C.B. Daly - The Knowableness of God

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VIII

The

nowableness oj

God

1

1 Metaphysics and Mystery

JUST two hundred years ago David Hume, concluding his Natural

History o Religion wrote: The whole

is

a riddle, an aenigma,

an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgment,

appear the only result

of

our most accurate scrutiny concerning

this subject.' Nevertheless, he went on, such

is

the frailty of

human reason and such the irresistible contagion

of opinion

that

the sceptical attitude which reason calls for could scarcely be

upheld unless we set the various species

of

superstition a-quarrelling

among one another,

while

we ourselves, during their fury and

contention, happily make our escape into the calm though obscure

regions

of

philosophy .2 Hume's fault was to have accepted the

rationalists' narrow interpretation

of

reason; to have conceded

their identification of philosophy with Cartesian clarity and geo

metric rigour. Hume's merit was to have appealed from this

inhuman reason

to

human nature, from this arid rationalism to

humanism. But much of what he says in the name of human

nature and against rationalistic

reason

should have been said

in the name of human reason adequately considered. The dilemma

which haunted

him-philosophy

or life, leason r belief-originated

in his failure to criticise radically enough the rationalist conceptions

of

reason and of philosophy. This failure is reflected in the

opposition he sets up between the 'inexplicable mystery' of

religion and the

calm

though obscure regions

of

philosophy'.

The calling in question

of

this opposition

is

one

of

the features

of

much contemporary philosophy.

The climate

of

contemporary thought is perhaps more congenial

than that of any period since Descartes for a genuine critique of

rationalism which shall avoid the pitfalls

of

irrationalism. Merleau

Ponty has said that the philosophical mission

of

the twentieth

century is to explore the irrational and to integrate it into an

enlarged reason .3 Waismann has said

that

that which is the

living spark

of

rationalism is irrational .4 Gabriel Marcel's con-

1 An amended and extended version of a paper read at the Philosophical Enquiry

Week-end, Spode House, Staffordshire, in September, 1957, with the title: • The

Attributes of God '. .

2 Hume,

The Natural History

o

Religion

ed. with Introduction by

H.

E. Root,

A. and C. Black, London, 1956, p.76.

3 L'existentialisme chez Hegel in Sens et non-sens Nagel, Paris, 1948, p. 125.

4 Verifiability', in

Logic and Language

First Series, Essays ed. by Anthony

Flew, Blackwell, Oxford, 1952, p. 143.

90



THE

KNOW ABLENESS OF GOD

91

stant endeavour

is

to obtain recognition of the mystery which

is

within reason and which envelops and transcends reason.

One can quarrel with the terms in which many contemporary

philosophers conduct their prosecution

of

rationalism. The term

, irrational'

is

particularly unfortunate, as almost inevitably sug

gesting that the alternative to rationalism is some form

of

irra

tionalism.

It

seems to concede to the rationalists their definition

of reason, which is the real point of the debate. The term mystery

too may be criticised

as

suggesting something supernatural and

as

being more proper to theological than to philosophical discourse.

But whatever about the terms, it can be said that philosophers

to-day are coming to recognise more and more clearly that reason

is

larger than rationalism conceived it

to

be, and that experience

is wider than empiricists accounts of it. Philosophers are en

quiring again into the meta-rational conditions of all reasoning,

the metempirical presuppositions of all experience. According

as

they suppose metaphysical enquiry to be possible or to be meaning

less, they admit mystery

or

they proclaim absurdity

as

the last

word of philosophy.

In this one may see a return to the challenge which Christian

philosophy has always presented to the human mind, the choice

between mystery and absurdity. Classical rationalism refused

mystery. Scientism and positivism, the modern versions

of

rationalism, refuse mystery, postulating clarity as the term of

philosophy. But a philosophy

of

clarity over-reaches itself and

falls over into absurdity. This is the dilemma of Camus, at least

in a certain phase of his development. t was the unreasonable

demand for all-explaining reasons which drove Camus to assert

absurdity. I demand that all should

be

explained to me, or

nothing', he wrote. 'And reason

is

helpless before Ihis cry from

the heart. . To

be

able to say, just once, That is

clear ;

then all would be saved . 5 This is what led Camus to pro

claim the philosophy

of

revolt.

'One of

the only coherent positions

in philosophy is revolt. Revolt is . . . the demand for an

impossible transparency ' .6 What Camus and many

of

our con

temporaries require is an enlargement

of

the reason f 1 the

acceptance

of

mystery, which is not other than a humility

of

the

reason before fact.

II

is

in this precise context

of

the alternative between mystery

and absurdi ty that the question

of

our knowledge of God and of

the attributes of God is situated. A common charge against

scholasticism

is

that it

is

hyper-intellectualist to a degree bordering

5 e my the

e

Sisyphe Galliard, Paris, 1942, p. 44.

Ibid. p. 77.



92 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

on rationalism

and

tends to dissolve mystery into logic.

This

impression might be gained from some manualists and rdail-

traders

of

scholasticism;8 but it certainly

is

not true of the great

exponents

of

Thomism

and

is glaringly untrue

of

St.

Thomas

himself.

Much

of this paper will be taken up with showing how

St. Thomas respects both mystery and reason in his discussion of

our knowledge of God.

t

will be enough, at this point, to

quote

from an

insufficiently known work of

Father

Garrigou-Lagrange,

a

work

which strikingly shows how Thomism does justice

to

whatever is true in contemporary anti-rationalism.

, A narrow view of . . . Aristotle and St Thomas . . . , he

writes, , could cause us

to

forget that they had the sense of mystery;

whereas they possessed it eminently, since they possessed the truly

philosophical spirit,

so

different from that

of

positive science and

from the geometric spirit

9. ••

Some too-material expositions of

doctrine of St. Thomas could

give

the impression that

he

had no

sense of mystery. But he had in an eminent degree the sense of

the real and of the mystery hidden in it10 .

f

the spirit of

Christian philosophy does not leave enough place to mystery, it is

replaced by another spirit which

is

Christian only in name

To deny the clear because of the obscure would be to replace

mystery

by

absurdity. . The philosopher who

is

at once

spiritualist and realist knows that one can escape contradiction

and answer difficulties;

but

he knows

that

the solution he gives is

and will always be imperfect; in the light-and-shade of which

we

speak, it will never dispel all shadow. The true philosopher has the

sense of mystery and he has

it

more and more as he progresses 2

We do not know everything about anything. Everybody says this;

the wise man for his part likes to speak of a docta ignorantia

13.

The mystery of which Father Garrigou-Lagrange speaks is a

strictly philosophical mystery, indeed often a strictly empirical

7 See, for example,

Rudolf Otto,

in The Idea of the Holy, tr.

J. W. Harvey

(1923),

1936 (Oxford Bookshelf edition). On p. 27, he writes: Intellectualist Scholasticism,

when worked out to its completion, (is a)

method

by which the

fundamental

fact

of

religious experience is, as it were, simply rolled

out

so thin

and

flat as

to be

finally eliminated altogether. This is a charge which Otto repeats again and again

throughout this important and most influential book. Some contemporary Catholic

thinkers go some way towards agreement with the Lutheran Otto in these strictures

against scholasticism.

•

One

of the great pioneers of the modern Thomist revival, Fr. Gardeil, O.P.,

wrote: The dialectical self-assurance of certain scholastics frightens me. t reminds

me

of the suspense caused

by

circus acrobats who toss gaily up in the

air

precious

and

fragile objects of which they don t know the value.

t

is only the true philo

sopher and

the

true

theologian

who

inspire confidence; because

one

feels

that

across

all their reasoning processes,

the

eye

of

their

mind

is always turned towards the

inaccessible heights of the Divine Being.

Le

Donne RtJveltJ

et

la ThtJologie, Edits.

du

Cerf, Paris (1909), 1932, p. 134.

• Le sens du mysN re et

e

clair-obscur intellectuel, e s c h ~ e de Brouwer, Paris,

1934, p. 122.

lOOp. cit., p. 123.

11 Op. cit.,

p.

131.

12 Op.

cit.,

p.

111.

13 Op.

cit., p.

113.



THE KNOWABLENESS OF GOD

93

mystery. t is not only God and his attributes, Creation and

Providence and Predestination, which he denominates as mystery;

but being, matter, change, even the least local movement.'

causality, the soul, knowledge, liberty, love. Always he contrasts

the spirit

of

the positive sciences, content to observe, measure,

correlate, to describe the how of things whose being they take for

granted; with the spirit of philosophy, which wonders and enquires

after the why of things and sees reflected in each being the mystery

of

the First Cause. There is an interesting resemblance between

this and Gabriel Marcel's polemic against the

category

of the

'perfectly natural , and his effort to make men wonder again

about the mystery

of

the

quite natural the mystery

of

whence

and what and why being

is

and why and what and wherefore I

am. The indispensable prolegomenon to any return to metaphysics,

the prelude to any profitable discussion about God in modern

philosophy

is

to restore to men their awareness of the mystery

of

being, the mystery of the self, the mystery

of

moral values 14

The sense of mystery is the sign of the great philosopher. Its

disappearance is the sign of the replacement

of

philosophy by

science and of the elimination of metaphysics. Schlick wrote in

1936:

A

genuine question

is

one for which

an

answer

is

logically

possible. This

is one of the most characteristic results of our

empiricism. t means that there are in principle no limits to our

knowledge. The boundaries which must be acknowledged are

empirical and never ultimate; they can be pushed back further

and further; there is no unfathomable mystery in the world .15

Lord Russell has written not long ago, in support of his solution

of the problem of mind and matter, that

the

most important

thing to be said in its favour is that it removes a mystery.

Mystery

is

always annoying and

is

usually due to lack

of

clear

analysis. The relations

of

mind and matter have puzzled people

for a long time but

if

I am right, they need puzzle people no

longer

.16

But Russell's removal of mystery is confessedly accom

panied by the substitution

of

science for philosophy.

t

is signifi

cant that he elsewhere writes:

( I t

is

doubtful) whether philosophy

as a study distinct from science and possessed

of

a method of its

14

Compare

Maritain, ' Nouvelle Approche de Dieu in Raison et raisons, Egloff,

Paris, 1947, pp. 167-195 See also L. J. Moreau, O.P., Dieu est-il o r t ~ LethieUeux,

Paris, 1953, pp. 62-73; A.-D. Sertillanges, S. Thomas d Aquin. Aubier, Paris, 1940,

pp. 149-151; De Lubac,

The Drama

o

Atheist Humanism,

E. trans., Sheed and

Ward, London, 1949, pp. 42-9;

J.

Danielou, Dieu et nOllS Grasset, Paris, 1956,

pp. 64-8.

15

Meaning

and

Verification , in

The Philosophical Review,

vol. XLV, 1936,

p.352.

1 6 Mind and Matter , in Portraits from Memory, Allen and Unwin, London,

1956, pp. 135-153; the quotation is from p. 153.



94

PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

own is anything more than an unfortunate legacy from theol

ogy'Y

Wittgenstein in the

Tractatus

showed a profound sense

of

the

three-fold mystery referred to above, the mystery

of

being,

of

the

self, and of moral values. 'Not how the world is, is the mystical,

but that it is ' .18

'The

metaphysical subject (is) the limit-not a

part of the world ' .19

'The

feeling of the world as a limited whole

is the mystical feeling ' .20

'The

sense of the world must be outside

the world. . . . If there is a value which is of value, it must be

outside all happening and being-so. .

..

t must lie outside the

world ' .21

'There

is indeed the inexpressible; this shows itself, it

is

the mystical'.

22

If

for Wittgenstein's

term'

mystical'

we

substi

tute 'metaphysical', we have in these propositions an accurate

statement of the subject-matter of metaphysics. But the business

of the metaphysician is to show that this subject-matter is not just

the inexpressible, of which nothing meaningful

can

be said.

Metaphysics begins with the recognition that there is mystery in

being and in experience, but it cannot end until it has striven to

render such reason of that mystery that it shall not become instead

absurdity. st Thomas' silence came

at

the end of his metaphysics,

not

before its beginning.

23

It

is

doubtful if any philosopher has

equalled his respect both for mystery and for reason.

It

is only

if we keep constantly in mind his respect for mystery that we will

17 In

The Philosophy

of

Logical Atomism

(1918), republished in

Bertrand

Russell,

Logic and Knowledge,

ed. Robert

C

Marsh,

Allen

and Unwin, London,

1956, pp. 177-281; the

quotation

is

from

p. 325.

Compare' Logical Atomism'

(1924), in

the same

collection,

pp.

339-341.

Compare

R.

Carnap, Logical

Syntax

of Language, London,

1937, p. xiii; A. J. Ayer,

Language, Truth and Logic, Gollancz.

London

(1936), 1946, pp. 151-3;

Hans

Reichenbach,

The Rise of Scientific Philo-

sophy,

University

of

California Press (1951), 1958, especially pp. 303-326.

M.

B.

Foster,

in a valuable

chapter on

' Mystery

and the Philosophy of Analysis'

(in his

Mystery

and Philosophy,

S.

C

M.

Press,

London,

1957,

pp.

13-37), calls analytical

philosophy

a •

Philosophy of Clarity'. He

accuses

it of

systematically rejecting

• mysteries which

remain

mysterious even

when understood,

because, though

under

stood, they

exceed our comprehension'. The analytic

philosopher regards

a mystery

as a puzzle, which

can be

solved and have all its obscurity dispelled

by

clear analysis

of

terms

(Op. cit.,

pp.

13-18). Dr.

Waismann,

in • How I See Philosophy ,

wrote:

•

t is all very well

to talk of

clarity, but

when

it becomes

an

obsession,

it

is liable

to

nip

the living thought in the bud. This, I am afraid, is one of the

deplorable

results of Logical Positivism. Look at these people, gripped

by

a clarity neurosis,

haunted

by

fear, tongue-tied, asking themselves continually,

Oh dear, now

does

this make perfectly good sense? No great discoverer has acted in accordance

with the

motto,

Everything that

can be

said

can

be said clearly . . (The

quotation

is,

of

course,

from

Wittgenstein's

Tractatlls,

4.116). See

Contemporary

British Philosophy,

ed. H.

D.

Lewis, Allen and

Unwin,

London, 1956,

pp.

464-5.

18 6.44.

19 5.641.

20

6.45.

21

6.41.

226.522

• 3 Compare P.

Rousselot, The Intellectllalism

of

Saint Thomas,

transl.

by

Fr.

James E.

O'Mahony,

Sheed

and

Ward,

London,

1935,

pp.

217-223;

Josef

Pieper,

The Sil<nce of St. Thomas,

E. transl.,

Faber and faber,

LQndon, 1957, especially

Pl 51-75

1

9 fQIl. ' , .



THE KNOW

ABLENESS

OF GOD

95

appreciate how profoundly his reasoning about God differs from

all rationalism. Many of those who have read lessons to St.

Thomas in respect

of

his philosophical theology would perhaps

have been better advised to read some lessons in St. Thomas.

2 Possibility o Demonstrating

the

Existence o

God

t

is

impossible to treat

of

the attributes

of

God without some

consideration of the possibility and validity of proving the existence

of

God. As St. Thomas puts it, all discussion

of quid sit Deus

follows the affirmative answer to the question an

sit Deus;

and

for him, as

we

shall see all the moments in our knowledge and

discourse about God are conditioned by the primary and continuing

affirmation that God

exists

as the Transcendent Cause

of this

contingent world.

Two main sorts of objections are urged in contemporary philo

sophy against the possibility

of that affirmation. In existentialist

circles, it

is

urged that any affirmation of a Transcendent Being

would destroy itself by destroying the contingent character of the

world, which was precisely supposed to require a Transcendent

Cause. In logico-analytic circles, it is more likely to be urged

that any talk about a Transcendent Being would by definition

violate the rules of our empirically-grounded language and therefore

would either issue in sheer nonsense or would at least be devoid

of

all

rational

or

logical

validity and significance. A philosopher

whose intention

is

to defend the meaningfulness

of

religious

language, but who feels that he can do so only by disclaiming for

i t

any kind of descriptive or of explanatory character and any sort

of

rational justification, has recently written: The concept

of

divine existence is

of

a highly dubious character. Our concept

of

existence

is

inexorably linked to our talk about spatio-temporal

objects .24

We shall look

at

the second type of argument first. As a result

of the logical positivist and logico-analytic critique of what was

taken to be classical metaphysics it is now universally agreed among

contemporary philosophers that those metaphysicians were mis

taken who thought that metaphysics was a special kind of metem

pirical knowledge of a special kind of metempirical objects. No

one will now claim, to borrow words

of

Father Copleston, that

the philosopher as such has privileged access to a sphere of

existence from which non-philosophers are debarred. Everyone

will now agree that the metaphysician does not discover God in

a manner analagous to the explorer who suddenly comes upon a

hitherto unknown island or flower.

t

is attention and reflection

•• Alasdair Macintyre, The Logical Status of Religious Belief , in Metaphysicqi

Qeliefs S. C. M. Press, London, 1957, 202, . .



9


which are required, rather than research or exploration

' .25

But

the best metaphysicians never denied this. Malebranche, a classical

metaphysician if ever there were one, said: 'No I will not bring

you into a strange country; but I will perhaps teach you that you

are a stranger in your own country'.

26

The only way to convince an empiricist

of

the possibility and

necessity

of

metaphysics

is

to open his eyes to the strangeness,

the mystery, the metempirical which

is

within all experience. This

mystery wells up at the very centre of experience; for experience

is the meeting of the self with being, and the self and being, though

present in and conditions

of

all experience, are not themselves

accountable for in empirical terms

or

definable in empirical

language. Wittgenstein was right in seeing here the mystical

which shows itself. Modern phenomenology expresses the point

well

in saying that being is always-already-there before I know

anything, always-stilI-there in everything I know or say; and that

I am always-already-there before anything is known, and always

still-there when anything is beirig known, described or explained.

The self and being are in all descriptions but not exhausted by

any description.

The claim that empirical descriptions are exhaustive

of

reality

can be kept up only by the device of putting the self and being in

brackets, and refusing to discuss them. t is significant to note

the heroic labours that Russell and Ayer have had to sustain in

order to eliminate the self and the problem of existence from

philosophy and to reduce experience to a series of non-personal and

non-existential occurrences.

27

If

you grant that things are and

that experience of things is happening, then indeed empiricism

25

F. C. Copleston, Aquinas, Penguin Books, 1955, pp. 40, 110. Compare the

same author s Contemporary Philosophy, Burns and Oates, London, 1956, pp. 61-86;

and

his

paper'

The Possibility

of

Metaphysics , in

Aristotelian Society Proceedings,

vol. L, 1949-50, pp. 65-82.

26

Quoted by Father H. de Lubac, S.J., in Sur les chemins

e

Dieu, Aubier, Paris,

1956, p. 88.

7

See Rus sell s

'Mind

and Matter', in

Portraits from Memory,

especially pp.

137-8;

also'

The Philosophy of Logical Atomism', in

Logie and Knowledge,

p. 277;

, Logical

Atomism',

ibid., pp. 329-330; History

o

Western Philosophy, Allen and

Unwin, London, 1946, p. 589. For Ayer, see Language, Truth and Logic, Gollancz,

London, 1950, pp. 46-7, 125-6; The Problem

o

Knowledge, Pelican edition, 1956,

pp. 44-52,197-9; compare his analysis

of

memory,

ibid.

pp. 134-175.

In Foundations

o

Empirical Knowledge,

Macmillan, London, 1940, Ayer wrote:

'There

is nothing

in an experience, considered by itself,

apart

from the relations that it happens to

bear to

other

phenomena, to make it form

part

of one person s history rather than

another's' (p. 169). Schlick, in his paper' Meaning and Verification (1936), cited

above, wrote that the recognition that primitive experience is

not

first-person expe

rience

i s

one of the most important steps which philosophy must take towards

clarification

of

its deepest

problems'.

He went on: 'The concept

of

the ego is a

construction put upon (physiological) fact and we could easily imagine a world in

which this concept would not have been formed' loc. cit., pp. 359, 367). Compare

Reichenbach in Op. cit., pp. 252-257.

The

attempt to

'eliminate

the self' is, of

course, characteristic of science, from which it has been taken over by philosophers

who assimilate philosophy to science,



THE

KNOW

ABLENESS OF

GOD

97

may proceed merrily. But it will be less than philosophy, less than

human experience, less than man; for man cannot forbear from

asking,

Why

re there things and how is experience of them

possible? The sense of there being things at all and of there

being knowledge at all must lie beyond the empirical world.

8

Many logical analysts and many existentialists would agree with

this. They would agree that man cannot cease from asking ultimate

or transcendental questions; but they would insist that these

questions cannot be answered. At this point the philosopher, if

he is French, may define philosophy and indeed man as the asking

of unanswerable questions,29 and hence embrace a more or less

tragic philosophy of the absurd. If he is Anglo-Saxon, he tends

frequently to define philosophy as the asking of answerable ques

tions and the answering of askable questions and sweeps all the

rest off the floor of reason and logic.

Much could be said about both attitudes. To speak, for the

present, only

of

the second, it seems to make the mistake

of

thinking that there can be a

solid

floor of reason and logic,

swept clean of mystery, on which the philosopher can walk without

fear

of

metaphysics. But this is an illusion, caused mainly by the

deceptive character

of

the spatial and chronological metaphors

which we cannot avoid using in this context. When we say that

the self and being are beyond empirical description, or that the

sense

of

experience must lie outside experience,

we

seem to suggest,

firstly that within experience these troublesome problems do not

arise; secondly that we claim familiarity with a place , outside

the

walls of

ordinary experience, to which in virtue

of

some

peculiar super-cognition

we

have a privileged access denied to

lesser mortals. Both suggestions are quite mistaken. The mystery

is

in

all being and all knowing and all saying; the met empirical

is

in

all experience.

It is not when we try to get outside of experience but when we

try to give an adequate description of experience itself that

we

run

(our) heads up against the limits

of

language

.30

The

feeling

of

the (empirical) world as a limited

whole

is the justifica

tion and the starting point of metaphysics, because both we and

our knowing of the world and the being of the world are outside

the inventory of empirical objects. What we should then say is,

not that there

is

something beyond ordinary language that

we

could know in

extraordinary

language or non-linguistically.

28

This seems to be what Wittgenstein meant when he asked: . Has the question

sense: what must there be

in

order that everything can be the case? Tractatus

5.5542. Compare 6.41, cited above.)

29 Compare

Jeanne Delhomme, a pensee interrogative, Presses Universitaires de

France, 1954, especially Part III , La finitude de a verite . This is essentially the

attitude also of Prof. Merleau-Ponty,

as

expressed, for example, in his inaugural

lecture at the College de France, 1953, published as E/oge de

f

philOsophie.

30 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investi[Jations, 119.




Nor, on the other hand, may

we

say that there is ' nothing beyond'

ordinary language in the sense that empirical concepts and terms

describe without remainder all that

we

know there

is

What

we

must say is that there is in ordinary experience and in ordinary

language something which

is

not ' ordinary' and not definable in

empirical terms or explainable by empirical causes.

3 a

This some

thing is indeed ' the everything' of all that

is

and of all that is

known.

Ronald

W

Hepburn is, therefore, right when he says that

' the

quest for a language that is adequate to describe our experience

in all its multifariousness

is

the common task

of

philosophers and

theologians

' .31

I t is

indeed the whole basis

of

philosophical

theology that language cannot be adequate to describe our experi

ence unless it allows for the existence

of

that

in

our experience

whose sense lies

beyond

experience.

But what of Macintyre's difficulty that ' our concept

of

existence

is inexorably linked to our talk about spatio-temporal objects'?

We have found some cause already for declaring that this simply

is not true. No description

of

spatio-temporal objects,

no

enumeration, not eyen the ideally complete enumeration

of

all the

spatio-temporal objects in the world, would be a complete account

of

all the reality we know there is; it would leave out the describer

and the

being of

the described.

t

may be objected that much of this

is

simply the old

'pre

Kantian ' fallacy of supposing that existence is one

of

the attributes

of

a thing. I t may be contended that the preceding paragraphs

are argUing that, when all the empirical attributes

of

a thing have

been enumerated, there is a residual one, a metempirical one, to

be supplied, that of the 'being'

of

the thing. But the objection

cannot be upheld; the argument makes no such supposition.

t

is quite obvious, and it was a commonplace

of

medieval scholastic

philosophy, that existence

is

not one

of

the attributes of a thing.

t does not, however, follow that it is meaningless to say that a

thing exists.

32

Existence is presupposed to all predication

of

3 a

Father Copleston writes: Human philosophic Knowledge

of

the meta

phenomenal must be acquired by reflection

on

the phenomenal and cannot be

acquired in any other way.' Contemporary Philosophy p. 42.

31 In 'Demythologising and the Problem of Validity', in

New Essays in Philo-

sophical Theology

edd. Anthony Flew

and

Alasdair Macintyre, S.C.M. Press,

London, 1954, p. 242

32

Cf. Russell, 'Logical Atomism lo o cit· p. 328: 'Exis tence in the sense in

which it is ascribed to single entities

is

thus removed altogether from the list of

fundamentals. . . . An important consequence of the theory of descriptions is

that

it is meaningless to say A

exists

unless A is a phrase of the

form

The

so-and-so . . . You can only say,

The

so-and-so exists , meaning, There

is just one C which has' these properties . But to say This C exists has no

meaning

at

all.'

Compare'

The Philosophy of Logical Atomism

lo o cit.

p. 241:

, With regard to the actual things there are in the world, it

is

a sheer mistake to

say that

t h ~ r e

is

a n y t h i n ~

a n a l o ~ o u s to exilMnce that you can say about

t h ~ m ,




attributes; it is the always-already-there of all knowledge. But

it is not the something-I-know-not-what lying beneath all attri

butes.

t

is given with and present in and affirmed with all

attributes. Being is co-predicated with all predicates, though it is

not

itself a predicate. That

is

what the Scholastics meant by

saying that being is transcendental, and that knowing is

convertible

with it. St. Thomas said:

, That

which

the intellect first grasps as a basic datum of know-

ledge, and that to

which

it ultimately refers all its concepts, is

being. . Every other concept of the mind must therefore be the

expression of

some

mode of being. But a mode of being cannot

be

regarded

as

a sort of property, distinct from and superadded to

being,

like differentia to

genus,

or accidental property to substance;

for

every

property is essentially being 33.

The

first thing to fall

within the grasp of the intellect

is

being;

for.

in order

for

anything

to

be

knowable. it must

first

actually

exist

34.

We

cannot express being itself in terms

of

anything other than

itself, in terms of spatio-temporal objects, for example; because

everything spatio-temporal is already being. Being is not one of

the things which we find in experience; it

is

not a kind

of

a thing.

We cannot give an empirical description

or

a logical analysis

of

being, because being has the logically baffling quality that unless

it be the case, there is nothing to describe or analyse. Similarly,

knowing is not a kind of a process or activity which one could

classify (as, e.g., dispositional, not episodic, etc. .35 Knowing

has the logically baffling quality that unless what it means be the

case, it could not exist as a word, nor could any word or thought

or

thing exist. One cannot describe existence

or

knowing in spatio

temporal terms, for no spatio-temporal thing or term can exist

without existence and knowing being presupposed.

t is impossible to think or know except in terms of existence.

t

is impossible for anything to be without its being able to be

known by us,

at

least to the extent of our being able to know that

it exists. t is not that

un

au-dela de la pensee est impensable but

that un au-dela de l etre est impossible. But existence beyond

spatio-temporal objects is possible and meaningful. My self exists,

knowing exists, and they are, although involved in all spatio

temporal experience, yet certainly not contained within the limits

of

our

talk about spatio-temporal objects .

t

is

absurd and

anyhow impossible to deny the term existence to that without

which spatio-temporal objects could neither exist nor be .known.

This is what is meant by scholastic philosophers in saying that

knowing

is

convertible with being. Nothing can be thought of

33 De

Veritate

q. 1 a. 1. Compare S.

Theol.

1. 16. 1 and 3.

34 S.

Theol.

1. 5. 2.

3S ~ Prof. Ryle s

Conce pt

o Mind, pp 117 fall,



100


except in terms of being, in relation to being. Nothing can be

that is not intelligible, or related to thought. There are as many

different kinds

of

being as there are things. The application

of

being cannot be restricted to spatio-temporal objects. t must be

allowed to all reality whose existence

is

involved in or is implied

by or is a condition of the being of and of our knowing

of

spatio

temporal objects. There can be no

a priori

disqualification of the

enquiry into the existence and knowability

of

God. There cannot

be in the absolute sense, anything that is Unknowable or Inex

pressible.

Of

the Unknowable, we know

at

least that it is, and

the reasons for and implications of its unknowability.

This

is

as far as

we

can go towards arguing the possibility

of

talk about God before

we

have actually proved that God exists.

We can only show that being and its correlative notions such as

knowing (and goodness) are capable

of

metempirical

or

transcend

ental use. That they can be applied to God

we

can know only

after we have proved that God exists. We cannot show that proof

of

God's existence

is

possible,

or

that talk about God

is

meaningful,

until

we

have actually been led by proof to admit His existence

and to talk about Him.

To

attempt to show that God's existence

is

possible, or that analogical knowledge

of

God could be valid,

before proving that He actually exists, would be to commit the

fallacy

of petitio principii

or to fall into the error

of

the Ontological

Argument. Maritain seems to commit this error when he writes

that, even before the existence of God

has been proved, the

concept of being implicitly involves ; . . the division of being

into created and uncreated

.36

We do not know

that

the term

,

being

can be predicted of uncreated being until we have proved

that uncreated being exists. t is the demonstration

of

God's

existence which necessitates and justifies our use

of

analogical

language about God. As Penido put it: Analogy presupposes

the existence

of

God established

.37

3

Ways

to

the Demonstration of God s Existence

This paper

is

not concerned to examine the Five Ways

of

St.

6

A Preface to Metaphysics (E. trans . of Sept ie,ons sur [ etre), London, 1937,

p.

65.

7

M. T.-L. Penido,

Le

role de L ana/ogie en theologie dogmatique, (Bibliotheque

Thomiste, XV), Vrin, Paris, 1931, pp. 86-7;

cf.

pp. 138, 146. But Penido is

not

always consistent in this affirmation,

and

at

times he favours a view similar

to that

of

Maritain, referred

to

above. On page 142, he argues that,

apart

from the Five

Ways, it can be shown that certain of our ideas have a transcendental value and

that

there would be

no

contradiction in applying them to

God. To

have an

analogical idea

of God,

it is

not

necessary to know that He

exists ,

he argues;

because in

any

primary notion I find a perfection

and

a limit; I can negate the

limit,

and

then I have

an absolute perfection

which

could

be applied to

God

formally,

but

analogically. Compare op. cit.

p

146. Penido protests

that

there

is no vicious circle here and no petitio principii. We feel

that

there is, and that the

reasoning has a certain kinship with the ontological argument.

t

does not seem

consonant with Penido's better

and more

usual thought.




1 1

Thomas, or other proofs for the existence of God, as such. We

assume that the existence of God can be proved and has been

proved. But there are some points concerning such proofs, which

have an important bearing on the theme

of

this paper. These

must be touched on briefly, mainly with a

view

to clearing up

some misunderstanding about how and what the proofs claim to

prove and what they claim to provide by way of explanation and

knowledge.

3.1. St: Thomas

Ways

Maritain has very justly commented on the significance of St.

Thomas' use of the modest and,

as

he puts it, delicate term

, ways'. The ways are, indeed proofs, demonstrations. But

when dealing with things on the level of our intelligence, our

demonstration. . . in a certain sense puts the object in our

control, subjects it to our methods of verification which measure

it, delimit, define it.' The words science, demonstration, proof,

verification,

he

goes on, have, for modern minds, associations with

the laboratory, the measuring instrument, the procedures

of

scientific research; associations which are quite different from

those which these words have for the medieval Scholastics.

t is

necessary for their disciples to-day to state quite clearly that when

they speak

of

theistic proofs they realise perfectly well that

to

demonstate the existence

of

God

is

not to put Him within our

mental grasp, not to define or apprehend Him, not to arrive at

anything more than feeble ideas about Him, not to express in our

judgment anything but our own radical dependence'.

8

These

words could scarcely be bettered, and they need not be expanded.

3.2. How Many ,

Ways ?

A similar modesty is to be found in the language of

st.

Thomas

about

five

ways. He says,

the

existence

of

God can be proved

in

five

ways'. He does not say that there are not other ways;

in fact,

we

shall

see

later, it seems truer to his thought to suppose

that the ways are indefinitely numerous. He does not say that

all

five

are necessary; it seems clear that he regarded each '

way

as complete and sufficient in itself. t seems clear also that all the

, ways have a basically similar starting-point, methcd, and term,

and invoke the same ontological principles. They start from

empirical beings. They direct our attention to the signs of con

tingency which are written in empirical being. Change, mutual

dependence, beginning to be and perishing, limitation, multiplicity,

all are shown to be signs

of

radical existential instability'.39 The

38

Les

degres

e

savoir, Paris, 1946, p. 446. The passage is found in the new

English translation, The Degrees of Knowledge, trans . under the supervision

of

Gerald

B

Phelan, Geoffrey Bles, London, 1959,

on

pp. 225-6.

89 Father F. C. Copleston, in Aquinas, p. 106.



102


force of the arguments is to point out, as Mascall put it, that ' the

fundamental character of finite

being'

is ' a radical incapacity to

account for its own existence .40 The conclusion of the arguments

is that finite being exists in absolute ontological

dependence

on

God, the Transcendent

Being.41

t is important to note that any finite being can be the point

of departure of a ' way to God' and that any mode of finite being,

whether in man or in nature, can be shown to be evidence of its

createdness and therefore sign

of

its Creator. S1. Thomas says

that as all things in their diversity proceed from God, so all point

the way back to God their source; and thus there are as many

different ways to God as there are things.42 As Maritain put it:

,

It

is

enough that anything exists, for

God

to be inevitable.

Grant

to a bit of moss or to the smallest ant the full weight of their

ontological reality, and you can no longer escape from the Terrible

Hand

that made us'. 4

3.3. The Ways and Empirical Verification

All this has an important bearing

on

the question

of

the empirical

verifiability of propositions about God and His relations with the

world. Professor Wisdom in his paper on ' Gods' 44 posed the

problem

of

how the assertion,

'God

exists' can be shown to be

true or false, when there is no ' difference as to the

facts'

in the

world, and therefore as to the relevant evidence, between those

who affirm and those who deny it. He illustrated the problem

by his famous parable

of

the garden which displays at one and

the same time signs of the attentions of a gardener and signs

of

the complete absence of any gardener. At some point in the

discussion as to whether there is or is not a gardener, he suggests,

the dispute will no longer bear upon the facts or the evidence.

Upon

what, then, will

it

bear? Wisdom does not answer. He

cryptically suggests that the dispute between theist and atheist will

still be, in a special sense, a dispute' as to what is so,

and

therefore

40 E. L Mascall, Existence and Analogy London, 1949, p. 71.

41 The words are those used by Prof. Anthony Flew in a broadcast discussion

with Prof. D. M. McKinnon on

'Creation',

published

in

New Essays in Philo-

sophical Theology pp. 170-186. Prof. Flew summed up the Christian concept

of

creation in the words:

In

the. . . theological sense, questions

about

creation

are questions about an absolute ontological dependence to which particular scientific

discoveries are simply

irrelevant'

(p. 174).

42

S.c.G.

IV 1.

The late Monsignor Ronald Knox. in his posthumously published

plea for a ' new apologetic urged that the five classical proofs, and specifically

the most fundamental of them, the proof from contingency, should be given as

their starting point the existence

of

the self, which, in its actual but contingent

existence is ' representatively the whole

of

known reality'. See

Proving God

pub.

by The Month London, 1959, pp. 27-8, 39-40.

43

Les degres u savoir p. 212; E. Trans., p. 110.

The paper appeared first in

Aristotelian Society Proceedings

(1944-5) and is

reprinted in Logic and Language First Series, ed. A. Flew, Blackwell, Oxford, 1951,

pp. 186-206.



THE KNOWABLENESS OF GOD 103

as to the

facts .

But a quick reading of his paper and parable

could give the impression that Wisdom concludes that the difference

uelween theist and atheist was a matter o f picture preference';

thal whereas objectively the world or the facts are the same for

both, the theist prefers to '

see

God in that world; the atheist to

see

no God. t depends on what R. M. Hare called their blik '

about the world,

and

bliks ' are not rational or arguable.

45

Prolonging what he took to be Wisdom's line

of

thought,

Professor Flew proposed a test for any theistic assertion, that we

attempt

to find out what the theist would regard as counting

against or being incompatible with, its truth . He challenged the

theologian to answer the question: What would have to occur

or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof

of

the love of,

or the existence of, God? 46 Nowell-Smith, in support, added

the requirement that i f an explanation, of whatever sort, be it

empirical or metaphysical, is to explain, it must explain why things

are like this and not like that ,47

But

if

the theist's reason for asserting the existence of

God

is

the finitude or contingency of any and all finite being, then quite

obviously the assertion is not open to empirical verification or

falsification in the sense intended and the proposed tests display

an enormous

ignoratio elenchi.

Flew's falsificatory occurrences

occur in an already existing world whose existence

is

taken for

granted; the theist invokes God

as

the Cause of the existence of

the world. Nowell-Smith supposes that the God-hypothesis' will

45 This was in a discussion on • Theology and Falsification taking its departure

from Wisdom's paper, in which

Anthony

Flew, Father Corbishley, S.J Patrick

Nowell-Smith, Richard Hare

and

Basil Mitchell took

part, and

which was published

in

University,

Blackwell, Oxford, 1950-1. The discussion, with the omission

of

Father

Corbishley's and NoweIl-Smith's contributions, is reprinted in New Essays

in Philosophical Theology,

pp. 96-108;

Hare s

remarks are on pp. 99-103.

He

writes: •

t

was

Hume

who

taught

us

that our

whole commerce with the world

depends upon our

blik

about

the

world;

and that

differences between b/iks about

the world

cannot

be settled by observadon of what happens in the world,

That

was why having performed

the

interesting experiment of doubting

the ordinary

man s blik about the world, and showing that no

proof

could be given to make us

adopt one

blik

rather

than another, he turned to backgammon to take his mind off

the problem (p. 101). The

term

b/ik, is perhaps

just

an unfortunate

and

mis

leading name for the metaphysical certitudes which are supposed to and can be

shown to be implied

by

all happenings in

the

world, all knowledge of the world,

all explanations about the world, • Blik , rightly understood, would then be pre

cisely a metaphysical, as distinct from a scientific, proposition.

4

New

Essays. . . ,

p.

99.

7 University,

Winter 1950, p.

13.

Compare Flew in his summing

up of

the

University debate: An assertion, to be an assertion at all, must claim that things

stand thus

and thus;

and not otherwise. Similarly, an explanation, to be an

explanation at all, must explain why this particular thing occurs,

and not something

else. Those last clauses are crucial.

And

yet sophisticated religious people. . .

are apt to overlook this, and tend to refuse to allow, not merely that anything

actually does occur,

but that

anything conceivable could occur, which would count

against their theological assertions

and

explanations. But in so far as they do this,

their supposed explanations are actually bogus, and their seeming assertions are

really vacuous.' See New Essays. . . . p. 106.



104


imply one kind of world:

the

no-God-hypothesis' a different

kind of world. But the theist's proposition is that on

the'

no-God

hypothesis' there is no kind of a world. Father Corbishley, S.J.,

was perfectly right in retorting to Flew: ' In reply

to

the question,

What

would have to occur

or

to have occurred to constitute for

you a disproof of the love of, and of the existence of

God?

, the

only thing to be said is, quite literally, Nothing

' .48

The theist

declares, if there is any kind of world,

God

exists. His alternative

is, either God

or

nothing. He invokes God, not to explain why

the world is

'like

this, and not like

that', but

to explain how

there can be a world at all.

As

Mascall put it, speaking about

Creation, and without this particular problem in mind:

, Perhaps the main difficulty in speaking about it arises from its

universality,

for

we cannot call attention to it by remarking on the

difference between objects of our experience which possess it and

those which do not. . . . We cannot see a difference) by looking

at a being which does not exemplify it, because there are no such

beings

' .49

The whole point at issue

is

that God

is

not an 'explanatory

hypothesis ' ,50 just as, and for the reason that, being is not a kind

48 University, lac. cit., p. 10.

49

EXistence and Analogy, Longmans, London, 1949, p. 146.

50

R. M.

Hare

noted this: 'The mistake

of

the position which Flew selects for

attack

is

to regard this kind

of

talk' (Le., the Psalmist's:

God

bears up the

pillars

of the world )

'as

some sort

of explanation,

as scientists are accustomed

to

use the word. As such, it would obviously be ludicrous. We no longer believe

in God as an Atlas-nous n'avons pas besoin de cette hypothese' New

Essays .

. . ,

p. 101). Very similarly, at the Semaine des Intellectuels Catholiques in 1953, Jean

Lacroix said: 'Science has certainly destroyed the God

of

explanation '. (See

Monde moderne et sens de Dieu, Pierre Horay, Paris, 1954, p. 43.

Compare

the

scientist, M. Lennuier's approving comments on pp. 66-7. Compare Lacroix, Le

sens de l'allu isme moderne, Casterman, Paris, 1958, pp. 15-28.) But to all this we

must surely reply that scientific explanation is

not

the only sort of valid explana

tion,

and

the scientific use

of

the

word'

cause'

not

the only valid use

of

the word

, cause'.

In

a real sense, God is the only adequate explanation of anything; and

all scientific explanations presuppose a deeper-level theological explanation. Yet

in

no case does the theological explanation make the scientific explanation invalid or

unnecessary. The assertion,

'God

made the sun and the moon and the

stars',

does

not

conflict with

or

supersede the assertion, ' The sun and the

moon

and the

stars reached their present form by evolutionary processes.' The assertion, ' God

moves the sun and the other stars', does not disqualify or replace the assertion,

'The movements

of

the heavenly bodies are governed by Newton's law

of

gravita

tion '. This seems elementary; but many eminent men of our time have not grasped

it. Thus Sir Julian Huxley, F.R.S., in a letter to the SUllday Times, 3

February

1957, wrote:

I t

is extraordinary that, almost a hundred years after the publication

of

the

Origin

of

Species

it

can

still be maintained that living organisms owed their

design to conscious purpose-presumably a Divine purpose. . . .

I t is

as if, a

hundred years after Newton, people are still maintaining that the planets were kept

in their courses by God and not by gravitation '. Apart from the philosophical

naivete

of

this, it shows a surprising lack of familiarity with Newton's own under

standing

of

the explanatory role

of

gravitation.

In

view

of

some modern scientists'

apparent fear of disemployment-through-theology,

it

is interesting to recall that one

of St. Thomas' arguments against the Islamic Occasionalists, the Asharites, who

in effect admitted only theological explanation, was that their theory would

make

natural

science impossible. See S.c.G. I 69.



THE KNOWABLENESS

OF

GOD

105

of

a thing or a particular sort

of

an occurrence. Another

way of

saying the same thing

is

to say that metaphysics, which studies

being, is

not science. The Flew and Nowell-Smith tests belong to

science, not to metaphysics. They leave the metaphysical question

unasked, and they therefore beg all the questions. For in asking

, Why

is

the world like this, when it might have been like that?

they refuse to

see

that that question could not arise unless

we

first

had answered the question, Why is there anything at all, when

there might have been nothing? Not how the world is, but

that it is is the metaphysical question.

But the difference between theist and atheist is not one of

picture-preference or

blik .

The difference is in the fullest sense,

one

as to what

is

so, and therefore as to the facts . The difference

is as to what precisely is the most radical and fundamental . ;l

fact about any fact, the fact that it is The theists language is

adequate to the facts of experience, the atheists

is

not. In this

special sense, one could say,

if

one wished, that the theists language

is empirically verifiable. More importantly, one must say that, in

the full rigour of the classic definition of truth as adequatio rei et

intellectus,

the theists assertion

is

true as to the objective facts,

and the atheists is false.

3.4. The Ways and Causality

Few misunderstandings about the proofs for God s existence

are so widespread and persistent as those about their reliance on

the principle of causality; and few misunderstandings are so full

of consequence for the question

of

our knowledge

of

God. It is

curious to find Brunschvicg and Gabriel Marcel at one in their

total repudiation of any theological use of the norion of causality.

Brunschvicg can

see

nothing

in

the notion

of

God as Cause

of

the world, except the naive anthropomorphism of Voltaire s

Watchmaker.

52

Gabriel Marcel asks whether perhaps the God

whose death Nietzsche was right

in

announcing was not the God

of the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, the God-First-Mover ; and

declares that we must get rid of the idea

of

God-as-Cause, we

-

61

St. Thomas, S.

Thea .

1.8.1: esse est illud quod est magis intimum cuilibet

et quod pro[undius omnibus inest.

62 In La querelle de l atheisme , a symposium of the Societe Fran)aise de

Philosophie in 1928, in which, with Brunschvicg,

E

Gilson, Gabriel Marcel, and

E. Le Roy took part.

The

discussion

is

published in Brunschvicg,

De fa vraie et

de

fa

/ausse cOl/version, Presses Universitaires de

France,

1951, pp. 207-264.

Brunschvicg regards all cosmic

or

causal arguments for the existence of God as

animistic, anthropomorphic, pre-scientific, medieval, characteristic

of

the infantile

mentality: see pp. 207-210, 234-5, 242-6, 251-9.

For

him, reason is coterminous

with science and mathematics, and these

mark

spiritual progress in the sense

of

idealism; metaphysical theology

is

imaginative, gross, materialistic.



1 6 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

must finish with all theological usage of the notion

of

causality'.53

Significantly the rejection of causality in reference to God involves

for both Brunschvicg and Gabriel Marcel a complete rejection

of

all

proof

for the existence

of

God. For Brunschvicg,

theodicy

is atheism .54 For Gabriel Marcel. all theodicy must be con

demned .55

These philosophers are not alone in alleging an incompatibility

between a causal demonstration of God's existence and a properly

religious attitude towards God. Rudolf Otto

r e g r d ~

the concept

of

causality as an intruder into religious language from the domain

of

natural science and ontology, and sharply contrasts the religious

or mystical sense

of

creaturely dependence from rationalistic

speculation about being as the effect

of

Divine Causality. For

causal demonstration of God hf substitutes divination , or the

capacity to grasp, in ourselves and in things, the significance of

our finitude.

By

'divination' we read the signs of our dependence

on

God, which are at the same time the signs

of

God's presence to

us and to the world. Causal categories, coercion by proof and

demonstration and the mistaken application of logical and

juridical procedures' mark a ' dessication and materialisation '

of

the most tender and living moment in all religion, that of the

actual discovery of and encounter with very

deity

in

our

creatureliness which is his sign. Causality could

at

most establish

53 L homme problhnatique,

Aubier, Paris 1955, p. 63; he goes

on

to say that

•

if

we attempt to make transcendental use

of

the idea

of

cause, we arrive at

an

impasse. . . .

t

is,

in

fact, to be feared that, despite the efforts modern philo

sophers have made to

spiritualise it, to detach it from its primitive anchorage, the

idea of causality remains inseparable from the status

of

man-as-tool-user, and

therefore involves the treating

of

effects as things. Hence the notion

of

causality

excludes the notion of liberty. A world caused by God could not be a world

in which there

are

free persons. G. Marcel acknowledges the affinity

of

his

thought

here with that

of

Kant (op. cit., pp. 62-6). Compare e mystere de l etre, Aubier,

Paris 1951, vol. IT pp. 52, 144. He holds that the use

of

the causal category in

relation to

God is

one

of

the great sources of modern atheism: See Jean Lacroix

in

Monde modeme et sens de Dieu,

p. 45. Gabriel Marcel's most recent reflections

on this matter are to be found in a discussion between himself and Father J. M.

Le Blond, S.J., in

Recherche de Philosophie,

111-1

V

•

De

la connaissance de Dieu

Desclee de Brouwer, Paris, 1958, pp. 15-33. His po;;ition remains unchanged

and

he seems

quite

unmoved by the excellent points made by Father Le Blond.

54 The

words are cited by J. Defever, a

preuve

delle

de Dieu,

Desclee de

Brouwer, Paris, 1953, p. 91.

55

Journal metaphysique, Gallimard, Paris, 1935, p. 65 English transl. by Bernard

Wall, Rockliff, London, 1952, pp. 64-5. t should be noted

that

by • theodicy

here, G. Marcel means a judgment passed

on God,

a justification

of God. But

it remains true that he regards all

proof

as bearing upon things, objects, and as

therefore incompatible with the true relationship of man to God as free-person

to-Person, I-to-Thou. See

Du re/us

a

l invocation,

Gallimard, Paris, 1940, pp. 226-

236; and R. Troisfontaines,

De I existellce a l ifre,

Louvain

and

Vrin, Paris, 1953,

vol. II, pp. 207 fall. Father Troisfontaines brings out all the nuances which must

be

kept in

mind for a just evaluation of G. Marcel's thought.



THE KNOW

ABLENESS

OF GOD

107

'the fact of having been

created';

religion is the continuing

awareness

of

the status of the creature'. As opposed to the idea

of creation and conservation, mysticism

or

the true religious sense

'leads to a valuation of the transcendent object

of

its reference

as

that

which through plenitude

of

being stands supreme and

absolute, so that the finite self contrasted with it becomes conscious

even in its nullity

that

I

am

nought, Thou

art

all . . .'

'There

is no thought in this', Otto repeats, '

of

any causal relation between

God, the creator,

and

the self, the creature ' .56 It

is

as though

he were afraid that a world seen as the effect

of

God would have

been dependent on him when it began but would be independent

of him after it had been made. t is curious to find a similar idea

in Sartre, who argues that the notion

of

Creation is self-contra

dictory, because the world, once created, would ' assume its own

being'

and assert its ontological independence against God 57 We

find a certain echo of the thought of Otto in Father Guardini,

when he argues that ' the fact of being created does not result

from an abstract causality but from an act of the Living

God

who

poses a thing in existence; . . . the fact of being created. . .

demands a Living Creator and not just a formal cause ' .58

But, so far as St. Thomas' notion of Divine Causality is con

cerned, it corresponds exactly to Otto's 'creature-feeling' and

Guardini's 'fact

of

being created '. It has nothing in common

with the abstract formalism

and

rationalism which these thinkers

associate with the concept of cause. Some misunderstanding could

arise if the exposition of the Five Ways were read in isolation

from the rest of St. Thomas' philosophical theology. But if this

is read as a whole, misconception about his notion of Divine

Causality becomes impermissible.

St. Thomas' conception

of

God's causality

is

most fully expressed

in his discussion

of

creation. Creation for him

is

precisely the

absolute, total, perpetual dependence of the creature for all that

it is, has and does, on the love and power

of

the Living

and

Present God. He refuses all anthropomorphic and all scientific

ideas of creation as an event in the past: creation is outside of

time, time being purely

part

of its effect. Creation is a relation of

total dependence of God in the present, a relation which

is not

56 The Idea of the Holy, pp. 21-2, 148-152.

7 L

erre et

Ie

ntant,

Gallimard, Paris, 1943, pp. 32-4, 287; see English Transla

tion by Hazel E. Barnes, Being and Nothingness, Philosophical Library, New York,

1956, pp. LXVI-LXVII, 232. Very similar is the thought of Merleau-Ponty: see

Sens et non-sens, pp. 148-152; L t/oge de fa philosoph ie College de France edit.,

pp. 35-9.

58

Les sens et

la

connaissance

de

Dieu,

French transl., Cerf, Paris, 1957, pp.

38-9, 47.



i08


other than

the creature,

a

relation which

is

the creature

itself.59

, The world

exists

St. Thomas says, ' for as long as God wishes

it to exist, for the existence

of

God

depends

on God s

will as its

cause'.60

Just

as

it

depends on

God s

will to give being to things,

so it depends

on

His will to keep things in being. He keeps things

in being precisely by continually giving being to them. f he were

to withdraw his action from them, they would all be reduced to

nothingness

.61

'Everything that exists owes all its being and all

its goodness to the fact that

God

wills it. .

. .

t is the love of

God

which confers and creates goodness in

things .

6 Speaking of the

presence of

God

to every created thing he writes: Created being

is

the proper effect

of

God. .

God

causes this effect in things

not only when they begin to be

but

as long as they continue in

being. .

. .

As long as a thing has being,

it

is necessary that

God

be present to it (sustaining) every form

of

being which it has.

But

being is the most fundamental and radical reality in everything

that

exists since it is the constituent of all that anything is. . . . Hence

it

is necessary that

God

be present in the centre

of

everything that

exists .63

No

one has

better

seized

and

expressed

the numinous

aspects

of St.

Thomas doctrine of creation

than

the

late

Father

Sertillanges.

The

world he wrote, in order to exist, is suspended, with

its duration . . . from the Source of all existence. . Creation

is the suspension from

God

of all that exists and of all that has the

dimension

of

time

.64 Creatures

do not exist of themselves.

And thus the help they need is . . . one which makes them exist

The point

of

application

of

the sustaining power

is

between the

creature

and God

in order that the contact shall not

be

broken

and

that the creature shall continue to flow from its source .65

t will be seen that the concept of creative causality is

not

a

piece

of abstract

speculation but

is the

exact expression

of the

existential

status

of the

world

and of

man.

t

is

the truth about

my

person. Religion is

making

this my

personal

truth, making

59 s c c II 18: Creation is

not

a change

but

is just the dependence of the

creature on the Principle from which its being is derived. . . . Every being is

placed in existence by God,

but

the creation by which it is produced is

not

different

from the created thing itself which is produced by creation.'

t

is interesting to

correlate these words with Guardini's:

The

fact

of

being created is

not

a formal

character added to the determinate content

of

a thing . . . , it is

part of

this

content; it is that which gives the thing the possibility of having a

content (Op.

cit.,

p. 38). Guardini could have found all that he wanted to say

about

'created ness'

in St. Thomas; and he would have found there that 'createdness' is not incom

patible with, but presupposes,

an

authentic doctrine

of

divine causality, and

that

divine causality in

S1.

Thomas,

is

not

abstract

and formal

but

in Guardini's

own

words an

act

of

the Living

God

who poses a thing in existence.'

60 S. Thea . 1.46.1. Compare S.c.C. II

31.

61 S.

Theol.

1.9.2. Compare

S.c.C.

II 28-30;

De Potentw

5.lc.

62 S. Thea .

1.20.2. Compare

S.c.C.

II 28;

De Potentia 3.5-6.

63

S. Thea .

1.8.1. Compare

S.c.C. II

15-16, 21;

De Potentia 3.7 .

• 4 La

creation

(Some theologique de S. Thomas

d

Aquin, lA, qq. 44-49, trad.

fran9aise), Desclee, Paris, 1948, pp. 245-6; cfr pp. 250-3, 261. Compare

L'idee de

creation,

Aubier, Paris, 1945, pp.

43

foil.

6

L'idee de creation,

p. 69.




109

real my assent to notions which are not dry speculation but contact

with the Mysterium Tremendum of my God and my Lord. o far

from being gross scholastic abstraction, the doctrine

of

divine

causality

is

almost the literal realisation

of

Gabriel Marcel's defini

tion of a mystery, as a problem which' invades' its own data and

involves the 'questioner' himself

in his

own question. There is

no need to repeat

at

this point that the question of the fact of

creation and of the existence of a Creator is presupposed to the

whole problematic represented by Flew and Nowell-Smith. These

take it for granted without enquiry that there

exists

a ' verifier'

having experience in a taken-for-granted world.

3 5 Causality and Transcendence

t will, of course, be evident that this discussion has taken much,

indeed has taken everything for granted about the validity of the

principle of causality and about the possibility of its transcendent

use. This paper does not set out to prove, or to justify any proofs

of, the existence of God.

t

merely endeavours,

at

this stage, to

clear away some misconceptions about the traditional proofs,

because these confuse the issue of the nature of our knowledge of

God. We are not here concerned to justify the recourse to the

principle of causality in these proofs, but are only trying to show

what it means.

Most of the criticisms of the attribution of causality to God

which we have been considering, come from the supposition that

the concept of causality

is

univocal and

cannot

be dissociated

from its anthropomorphic or scientific uses. This is mistaken.

The notion of cause, like that of being, is analogical. We have

only to enumerate a series of typical sentences containing the word

cause

or the

verb

causes

in order to see this. We say, for

example: 'Gravitation causes motion'. 'Internal combustion

engines cause motion '.

'Friction

causes heat '. ' Excessive

radiation causes leukaemia'. 'An abnormal fear of being tricked

caused Descartes to practice systematic doubt'. ' Descartes'

arguments have been a cause of scepticism'. 'Brain-washing causes

changes

of

belief '. 'Rational conviction causes changes of belief '.

, Premisses cause conclusions'. A good teacher causes his pupils

to think for themselves'. A wise man causes truth to be loved '.

'A

good man causes virtue to be

loved'.

'A

saint causes God

to be loved '. 'Love causes readiness for sacrifice '. 'A sculptor

is the cause of the beauty of a statue'. A critic causes the beauty

of a statue to be appreciated '. A novelist is the cause of the

personality of his character'. 'A mother is the cause of the

personality of her child '.

These are all valid and non-metaphorical usages

of

the term

'cause'

and no single usage can be regarded as privileged or



110


primary. There are essential differences between them; and yet

there is a common element. This common element can best be

expressed as ' dependence'; every use

of

the

term'

cause'

connotes

a certain dependence in being of one thing or another.

ut

this

dependence does not exclude freedom: a novelist causes his

character's personality to develop itself

freely;66

a good man

causes others to wish freely to be good; a good parent causes

free and willing virtue in his child. There is nothing in the notion

of

causal dependence which is incompatible with the free response

of person to person. It seems

that

Gabriel Marcel, great anti

positivist that he is, has incredibly fallen into the positivist mistake

of

giving privileged status and indeed monopoly to the scientific

use

of

the term cause. To hold that causality abolishes freedom

and personality

is

to grant that only scientific causality is meaningful.

This, however, is to abandon the analogical character

of

causality,

which is the only escape from positivism, the necessary foundation

of metaphysics.

If

cause' be defined as ' that being on which

another depends in its beginning, its change or activity or its

existence', there will be as many different kinds of cause as there

are kinds of dependence. Already in the purely empirical usage

of

the term' cause', we find that cause is analogical. To adapt

words from

Dr.

Waismann's

historic article,

'Language Strata':

(Causal) , statements may be

true

in different senses,

verifiable

in

different senses, meaningful in different senses. Therefore the

attempts at defining (the)

t ruth

(of causal statements)

or at

drawing a sharp line between the meaninful and the meaningless,

etc. are doomed to

fail'. 67

is this analogical character

of

causal statements which makes

66 The late Dorothy L Sayers brought this

out

brilliantly in her study of literary

'causation'

in Tne Milld

o the

Maker, Methuen. London (1941) 1952: see especially

pp. 49-67, 101-117. Compare Helen Gardner,

The Business

of

Criticism,

Oxford

1959, enpecially pp. 52-75.

67

(The words in brackets are added by us). This paper, read in 1946, was first

published in Logic and Language, Second Series, ed. A. G.

N.

Flew, Blackwell,

Oxford, 1953, pp. 11-31; the quotation is

from p. 26. Compare the same author's

paper,

'Verifiability',

originally published in Aristotelian Society Proceedings,

Supplementary volume XIX, 1945, and reprinted in

Logic and Language,

first series,

ed. A. G. N. Flew, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 117-144. These papers had a consi

derable influence in discrediting p o ~ i t i v i s m and disqualifying much of its brash

anti-metaphysics. In the first-noted paper lac. cit., p. 26), Waismann said: ' There

may even be a sense in which metaphysical statements have a meaning sic). The

trouble with the Logical Positivists was

that

they attached too rigid an import to

meaningfulness and lost sight of its ambiguity.' Similar remarks about the

'ambiguity'

o f truth'

are

made in lac. cit., pp. 21-4;

and about the '

systematic

ambiguity' of ' reality', 'exists 'knowledge', 'fact 'event', 'case', etc., in

'Verifiability', lo o cit., po. 134-7.

Compare

G. J. Warnock's discussion

of

the

, troublesome complexities of language' and especially of the words' there is

exists something there is something which' in his ' Metaphysics

in

Logic',

first publi,hed in

Aristotelian Society Proceedings,

1950-1, and reprinted

in Essays in Conceptual Analysis, ed.

Anthony

Flew, Macmillan. London, 1956,

pp. 75-93. In these papers, what we really find is n;turn to the s c h o l ~ s t i l ; d i ~ -

c r u s ~ i o n s

of the

analogr

of bein¥




it possible to make theological use of the notion of causality.

t

is the business of theistic metaphysics to show that, without the

theological use of the notion of causality there can

e no use

whatever

of

it; since all causes depend on an ultimate and Trans

cendent Cause. But this Transcendent Cause, precisely because

transcendent, verifies the notion

of

causation in a manner unique

and essentially different from that in which other causes verify that

notion. t

is

a commonplace

of

scholastic metaphysics that the

Cause of the world cannot be merely like causes in the

world.

68

When speaking earlier

of

the analogical

term' being'

and its

applicability to God,

we

maintained, however, that one does not

first establish the possibility of predicating being

of

God, or

of

using the term

being'

in a transcendental sense, and then prove

that God exists. Rather one proves that God exists, and then

inquires into the validity and meaning of

the term

'exists'

when

predicated of Him. We now suggest that the same applies to the

analogical term 'cause'. One does not first prove that causality

has a transcendent validity and then prove that God

is

the Trans

cendent Cause. Rather one discovers the absolute ontological

dependence

of

the world and is forced to admit an Absolute

Source of being; and in the act one discovers that God can and

must be called First Cause

of

all that

is.

One proves the trans

cendental validity

of

the principle

of

causality by proving that

God exists.

69

God is not the first of a series of causes interlocked through

space and time. On a superficial

view of

the first three

'ways'

of St. Thomas it might be supposed that he thinks of God as giving

the first impulse to a series of spatio-temporal movers or causes.

Nothing could be further from his thought. Our discussion

of

his

notion

of

creation has already made that clear. The real force

of

the arguments in question and

of

the exclusion

of

infinite

regress which recurs in them, is that regress in the spatio-temporal

series of causes, however long, is utterly unavailing for the solution

68

Professor O Connor is excessively naive in thinking that metaphysics will be

reduced to embarrassed silence by his pointing

out

to them that the 'first cause'

argument for the existence

of

God

'uses

the word

cause

in a

s n ~

entirely

different from that conferred on it

in

ordinary usage'

The Philosophy o Education,

Routledge and Kegan Paul. London, 1957, p. 39 . This is precisely what meta

physicians are the first

to

say, when ,hey stress the analogous character of all

predication about God. But they discover the analogous character of language

first in ordinary existential, descriptive or causal statements. They do not commit

the error of confusing, as O Connor seems to confuse. the ordinary use of cause •

with the scientific use of cause' (compare op. cit., pp. 120-3).

69 Compare Mgr. J. D. Horgan, in

'The

Proof for the Existence of God J in

Philosophical Studies, I, 11 1ne 1951, pp. 41-53, especiaJly p. 53.



112


of the problem in hand.

7

The arguments force us to transcend

the spatio-temporal order to a First Cause who

is

First in the

sense of being presupposed to all causes, just as the being which

He causes

is

presupposed to all happening and all being-so .

St. Thomas knew very well, before Kant, the difference between

the phenomenal and transcendental uses of the principle

of

causality.

He proves the transcendental validity of causality precisely by

showing that phenomenal causes provide no explanation of the

being

of things.

Being ,

he said,

is

common to all that exists;

and therefore, above all particular causes, there must be a cause

whose effect

is

to give being

.71

The ancient materialists, he says,

thought that every cause required a precedent cause

or

condition

or material; they did not realise that this is true only of particular

or phenomenal causes; they did not rise to the conception

of

the Universal or Transcendent Cause which

is

the active principle

of all the being of all that is.72

3.6. Demonstration and Mystery

The five ways declare that the cause of being must be sought

outside the whole empirical order. They assert

that if

we arrest

our search for the Cause

of

being anywhere within a finite order

we

have a cause which itself cemands a cause, and thus is a

question and not an answer. We cannot account for being except

by posing a Cause which is Uncaused, Immutable, Necessary, A Se,

Eternal, Infinite and absolutely Simple, without composition or

multiplicity of any kind. This Cause

is

necessarily posed as being

outside empirical conditions and beyond the possibility of adequate

apprehension by human concepts or of definition in human language.

The five

ways

instal us in the heart of mystery. As Gardeil

put it, the first dogma

of

analogy

is

mystery.73

How mistaken

is

Merleau-Ponty in alleging

that

Theology takes

note of the contingency of human nature, but only in order to

derive it from a Necessary Being and thus abolish it. Theology

uses philosophical wonderment only to found an affirmation which

ends it .74 The notion of the causation of the world by necessary

being does not abolish the contingency of the world; rather, as

we have seen,

it

supposes the perpetual and irremediable contingency

70

Compare E.

L

Mascall,

Existence and Analogy,

Longmans, London, 1949,

p. 73:

The

real point of the argument (the Prima Via) is, I am convinced,

not

that we

cannot

proceed to infinity,

but

that

it does

not

get us any nearer the solution

of

our

problem

if we do.

Compare the same

author s He Who Is,

Longmans,

London (1943) 1954, pp 50-1.

71

S.c.G.

I I 15.

2 S.c.G. II 16.

Cfr.

S. Theo

1.44 1;

De Potentia III

5;

De Spiritualibus

Creaturis,

5. D. Dubarle, O.P., has a valuable discussion

of

the difference between

the philosophical-theological and the scientific usages of the notion of causality in

Recherches de Philosophie, Ill-IV D e

la connaissance de

Dieu ,

pp. 35-112.

,3 Le donne rheM et

la

theologie,

Paris (1909) 1932, p. 139.

7

L'eloge . . . College de France edit., p. 37. See also J. Daniclou,

Le

probleme de Dieu et l'e.'(istentialisme,

Montreal, 1958,

pp.

9, 26-7,



THE KNOW

ABLENESS

OF GOD

113

of

the world. Equally the affirmation

of

the existence

of

God

is

not the end but is the condition and the justification and the object

of philosophical wonderment. In the prologue to the fourth book

of

the

Summa contra Gentiles,

St. Thomas says that

if

our intellect

cannot grasp the essences even of the empirical things which are

the starting points of our ' ways to God it is infinitely less capable

of apprehending the nature of God, their Transcendent Origin.

t

is clear that, for

st

Thomas, the reason why we cannot fully

understand anything is that everything is a creature of God, marked

in its essence by God's presence, penetrated in its being by the

mystery of God's eternal Power. t is the affirmation of God

which makes it possible for us to know anything about anything.

But the affirmation

of

God makes

it

impossible for

us

to pretend

to know everything about anything. Josef Pieper in a remarkable

paper on

the

Negative Element on the Philosophy of St. Thomas

Aquinas 7 has shown how the concept of createdness is basic in

St. Thomas' whole philosophy and how, in particular, it sets up

in his noetic that remarkable balance of intelligibility and mystery

to which we have frequently alluded.

Theistic metaphysics does not pretend to provide that impossible

transparency' which Camus demands from reason. The affirmation

of God is not an ' explanatory hypothesis' which

makes

every

thing clear '. The alternative which theism offers

is

not clarity or

obscurity, but mystery or absurdity. The absurdity in question

is

not some romantic challenge to the human spirit which man could

heroically accept and dramatically live, as Camus thought. t is

the absurdity of incoherence, self-contradiction, unreason and

nothingness. The theist does not suppose or require that reality

should be positively and fully intelligible by us. He demands

intelligibility only in the minimal sense that reality shall not be

self-contradictory.

76

He requires that what we do know shall not

.5 First published in Dieu Vivant, 20, 1951, and reprinted in English translation

in The Silence

of S.

Thomas,

Faber

and Faber, London, 1957. Compare R.

Garrigou-Lagrange, God, His Existence and His Nature, vo ' II, E. trans ., Herder,

London, 1941, p.

89

.

• 6 As Gilson put it in the discussion with Brunschvicg on • la querelle de

l'atheisme': • The metaphysical problem

of

a cause

of

the universe arises from an

effort to determine the conditions which are pecessary in order that the given world

shall be radically intelligible' (De la Vraie

t

de fa fausse conversion, p. 229). t

would perhaps be preferable to say . . . • shall not be radically unintelligible.'

Compare Mgr.

J.

D. Horgan in foc

cit.,

pp. 52-3; Sertillanges

(La philosophie de

S. Thomas d Aquin,

t.I, Aubier, Paris, 1940, p. 150 writes: • The problem

of

God

brings us precisely to this: to comprehend the necessity of the incomprehensible

. . . to know that there is an Unknowable; to explain by mystery that which,

without the mystery would be absurdity and would therefore be nothing; whereas,

precisely, it is. Compare Pierre Fontan, Adhesion

t

depassement, Louvain and

Paris, 1952, pp. 44 foIl. Ronald W. Hepburn misunderstands this when he objects

to the theist that the world need not be

completely

rational or coherent and we

cannot make

perfect

sense

of

it; and asks the theist: • Can

no

explanations be

valuable unless complete and ultimate explanation is also possible?' (Christianity

and Paradox, pp. 180-1).



4


be pronounced unknowable, that being shall be and not be nothing.

The Beyond Reason which he affirms in affirming

God

is the

necessary condition

of

all reasoning; it is what Father Sertillanges

called ' the Necessary Unknowable'. The proof for the existence

of

God is basically the reductio ad absurdum

of

the non-existence

of

God.

The problem

of

our knowledge

of

God begins with and is

at

every point implicated with our demonstration and affirmation

of

God's existence. As Penido put

it:

, Analogy commences precisely at the point where the quinque

viae end; not only for the obvious reason that we must know

existence before

examining

nature, but for

the

most important

reason that the mechanism of the proofs of God itself places us of

necessity

in the midst of the problem of analogy and thus constitutes

a first justification for the use of

analogy

in theology. . The

very

mechanism of the Five Ways, forcing

us

to leave the order of

created causality,

forces

us to abandon univocity and places us in

the heart of analogy'. 8

4 Ways to Know God

The question

of

the nature and validity

of

analogical language

is one which requires separate and special treatment.

9

What

follows may be regarded as a kind of prolegomenon to this study.

This paper is concerned with our actual knowledge about God,

of

which analogy

is

the logical instrument.

f

it is true, as has

been argued above, that the problem

of

analogy is posed by the

necessity of

affirming God, rath6{' than that the possibility

of

affirming God is proved by the validation of analogy, then this

mode of procedure and this division of labour are justified.

4.1. The Affirmation

of

the Transcendent

The whole problem and paradox of our analogical knowledge

of

God are contained in the affirmation of God the Transcendent.

The proofs

of

God's existence make it rationally necessary to

affirm the existence of a Being who is, by the proof itself, by the

affirmation itself, posed as beyond reason, because beyond the

conditions

of

spatio-temporal existence, beyond the empirical

categories from which are derived and by which are limited our

concepts and our language. Reason can save itself from unreason

only by posing what is Beyond Reason as the very condition

of

rationality. Language can save the verb ' to be ' which is its life,

only by affirming that ' God is

as

the condition

of

being

of

all

77

a

philosophie de S. Thomas

Ii

Aquin, t. I, loco cit.; compare the whole of

chapter III,

and

especially pp. 152-174.

78 e

role de l analogie en tMologie dogmatique,

pp. 86, 89, 92.

78

It

was in fact separately treated,

at the

SpQde HQusq CQnfqrqncc

1

br

Very

Rc;v, ~ n Q n D, I

B,

H\I,wkin ,

.




115

that is. But the God thus affirmed is by principle unknowable

by finite reason which is all the reason we possess. He is by

principle beyond the finite being which alone

we

properly know.

Here are the two ends of the chain whose links are analogy. No

move in the dialectic

of

analogy will go back on the two-fold

certitude: first that

we

know

that

God exists as the Cause of all

existence and all knowledge; second that

we

know that He

transcends

all our knowledge. No negation can be made about

God which will revoke that persistent affirmation; no affirmation

can be made about God which will not have to be accompanied

by a persistent negation.

4.2. Affirmation Negation Eminence

Modern expositions of the doctrine of St. Thomas usually

distinguish three

ways

of knowing God or three moments

in

our accession to knowledge

of

God; and sometimes speak as if

the three were distinct from or even somehow opposed to one

another. This is not so. St. Thomas does not distinguish the

way of affirmation which he prefers to call the way of causality

from the way

of

eminence or excellence or transcendence. What

we always find

in

St. Thomas is the affirmation

of

an Eminent or

Transcendent Cause. The yay

of

negation

is

not a revocation

of

either the affirmation or the transcendence; it is a way of dis

tinguishing the Transcendent from all that is finite and therefore

of safeguarding the affirmation of transcendence. Every assertion

about God therefore contains at one and the same time and

inseparably the three elements of affirmation eminence and nega

tion. Every assertion about God is from the beginning an

affirmation that God

is

. . .

not-jinite.

4.3.

he

Way

o

Causality

This affirmation is necessitated by the causal demonstration that

God exists. When God is affirmed as Cause of the world He is

immediately affirmed to be utterly beyond all finitude all contin

gency all multiplicity

or

change all limitation or imperfection.

These are the signs of createdness. The Creator by principle

transcends them. The reason for affirming God at all is at the

same time the reason for affirming God as Transcendent or as

Maritain has it Transintelligible;

80

for the reason for affirming

God

is that no empirical cause or explanation or reason

is

enough

to account for anything whatever in reality or in our personal

experience. It does not matter what object event or experience

we take; all causal lines lead to God all lines

of

explanation

converge and terminate

in

God.

oa

There

is

only one final answer

- s o

Les

degrl}s

du savair

p.

448

and 442-457; E. transl. pp. 218-231.

SOa The principle of

the proof

from motion is applied by St. Thomas to the

motion

of the human will in discussions in which he establishes

that

the

Will

is

Pl9ve;i by God al<;me as its sole svlfici< \llt Ultimate M9VC;r. Sec; S

Theal. 1-2

qq. 9-10



6


to any question, and that is: 'God is God'. 81 Nothing else and

nothing less than Transcendent Being will do. The answer

of

metaphysics

is

not

other than the answer

of

religion and

of

mysticism: 'Only God is enough . When St. Thomas speaks

of

the

Primum movens quod a nullo movetur,

he means no other than

what St. Teresa of Avila meant by Solo Dios Basta.

8la

Only God

is sufficiently Being, Truth, Goodness, Love, Beauty, to make the

world s being possible or experience meaningful or human existence

intelligible. This is what the Five Ways assert when they repeat:

t is not possible to go on to infinity. . . . in chains of finite

causes,

or

empirical explanations, or human experiences.

SIb

Only

God

is

enough as cause and as explanation, as reason and as

truth, as goodness and as object of love, as perfection and as term

of moral and spiritual endeavour. Only God is enough to satisfy

the mind s need to know and the heart s desire to love. Therefore

the theist does not build up his affirmation of divine transcendence

by a process

of

verbal inflation, as

is

sometimes suggested. He

does not, as Hume thought, make a finite God bigger and bigger

until he is infinite.

82

The infinity

of

God is the reason for the

theist s first assertion of God. t is not merely that no finite God

would be an adequate object

of

religious attitudes

' .83

t is also

and primarily, as we have just seen, that only an Infinite God

would be the adequate explanation and sufficient cause, that

is

to

say, the Uncaused Cause,

of

finite being and knowledge.

The Infinity

of

God is not arrived at by a process

of

anthropo

morphic projection either. Assertion of God s infinity expresses

a

'frame of mind'

utterly different from that in which we give

81 Compare R. Guardini, Le Dieu vivant, French transl., Alsatia, Paris, 1955,

p. 64. See also Ch. de More·Pontgibaud, Du jini a I injini, Aubier, Paris, 1957,

pp. 75-8.

8la

St. Teresa s breviary was found to contain this writing, in unrhymed verse:

Nada te turbe: Nada te spante: Todo se passa: Dios no se muda: Quien

aDios

diene: Nada e falta: Solo Dios basta. 'Let

nothing disturb you; Let nothing

dismay you: All things pass; God

does

not

change.

To

him who has

God,

Nothing

is

lacking: Only God suffices. See Complete Works of S. Teresa, tr.

and

ed. E. Allison Peers, Sheed

and

Ward, London, 1946, p. 288.

81b

There could scarcely be a more elementary blunder

about

the nature

of

arguments for the existence

of God

(or a more foolish reason for 'not being a

Christian ) than Bertrand Russell s 'reply': I for a long time accepted the

argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age

of

18 I read John Stuart

Mill s Autobiography,

and I

there found this sentence:

My

father taught me

that

the

q u e ~ t i o n

'Who

made

me?'

cannot be answered, since

it

immediately

suggests the further question, Who made

God? ,,,

. . . If everything must have

a cause, then

God

must have a cause.

If

there can be anything without a cause,

it

may

just

as well be the world as

God.' Why

am not a Christian, ed. Paul

Edwards, Allen

and

Unwin, London, 1957, pp. 3-4.) t

is

surprising

to

find a

similar misunderstanding

of

the argument in Ronald W. Hepburn,

Christianity and

Paradox, Watts, London, 1958, pp. 165-6.

82

Natural History of Religion, Ed. H. E. Root, pp. 43, 45-7, 66.

83 The phrase is J. N. Findlay s, in his paper,

'Can God's

Existence be dis

proved?',

in Mind, April, 1948, pp. 176-183;

v.

p.

177.

This is reprinted in New

Essays

in

Philosophical Theology, pp. 47-56.



THE KNOW

ABLENESS

OF GOD 117

ourselves over unconditionally and gladly to the task of indefinite

approach towards a certain imaginary focus where nothing actually

is , and find this task' sufficiently inspiring and satisfying' without

feeling any need to assert the existence

of

an impossible Infinite

God.

84

The actual existence

of

an Infinite God is felt by the theist

to be the condition of the existence of the world and

of

himself,

and not just a name for an aspect of his experience. The insatiable

aspiration towards perfection in knowledge, in being, in moral

behaviour, in beatitude,

is

a profound and essential constituent of

human experience. Man is such

that

no finite knowledge, no

limited being, no imperfect virtue, no partial bliss, will satisfy him.

But

it

is not thereby and immediately evident that God exists as

the object

of

his desire.

t

is only by an exercise

of

explanatory

reasoning, only by an inferential process resting on the principle

of

causality, that

we

are justified in asserting, and are constrained

to assert, that God exists: because, if God does not exist, human

experience is inexplicable and absurd and human existence

impossible.

85

But

God

who is thus affirmed as the Condition of

human experience is at the same time declared to lie beyond the

conditions

of

human experience, beyond the grasp of human

concepts and words. To assert God's transcendence is not to

stretch human experience or human language to its limit and

suppose that God is at the limit; but rather to make a complete

break between what we can think or say and what God is. It is

to be conscious, in all

we

think or say about God, that ' He

is

beyond all our language and knowledge, and that He not only

surpasses our language and knowledge, but that He is beyond the

apprehension of every intellect, even the angelic, and is trans-

cendent to all substance'.

86

This assertion of transcendence

is

it must be repeated, required

by

the'

mechanism' of the proofs of God as the Uncaused Cause

of

being. The Uncaused Cause is 110t found until

we

assert a

Being utterly perfect, utterly without compositeness, utterly simple.

Such a Being is by principle beyond our knowledge; for our

84 J.

N.

Findlay, in

art.

cit. p. 183. Compare R. W. Hepburn,

Christianity and

Paradox pp. 197 foil.: he suggests

that

an • ideal imaginary focus' is all that

is

needed to • maintain moral seriousness and achieve integration of

character';

and

that thus the • religiously minded sceptic' can retain religiousness without faith

and without God.

85

That the theistic interpretation

of

human aspiration

is

not immediately evident,

is shown by the example

of

such men as Nietzsche, Sartre

and

Camus, who recognise

man's

• divine discontent'

or

passion for the Absolute,

but

do

not

admit God's

existence. They speak much

of human

• trunscendence', but deny any Divine

Transcendent. Maritain distinguishes theological transcendence from • that appeal

to a ceaseless onward movement, to a passing beyond what we have already

experienced, which the modernists substitute for transcendence, and which only

attests the inexhaustibility

of our

own nature

or

the endlessness

of

spiritual process

in ourselves' es

degres du sawir.

p. 463; E. trans .,

p.

234.

86 St. Thomas Aquinas,

III

B Dionysii De Divillis Nomillibus Commelltarium

(Pera edit.. Marietti, Rome, 1950),

77.



8

PHILOSOPIDCAL STUDmS

knowledge

is

of imperfect, limited, composite things; and can

proceed only by abstraction or

morcellation and attribution,

or

what the scholastics called composition and division. But the

difficulty

at

once arises:

if

the first moment in our knowledge

of

God is the affirmation

of

God s transcendence, it would seem also,

and by the very fact, to be its last moment. For the Transcendent

seems to be by definition the Unknowable, the Unutterable.

4.4. Tile Way o Affirmation

But the affirmation in question is the affirmation of God as

Cause of all that exists. We have seen that it is not question of

a Cause that once created and

of

which I and the world are now

independent. God is either not proven to be, or He is proven to

be the Cause which is now maintaining my whole being and the

being of the world in existence, the Power which is present to all

being, making being be. My thoughts cannot circumscribe Him

nor my words describe him nor things represent Him; but He is

that without which neither thoughts nor words nor things could

be. I cannot know Him in Himself, but I can know that He must

be and what He must be in order to be the Cause of all I am and

all I know and all there is.

In

one

of

the most concise statements

of his doctrine on our knowledge of God, St. Thomas says: Our

natural knowledge has its origin in sense experience.

t

therefore

can extend only so far

as

it can be brought by sense experience.

From this empirical starting point, it can never arrive at any direct

knowledge of the essence of God; for sensible objects, though

they are the effects of God, are effects which cannot adequately

represent the power

of

their Cause. . . . But because they are

effects, and (continually) depend on God, we can through them

come to know

that

God exists. Furthermore,

we

can through

them come to know

what He must be, in order to be the First

Cause of all, transcending all that He has created. We therefore

know His relationship to creatures;

we

know that He is their

Cause. We know the difference of creatures from Him; we know

that we must say that He is

not

any of the things which He has

caused. We know finally the reason for this negation; it is not

because He lacks any perfection, but because He infinitely trans

cends all His creatures .

87

But the question remains, can

we

know anything positively and

properly about God? t has been insisted that we know that

God exists. But when

we

ask, how does God exist,

we

are forced

to say that His existence

is

utterly different from that of all the

empirical things

we

know. Are

we

then, saying that His existence

8

S.

Theol.

1.12.12; compare 1.13.1, 1.13.10, 1.13.12;

S.c.G.

I 14 30-36; II

15-16;

III

39, 50.




9

is

the same as non-existence? Are we using the term existence of

God without any assignable meaning?

Without going into any technical discussion of analogy, let it

be remarked that it would be absurd to say that that Being does

not exist on which my whole existence is here and now depending.

t

would be absurd to say that that existence

is

unintelligible which

is the condition of my whole intellection and the source of all

rationality.

But this does not go deeply enough into the matter.

t

can be

objected that even though God were the cause of the being of the

world, yet His being could be utterly incomparable with the being

of the world, so that it would be without sense or meaning to

use our

word' being' of

Him or to attempt to make any assertion

concerning Him. t cannot be meaningfully asserted that

God

exists, unless there

is

some meaning-element in common between

, existence' as ascribed to God, and 'existence' as we find it in

experience. What is this common element? Can we attribute it

to God without destroying His transcendence? When we attribute

it to God, are we really knowing something positive about

what

God

is?

St. Thomas' unvarying position

is

that there is a meaning-element

in the term '

being',

and the transcendental terms related to being,

which can be mentally separated from the imperfections which

accompany them in our experience, and which can, when thus

purified, be positively attributed to God; and that, through these

attributes, we have a positive, though obscure and utterly inadequate,

knowledge of what God is in His own Nature.

Some consideration has already been given to what is meant

by saying that

'being'

and 'knowing' are analogous terms,

capable

of

being used with transcendental reference. The mystery

which attaches to these terms has, as we have seen, impressed

itself more and more on contemporary philosophers, both in the

existentialist and in the linguistic-analytic schools. Being and

knowing are presupposed to all experience; but they themselves

transcend empirical description or definition. t is meaningless to

say that that which makes being and knowing possible is utterly

and merely other than being or knowing. Being and knowing are

such that it

is

strictly to use words without sense to say, with

Rudolf Otto:

(

God

is

that which

is

nothing .

By

this nothing

is

meant that

of

which nothing can be predicated, but that which

is absolutely and intrinsically other than and opposite of everything

that is and can be thought ' .88 If the word' exists' be literally

understood, it is self-contradictory to say, with Kierkegaard: 'God

88 The Idea o the Holy

p. 30.




does not exist, He is eternal ' .89 All discourse about God begins

and moves and remains within the affirmation: God is, He exists,

He is real.

But this

is

not to put Him on the level

of

empirical existents.

, Is " 'exists', ' real ' have a meaning that is not restricted to

empirical or finite realities. To realise this,

we

have only to reflect

on how we use the word real. Few would be prepared to hold

that ' our concept of reality is inexorably linked to our talk about

spatio-temporal objects '. But reality is strictly correlative with

existence. f we continuously remember that we know

'God

exists'

because we know ' God is Cause of all that

exists';

and

if we

realise what God's causation is,

we

will know that nothing

is real but by Him, and will know that nothing is really real but

He, by Whom and in Whom we live and move and are. We will

know that He

is

and we in comparison, are not.

9 Concluding Unscientific Postscript

to

the Philosophical Fragments ; see A

Kierkegaard Anthology,

ed. Robert Bretall, Oxford Univ. Press, 1947, p. 231. t

is clear, however, that Kierkegaard

is

using the word' exists' in a restricted sense,

where

it

means the exclusively finite, mutable, temporal existence of

human

beings.

He

is

anxious to affirm the existence of

God

as a reality beyond the finite conditions

of human existence. The passage more fully r e a d ~

'God

does

not

think, He

creates; God does not exist, He is eternal. Man thinks and exists, and exislence

separates thought

and

being, holding them

apart

from one

another

in succes

sion. . . .' Earlier, Kierkegaard has just written: 'Christianity is therefore not

a doctrine, but the fact that God has existed. . . . The maximum of attainment

within the sphere of faith

is

to become infinitely interested in the reality

of

the

teacher'.

(In (he two latter passages, Kierkegaard's thought is slightly different;

he

is

di stinguishing

' the

realm of faith' from 'doctrine' or ' the sphere of the

intellectual " holding

that

doctrine

or

intellectualism is concerned only with notions,

essences, and is indifferent to existence or reality; while faith

is

concerned, not with

whether a doctrine is true or

not but

with'

God's

reality in existence as a particular

individual, the fact that God has existed as

an

individual human being.' Kierke

gaard's position may be compared with

that

of Lagneaux, who insisted

on

calling

himself

an

atheist, because, though he affirmed God as Value, he denied that God

existed. He understood

e x i s t ~ n c e

as relating to empirical objects; therefore, in

order to

affirm

God

as metempirical, he had

to

affirm

Him

as non-existent (See

Jean Lacroix in Monde moderne et sens e Dieu, p. 45). Compare also Gabriel

Marcel,

Journal Metaphysique,

Gallimard, Paris, 1935, pp. 30-2, 34-40, 221-4.

Alasdair Macintyre quotes Kierkegaard's sentence,

"God

does not exist, He

is

eternal"

in his paper, 'The Logical Status

of

Religious Belief', and though he

puts

the words in a

rather

different philosophical frame, his conclusion is similar

to Kierkegaard's. Macintyre suggests that

' the

concepts of existence or non

existence are equally inapplicable to God'. ' Existence' is a 'non-religious

concept', and no non-religious concept can be applied to God. The concept

of

existence is specifically inapplicable to God because it would suggest that God is

an object; and because an assertion that God exists would be superfluous for a

believer, senseless for an unbeliever (See

Metaphysical Beliefs,

pp. 203-3). Macintyre's

curious conclusion

is

quite Kierkegaardian: namely

that

theistic philosophy

or

metaphysics

is

the enemy

of

faith. for

it

attempts to replace conversion by argument.

Logical Positivism has saved religion by destroying metaphysics All this is, sur

prisingly, meant

to

be a defence of religion; and one is tempted briefly to retort:

'God save religion from its New

Apologists '

The basic flaw in such arguments

is that they miss the special logical character of such words as i s or 'exists',

' t rue ' or

'false',

'meaningful' and nonsense '. If God is beyond being and

nothingness, then there is no such being as God; if religion is beyond truth

and

falsehood, then

it

is simply false; and if religion is nonsense, it cannot be defended

by calling

it Important

or Ineffable Nonsense.



THE KNOWABLENESS OF GOD 121

God

is

He Who Is. The causal affirmation compels us to assert

that God is not One who has existence, or nature, or goodness;

but that He

is

existence, being, goodness; quite simply, that He is

J.

N. Findlay finds this a ' queer and barely intelligible scholastic

doctrine . 90 We readily grant that it is not fully intelligible. t

could not both be fully intelligible and be about God.

oa

But is

it unintelligible? We know enough about being to know two

things: firstly, that

if we

could fully grasp what is meant by ,

is

in the assertion ' God

is

He Who Is

we

should need no other

Name for God; secondly, that we are utterly incapable of fully

grasping the content of ' is ' when it

is

predicated without qualifi

cation or limitation. We know that, even on the finite level, being

contains already every attribute that can be predicated, every name

that can be named; but we know that

we

cannot predicate finite

being without predicating other attributes or using other names.

How much more does Infinite Being contain every Divine Perfection

and say every Divine Name; but it so overwhelms us by the

immensity of its significance that we can only stammer 90b the

litany of all the perfections there must be in Infinite Being. We

know that all perfections are already contained in the Simplicity

of Infinite Being, but we cannot grasp or express their self-identical

co-presence there. We know that all the attributes we add to

Infinite Being serve only to seem to circumscribe and limit its

Infinity; but we cannot otherwise than by mUltiplying attributes

express the inexhaustible plenitude which we know Infinite Being

to be.

This is why S1. Albert the Great, following the Pseudo-Denis,

said: 'God is Unnameable and All-Nameable at once. He is

unnameable, and the Unnameable is the most beautiful of all His

names, for it places Him immediately beyond all that one could

attempt to say of Him'. 91

S1.

Thomas, making his own the same

90 See New Essays in Philosophical Theology, pp. 53-4.

Compare

C. B. Martin's

paper, • The Perfect Good in

op. cit.,

pp. 212-226.

90 Compare St. Augustine,

Senno

52 n. 16: Si comprehendisti; non est Deus.

Si comprehendere potuisti, aliud

pro

Deo comprchendisti. Si quasi comprehenderc

potuisti, cogitatione tua te decepisti. Also

De Civitate Dei

XII c 18: Quidquid

scientia comprehenditur, scientis comprehensione

finitur.

. .

Si

finisti, non est

Deus. For these

and 1

her patristic references, see de Lubac,

SUI Ii s

chemins de

Dieu,

pp. 140 foil. Father Steuart, S.l., wrote: • God

is

not destroyed because

our

thoughts of

Him

are confused

and

contradictory;

rather

for

that

very reason we

see

Him

the more truly as He is.

For

the

God

whose attributes and operations

are literally explicable in terms of

our

own is not our

God;

He is perhaps the first

of

creatures,

but He is

in the

end

limited like ourselves. . . . .. Let him who

cannot

understand it , says SI. Augustine, .. rejoice that He can only wonder.

Let him rejoice and be glad rather to find Thee by not finding Thee, than by finding

Thee to lose Thee .' (Ill

Divers Manners,

Longmans, London, 1938, p. 40).

90b cfr. St.

Thomas, S.

Theol. 1.4.1. ad 1: Sicut dicit Gregorius: Balbutiendo,

ut possumus, excelsa Dei resonamus. Cfr. I

Sent.

d. 22 q La. 1.

01

Summa Theologiae, tract.

III

q. 16 ad 1. Cited

by H.

de Lubac, Sur les chemins

de Dieu,

p. 155.

F



122


Dionysian language, says: 'Because God is both utterly Other

than all that is and is the Cause

of

all that is, theologians sometimes

call Him Unnameable and sometimes apply to Him the names

of

all the things that He has

made .

92

Among all the Names we can apply to God, St. Thomas says

, He Who Is ' is the most proper. He gives three reasons for this

view. Firstly, this Name does not signify a form or essence,

but

existence itself; and we know that God's essence is His existence.

Secondly, it is the least determined and least particular and least

conditioned of names; it implies no defined mode or manner of

being, and therefore best indicates that Infinite and Unterminated

Ocean of Substance which we know God to be. Thirdly, it carries

no mark

of

temporal duration, and thus best points to God's

Eternal Now.

93

t

is plain that when we assert Being of

God

we

are indivisibly affirming that He exists and denying that He is in

any way finite; because our first affirmation

is

that God

is infinitely.

All that

is

meant by , being is truly and properly said of God,

verified in God. But all that is meant by being is utterly,

infinitely incapable of expressing what is the reality of Divine

Being. But that Reality

is

the most certain truth we know. t

is because

we

know

God

is

real,

that

we

know

we

are real ourselves.

St. Thomas' procedure in establishing the various attributes

of

God is exactly similar; we can only baldly summarise some

of

his arguments here. The starting point is always the conclusion

of

the causal

ways-that

God

is

Absolute and Simple Being. Such

Being is spiritual, utterly immaterial and utterly active, and there

fore both supremely knowable, supremely knowing and supremely

self-known. We know enough about knowing to know

that

it is

spiritual presence

of

being to mind, and to know

that

our knowing

is

hindered by all kinds

of

impediments from

that

perfect com

presence

of

mind and being which would be knowing as such.

We can think away the imperfections of our knowing, and affirm

knowing as such of God. We can be certain that thus we are

knowing something that is in

God but

certain also that God's

knowing

is

infinitely more really knowing than anything

we

can

know

of

it.

94

Similarly we know

that

mind tends towards, is attracted by

being in so far as being is perfect; and that the attraction of

being

is

goodness. Perfect Being

is

perfect Will; Perfect Being is

2

In B. Dianysii e Divinis Naminibus (Pera edit.) 99, 1 2 .

• 3

S.

Theal.

1.13.11. t

is interesting to compare this with Kierkegaard's sentence,

quoted

above: God does not exist: He is eternal . St.

Thomas

sees

that

the

best way of saying God is eternal is to say, simply and without qualification,

God exists . We shall later show how the mystics in the end are brought back

to the term He who is ' or Ipsum esse subsistens of scholastic metaphysics, as their

best way

of

expressing

what

the Living God

of

Love

had meant

to them. See also

H. Paissac, Le

Dieu

e

Sartre

Arthaud, Paris, 1950, pp. 74-93 .

•• S. Theal. l.q.14; S.c.G. I 44 foll.; e Veri/ate q.2.




123

perfect Good. We know enough about goodness to know that

being as such

is

good but that its limitations and the imperfections

of our will introduce evil. We know that Being without limitation

or

imperfection would be

both

perfect good and perfect willing

of

perfect good. Thus

we

know something real and positive

about

God s goodness; but we know at the same time that He is infinitely

more good and otherwise good than we can know.

95

Human love

is

in the giving of one s possessions and especially

of oneself to others. It is an infinitely other and different; but an

infinitely greater and more real love, to give being to what would

otherwise not be. What

God

gives is being; and since being

exists only by His will and power and presence, what God gives

to beings is Himself. St. Thomas says:

, Everything that exists owes all

its

being and all the goodness it

has to the fact that

it

is

willed by

God.. God loves

all

that is

but His

love

is

other than our

love.

Our love is not the cause of

the goodness of the things we

love

rather is their goodness the

cause of the love we have for them. . But the love of God is

that which confers and creates goodness

in

things .

96

We see thus something of what manner of love God has for us,

already in the natural order. We see, even metaphysically, that

if

we

love God, it is because He has first loved us.

t

is because

He loves us that

we

are. The more

we

know our nothing, the

more will

we

know and marvel at the Love which not merely

tolerates but wants us and by loving makes us be. 'Vous n etes

point autre que

l'Amour',

says Father de Lubac, 'mais Vous etes

un autre Amour ' .97

An Infinite Spirit who knows and loves is a Person, not an t

but a 'Thou'. He is not a Ground of Existence but a Person

with whom

we

can and must have personal relations, turning

knowledge into love, adoration, invocation, praise.

We

have

learned much from modern phenomenology about personal en

counter, and this has its value for the metaphysics of Divine

personality. Some theologians and philosophers declare that

God

can never be spoken about but only spoken to; that He can only

be either rejected or invoked; that He is only Thou and never

It

or an Object of discourse. 98 But Otto rightly pointed out that

95 S. TireD .

l.q.6; S.c.C.

I 37 fall.

96

S.

TireD .

1.20.2; cfr.

S.c.C. r

91.

97 Sur

es

chemins de Dieu, p. 124.

98

Compare

Gabriel Marcel,

Journal mtitaphysique,

pp. 272 fall., 302 fall.; E.

transl., pp.

281

fall, 312 fall.

For

a commentary and

other

references, see

Troisfontaines,

e

'existence iJ riJtre, II pp. 222 fo11. Compare Martin Buber,

I and Thou,

E. transl., T. and T. Clark, Edinburgh, Part III, pp. 75 fall. On pp.

80-1

we find:

'God

cannot be inferred in

anything-in

nature, say, as its author,

or in history as its master, or in the subject as the self

that

is thought in it. Some

thing else is not

given

and then God elicited from it; but

God

h the Being that

is directly,

most

nearly

and

lastingly over against us, that may properly only be

addressed,

not

expressed'. On this line of thought, see the remarks of

Father

de Lubac,

Sur

es

chemins

de

Dieu,

pp. 117-120.



124


our approach to

God'

should not be so continually in the form of

an address to God as to exclude prayerful and thoughtful discourse

about Him'.

99 The God whom we invoke

is

God as revealed or

philosophical discourse about Him have taught us to conceive

Him. Unless discourse has first convinced us that He is real, then

our invocation will not be an I-Thou dialogue but only an agnostic's

monologue; it will be not a prayer but a cry of panic in the night

to which no answer comes but its own anguished echo.10o

Marcel and Buber meant to preserve Divine Transcendence.

But exclusive use

of

person and vocative language could subtly

become a new anthropomorphism; or a false immanence. All

that

we

mean by Person is in

God;

but God's Personality

is

utterly other than

we

can conceive. Sometimes non-personal

names better express His utter transcendence. Origen called Him

' the Paternal Abyss .101 The use of non-personal language by

the mystics is significant. Father de Lubac quotes one who begins

his praise with'

0

Father,

0

Spouse,

0

Brother'. . . . and goes

on, '

0

River deep and calm, devouring Fire, Light which makes

all things light . . .' 102

Affirmation that God is Personal includes the negation that His

Person is as ours. But this negation takes away nothing

of

the

perfection of personality from God; it is there to ensure that

God's Personality shall be affirmed Infinite. As

Le

Senne put it:

, The personalism of God

is

logically before the impersonalism.

t is

the impersonalism

denied. Once

personalism has been posed,

it can never again be retracted. But we are afraid that the name of

person might reduce God to our limitations;

and

by impersonalism

we

deny, not what is positive

in

our concept of personality, but all

that is

negative

in personality as we possess it. Instead of denying

divine

personality,

we

raise it to the supreme

degree.

Our

im-

personalism

is

supremely personalism

.103

What we should finally say is that God is SuperpersonaJ.

4.5. he Way

of

Negation

The element of negation in all these affirmations is quite obvious.

99

The Idea of the Holy, pp.

207-8.

100

Father Paul

Henry,

S.J.,

in the 1953 symposium of the Semaine des intellectuels

catholiques,

put it very

wel1

when he said:

' I

confess I

am

a little tired of hearing

philosopher:;, and sometimes theologians,

but

hardly ever mystics-and

that

is

significant-reducing their statements about God to .. No. no, no , and Oh,

oh, oh . . .' (Monde moderne

et

sens

de

Dieu, p. 73). Compare Basil Mitchel1

in Faith and Logic,

Al1en and

Unwin, London,

1957,

p.

157.

101

Cited by

De

Lubac,

Sur les chemins de Dieu,

p.

159.

1 2 Op

cit.,

p. 123.

10

La decouverte de Dieu

(published posthumously), Aubier, Paris,

1957,

p.

18.

Compare

E. Le Roy, Introduction

a

[ etude du problhne religieux, Aubier, Paris,

1944, pp. 140-1:

'Firstly, God

cannot be represented by any concept inferior to

that

of personality. . . . Furthermore,

God

must be thought

of .

. . through

the positive concept

of

personality

but

along

an

ascending line which passf,S beyond

it to

the Infinite. Finally, since

God

the personalising influence in us, we must

find

in

Him the source of

our

own growth

in

personality .'




125

We seem first to assert that God is, for example, wise, and then

to deny that He is wise as we know wisdom. Are we then saying

that He is both wise and not-wise at once?

Do

the affirmation

and the negation cancel one another out? Are

we

as

Le

Roy

seems to have sometimes thought, playing , sacred parrotting in

a void? 104 Is

our

discourse about God only a sort

of

dialectical

game in which

we

try to dodge our critics by jumping from inflated

anthropomorphism to agnosticism? Professor Flew did not hesi

tate to use against

us

the nasty term 'religious double-think'.

He says that the negation which we append to every affirmation

about God deprives the affirmation of all its meaning-content.

Our negations inflict on the fine brash hypothesis' with which

we

started a death by inches, ' the death by a thousand qualifica

tions '.

In

this Flew sees the endemic evil of theological

utterance .105 His view that the way of negation is no different

from agnosticism

is not an

uncommon one.

J.

N. Findlay, winding

up the discussion on his paper,

an God s Existence be disproved?

raised the query whether there was any genuine difference between

(his) sort of atheism and the analogical theism of (his) oppo

nents

.106

One

of

the things one should like to ask Professor Flew

is

whether he can state affimlatively what being is, or knowing or

willing, or acting or doing or causing;

or

unity or truth, or good

ness or beauty? Can he describe these realities otherwise than by

naming a thousand things which are not they, but which exemplify

them in manners endlessly diverse, with texture of meaning end

lessly open? But do the ' thousand qualifications' make any less

real or living these realities which are the always already there

of

all experience and language, but which are not themselves contained

in any category

of

experience or circumscribed by any utterance?

These are what the scholastics called the transcendental properties

of being. t

is

these properties which St. Thomas constantly asserts

can be attributed to God positively and formally; because what

these attributes mean exists in God properly and substantially,

though in a way incommensurably transcending the mode

of

their

104 See Penido, Le

role de I analogie en theologie dogmatiqlle,

pp. 119, 137, 149.

105 See New Essays in Philosophical Theology, pp. 97, 106-8, 180.

106

New

Essays . . pp. 73-4. Compare the conclusion to the original article,

ibid.

p. 56, where Findlay commends a • religious atheism which fully meets his

requirements. •

For

since the religious spirit is one

of

reverence before things

greater

than

ourselves, we should be gravely impoverished and arrested if this spirit

ceased to be operative

in

our personal and social life.'

He

says, in his summing-up,

that

he tends towards atheism as the purest form of Protestantism op. cit., p. 74)

A very similar position

is

taken up by Ronald W. Hepburn in Christianity and

Paradox

(see especially pp. 22-3, 186-209); and has been argued by

J.

P. Corbett

in broadcast talks such as • How to be an Agnostic (see The Listener, 9 January

1958) and Man

and

his Maker (The Listener, 21 May 1959). t does

not

seem

essentially to differ from the view

of

Alisdair Macintyre in • The Logical Status

of

Religious Belief',

in

Metaphysical Beliefs.



126


realisation in us. Indeed, we have seen that St. Thomas would

give as reason for the mysteriousness

of

these realities, the fact

that they can be used as proper names for God; that what they

mean

is

verified more properly in God than in finite experience.

lO

?

St. Thomas constantly distinguishes these proper predicates

of

God from the improper or metaphorical predicates. In the former,

we

can distinguish the

thing signified

by the predicate from the

mode

in which

t is

realised; and can thus attribute the

thing meant

to God while carefully denying that this thing exists in Him in any

finite

mode. In the case

of

non-transcendental attributes,

we

cannot mentally separate the

thing meant

from the

finite mode

in

which

we

find it realised. The attribute in question

is

inexorably

linked to our talk about spatio-temporal objects and cannot

properly be ascribed to God.

lO

At best, such attributes could

be ascribed to God metaphorically; that is to say,

we

can correctly

assert that something corresponding to anger exists in God, because

God s love produces some effects which seem to resemble those

which human anger produces in its objects. But what anger

means

cannot be formally in God, because the term

anger

is inexorably

linked to human and animal psychology.lo9 As is well known, the

first sort

of

predicates are called by St. Thomas pure perfections,

the latter sort mixed perfections. The whole dispute as to whether

we can have any positive knowledge about God turns on whether

this distinction is justified.

We have tried to show that it is justified by pointing to the

peculiarly mysterious, ultimate, irreducible, indefinable nature of

the

pure

attributes, which seem to defy rational analysis and

yet are the basis

of

all reasoning. Their meaning is not limited

to spatio-temporal objects; it extends over the whole realm

of

thought and being.

t

is

not thinkable or possible for anything

to

be except it be knowable, true,

in some respect

good and lovable

and beautiful. That is why it is not thinkable or possible that

there should be a God, and He should not be infinitely Being and

supremely Knowing and Knowable and in all respects Good. The

pure perfections are those which cannot be denied

of

Perfect Being

without stultification

of

our whole thought about any being. But

the mixed perfections could not be affirmed

of

God without

attributing imperfection and finitude to Him and so stultifying

our whole thought about God. And this, too is to stultify our

thought about the world; for the whole point

of affirming God s

existence

is

that, without it, the world can neither be nor be

intelligible.

101 See J. Pieper, The Silence o St. Thomas Aquinas already cited.

108 S. Theol. 1.13.3; efr. S.c.G. 1

30 and

33-6.

109

S

Theql.

1.13.3;

De PQtentia 7.5.




127

This latter, the way of affirmation, the way of causality,

is

the

continuous context

of

all dialectic about God. No negation with

draws a particle

of

what is first positively affirmed. The negation

is

there only to safeguard the transcendence

of

the Divine Being

who is affirmed.

t

is

there

to

purge religious language of

anthropomorphism; to exclude any pretensions that God can be

defined by human concepts. Penido points out that St. Thomas

is much more hostile to anthropomorphism than to symbolism in

discourse about

God.11

O

It

is not that symbolism is not false;

but anthropomorphism is not only completely false, St. Thomas

says, but it is also absurd.1

11

No name can be predicated univocally

of

God and creatures.

l l2

Negation

is

not there to unsay what

is

said

of

God, but to ensure that it is said

of

God

The way of

negation is, to quote Pen ida again,

the

complete destruction

of

anthropomorphism

.11

3

Only then do we know God truly ,

writes St. Thomas, , when we believe Him to be beyond everything

that it is possible for the human mind to think about Him

.114

The Divine Substance is incommensurably elevated above all

empirical objects and indeed above all finite beings whatsoever .115

St. Thomas had no fear that negation would cancel out affirmation;

it

serves only to cancel out the negativity in

our

notions

of

being,

goodness, truth, reason, and to give these their full potentiality

of

transcendent affirmation. Father de Lubac has expressed this

admirably in his book, Sur les Chemins de Dieu.

A negative method is not necessarily negation. Theology,

multiplying its negations, the so-called The gia Negativa, is

nevertheless

not

a theology of negation. The movement of nega

tivity which characterises it

is

never a calling in question. . . . The

affirmation always remains; it always triumphs, in its highest form.

t triumphs by the very negation, which it uses

to

remedy its own

insufficiency

u

6

Negation

takes away nothing

but

its limita

tions from the affirmation which has gone before it. . The

sense of this necessary negation (is) in the end entirely positive .117

110 Le

role

de

I analogie

, p. 169; efr. pp. 74-6, 125.

m

De Veritate

2.1: • Some philosophers, not being able to conceive of a know

ledge transcending the limitations

of

human knowing, have represented

God s

knowledge as if it were some kind

of

faculty added to His essence, as it is in the

case of ourselves. But this

is

totally mistaken and absurd. . .' (Because it would

destroy God s simplicty and make

Him

a composite, and therefore finite and

dependent being). Cfr. S.

Theol.

1.13. 1-2;

De Potentia 7.

3·4.

112 S. Theol. 1.13. 5; cfr. S.c.G. I 30, 32, 33; De Potentia, 7.7.

113 Le

role

de

l analogie . . . ,

p.

177.

J14

S.c.G.

I

5.

Compare

ibid.

I 14: • The Divine Substance exceeds

in

its

immensity every notion which our intellect

can

grasp.' Cfr. ibid. I 29, 33; II 13;

49.

115 S.c.G.

TV

1.

1160p cit., pp. 145-6.

117

Ibid.

p. 157; cfr. pp. 143-4, 151, 157, 164-6, 176-8. The whole

of

his 5th

chapter, •

De

l'ineffabilite de Dieu is to be read. On the affirmative force

of

the

via negatira, compare Penido, Le role

de

I analogie , pp. 116-7. 125; Garrigou

Lagrange,

God, His Existence and His Nature,

E. transl., v. II, pp. 191-202; de



128


It

is significant that St. Thomas speaks of the ' way of remotion

more usually than

of

the ' way

of

negation'; thus signifying both

our aim

of

removing imperfections from our predicates when we

speak

of

God; and also the utter remoteness of God's Being from

our thoughts and from the world. Negation in theology is not,

as Flew imagined,

death

by a thousand qualifications', but

transcendence safeguarded through a thousand imperfect affirma

tions by means

of

a thousand purifying negations. The theistic

philosopher is not engaged in a game of dialectical catch-as-catch

can. He is groping for language adequate to express his encounter

with the Living God. He is not forced into shame-faced retractions

when he

is

challenged by a linguistic analyst.

us

He has himself

deliberately adopted the way of negations in order to purify his

affirmations and ensure that they be affirmations about God Who

Is,

but

Who

is not

to be enclosed in any concept, exhausted by

any description, properly known by any name. Negation

is

the

theist's way

of

cleansing his unclean lips when he would speak

of God.

4.6. Agnosticism in St. Thomas?

St. Thomas does not hesitate to declare, following the Pseudo

Denis, that negations are absolutely true

of

God and affirmations

only true with qualifications.n

9

Father Copleston is therefore

right in saying that in his account of our natural knowledge

of

the divine nature, there is a certain agnosticism .120 But this is

a term which

is

not to be loosely used.

It

has, in philosophy,

associations which place it at the opposite pole from the way

of negation in St. Thomas. Because of these associations, it is

perhaps better not to use the term in reference to his doctrine

at

all.

It

would be better to speak, with Father Journet,

of

our

dark knowledge'

of

God.

More-Pontgibaud,

Du fini a l infini,

Aubier, Paris, 1957 pp. 62-78; A. Gregoire,

ImlrUlnence

et transcendance,

Desclee de Brouwer, Paris, 1939, pp.

159

foU.; Maritain,

Les degres

de

savoir,

pp. 468-478, E. trans ., pp. 236-241; Journet.

The Dark

Knowledge

of God E. trans ., Sheed

and

Ward, London, 1948, pp. 27-49; E. J.

Chevalier, Essai d'une critique de Ia connaissance theologique'. in

L homme:

metaphysique et transcendance, £tre et

penser, Neuchatel, 1948, esp. pp. 98-103;

P.

Fontan,

Adhesion et depassement,

pp. 63-71; H. BouiUard,

Karl Barth,

t.IU,

Aubier, Paris, 1957, pp. 189-190, 198-204, 217; Dom Mark Pontifex and Dom

Illtyd Trethowan, The

Meaning

of

Existence,

Longmans, London, 1953, pp. 134-5.

See also Ian T. Ramsey,

Religious Language,

S.C.M. Press, London, pro 50-53.

118 Dr. E.

L

Mascall, commenting

on

Professor Flew's charge, remarks:

I t

is

difficult not to feel that Flew, for all his undoubted moral seriousness, is extraordi

narily unaware

of

the way in which the believer ('xperiences and deals with the

obstacles to his

belief (Words and Images,

Longmans, London, 1957, p. 28).

119 I Sent.

d.22 q.l a.2 ad 1; cfr. S.

Theol.

1.13.1, 1.13.12;

De Potentia 7.5;

De Veritate 8.1

ad 8;

In B. Dionysii De Divinis Nominibus

(Pera edit.) 83-4. Com

pare Penido,

e

.61e de

l analogie ,

pp. 125, 169, 177.

120 Aquinas,

p.

131.

The

agnostic

element in

our

knowledge

of God

is strongly

stressed by

C.

V. Heris, O.P.,

Le mystere

de

Dieu,

Edits. SHoe Paris, 1946; compare

E

Gilson, in

e

thQmisme. Vrin. Paris, 1947, pp. 150-160.



THE KNOW

ABLENESS

OF GOD

129

The question

of

the ' agnosticism'

of

st

Thomas has been fully

discussed by and because of the late Father Sertillanges, who, in

his great expositions of Thomism, strongly stressed the negative

element in

our

knowledge

of God

according

to

st

Thomas.

It

would be ridiculous to accuse Fr. Sertillanges

of

agnosticism. He

himself says the differences between Thomists

on

this matter are

purely verbal.

l l

He

had

certainly no intention but to stress the

utter tramcendence and

ineffability of God. But he

had

a o v ~

for paradox-Penido rather unkindly suggests that he reads some

times like Maimonides ll style flamboyant 122-and is sometimes

led by it into exaggerations and inaccurate expressions. His

central theme is

that

the whole of st Thomas' philosophy

about

God

is

contained in the sentence from the Summa Contra Gentiles:

'We

cannot understand of

God

what He is but only what He

is not and what relation created things have to Him ' .123 He

comments on this:

,

We

do not know in any manner or in any respect or in any

degree what God

is. We

know

that

He

is.

But in the proposition,

God

is ,

the word is does not at

all

signify real being, or

being considered after the manner of an attribute; it is only the

logical link of a true proposition. We use it here in a sense no

different from that in which

we

might

use

it of a non-existing thing,

as

when

we

say

for example, blindness is . The proposition,

God

is

,

is

a true proposition, not as qualifying God

in

the

way

of His being, but as requiring God because of the

exigencies

of

created

being.

He Who Is, the best of His names,

is

therefore not

properly

His

name;

t is

only the name of creatures .124

There is surely exaggeration here. Indeed, it seems that, if the

words are understood strictly, there

is

error here. To take the

second part

of

the assertion first, it seems to forget the utterly

privileged, unique, all-pervasive, transcendental role possessed,

among

the '

names

of creatures',

by the

word'

being

'. To

affirm

it, can be to transcend finite being entirely; to deny it is to pose

non-being simply. To say

'God

is ' can be to name God by

something He really is;

to

say' God is not ' is

to

say ' nothing

at all

is

God'; or 'there

is

nothing to which the name

God

refers' ; or, quite simply,

'There is

no

God'.

John Wilson has

well written:

'God is

real

in

the same

sense,

though not

in

the same

way,

that physical objects are real. He must be rcal in the same sense;

for the word real has, in fact, only one sense-either something

121

Dieu (Saint Thomas d'Aquin, Somme theologique,

lA

qq. 12-17, trad. fran\,aise,

DescJee, Pari 1926) t.II,

p.379.

122 Gp

cit.,

p. 171

123 Gp cit.,

I

30.

124 Dieu

II. pp. 383-4. Compare his

a Phi osophie de Saint Thomas d'Aquin,

t.l, pp. 150-1, 164-174, 176-7, 188-9. In e Christianisme et es philosophies, t.I,

Aubier, Paris, 1941, p. 270, he characterises St, Thomas' teaching as

an '

agnosticism

of definition',



130


is

real and

exists,

or

t is

unreal and

does

not

exist. Real

and

exists are

definitely

not ambiguous

words.

.

. . I f

God

is

real

and

exists,

the unambiguous

logic

and language of statements about

existence and the verification needed for those statements, must

apply to God as

much

as to anything else,

for these

are part and

parcel of what

we mean

by words

like

exist and

real ;

but

this

is

not to

deny

that

much

of

His

nature

may

e mysterious and

uncomprehended by

men

'.126

As Penido has argued, in a vigorous criticism of Sertillanges,

the copulative use of the verb to be as

' the

logical link of a true

proposition' presupposes, in the case of an existential proposition,

the real existence of the subject as an existence somehow appre

hended and asserted. St. Thomas said explicitly:

'Truth

and

falsity in a proposition, indicated by the use of the word

is

as a verbal link, depends upon the real existence or otherwise in

objective fact of the thing in question

' . l26

Fr. Sertillanges only

wished to stress that we do not use the word being of God ' in

the human sense of the term '. But the whole casual-affirmation

negative dialectic of the affirmation ' God is ' puts it beyond ques

tion that we are always and only asserting, ' God is transcendently .

Fr. Sertillanges exaggerates when he says that we do not know

in any manner, respect or degree what God

is.

Maritain points

out the fatal ambiguity of ' what in this formula; he warns that

the statement,

as

it stands, ' is bound to lead to grave misunder

standings

.1

7

He shows conclusively that the phrase

quid sit Deus,

which

is

crucial in this context, has a quite special and technical

meaning for St. Thomas.

I t

means being able to give a demonstratio

propter quid of His existence, by deducing it from the definition

of His nature; it means therefore being able to define the essence

of God; in other words, it means knowing God as God knows

125

Language and Christian Belief,

Macmillan, London,

1958,

p.

23.

The words

'much

of' , in the last phrase, are unhappy; but Wilson's point

is

clear and

is

surely right.

126 In Aristotelis

XII

Metaphysicorum, I.V lect. 9 (Cathala-Spiazzi edit, Marietti,

Rome,

1950,896).

See Penido, op. cit., p.

181.

For Penido's critique of Sertillanges'

over-' agnostic' interpretation of St. Thomas, see

op. cit.,

pp.

170-183.

1 7 Les degres du savoir, pp. 842-3. The whole of his Annexe III, ' Ce que Dieu

est', is devoted to a criticism of Sertillanges' doctrine on our knowledge of God:

see pp.

827-843;

E. transI., pp.

422-9;

cfr. pp.

468·478,

E. transl., pp.

236-241.

Father Victor White, O.P.,

is

strongly influenced by Sertillanges in his treatment

of our knowledge of God in God the Unknown, Harvill Press, London, 1956, ~ p i -

ally pp. 16-61. He claims the support of the Abbe Penido (whom, by a slip, he

calls Pere Penido, O.P.), but does not refer to Penido's criticism of the very views

of Father Sertillanges which he is propounding. When we read (p. 51): I t is a

sobering thought that, when we talk about God, we do not know what we are

1alking about '; we cannot

but

repeat Maritain's protest against the ambiguity of

the words. Maritain writes: 'Ambiguity is not an instrument of philosophy, and

it is too high a price to pay for the reconciliation of Thomism with some modem

systems of thought, to obtain it from an equivocal of language' op. cit., p. 843).




131

Himself.128

This

is

quite obviously and eternally impossible for

any intellect except God Himself. Neither man nor angel can

ever know

quid sit Deus

in the sense of being able to

give

a proper,

quidditative definition

of

God.

t

is perhaps, after all, only this that Fr. Sertillanges meant to

say. Yet it is

regrettable that his expressions seem at times to

assimilate to one another things that are entirely different, the

via negative

of the Christian metaphysician and theologian, and

the negations of the modern agnostic. When St. Thomas says

, God is incomprehensible';

129

and the positivist says, 'God is

meaningless' ; they are not saying a similar thing in different

words but a totally different thing in similar words. Sertillanges

is mistaken when he says that negation is primary in our language

about God.

13

t

is

the way of affirmation-by-causality which

comes first and last in our language about God. Negation

is

made meaningful by the primary affirmation.l3l Negation affirms

that

God is at least

all that

we

mean by our concepts

of

positive

perfection; but that He

is

not

only

perfect as

we

understand

perfection, but infinitely more.

132

Negation in theological discourse

has

an

affirmative force and purpose: it distinguishes God from

all that

is

not He and thereby

gives us

the assurance that our

knowledge is properly about

God.133

The via negative is not a

Father White is anxious

to

show how St. Thomas does justice to the element of

truth in agnosticism; but the statement that St.

Thomas'

meets the agnostic more

than

half-way' is unfortunate.

t

does not allow for the difference in kind between

the agnosticism of doubt and the agnosticism of awe and worship; between, the

agnosticism of uncertainty, darkness and ignorance and what Penido (op. cit., p.

177

calls agnosticism 'by excess of

light'.

St. Thomas decisively rejected philo

sophical agnosticism as is clear from his life-long criticism

of

Maimonides, which

seems to have become more

and

not less severe towards the end of his life. See

Penido, op. cit., pp. 164-7, 171-4; Garrigou-Lagrange, God, His Existence and His

Nature,

II pp. 191-9, 245-6; Maritain,

Les degres du savoir,

pp. 450-7; E. trans .,

pp. 227-231, M. Chossat, art.

'Agnosticisme',

in

Dictionnaire apologt tique

de l

foi catholique,

esp. co . 28-68.

28

Les degres

du

sa voir,

pp. 827-836; E. trans ., pp. 423-7.

129

S. Theol.

1-2. 102. 4

and 6;

cfr. 1-2, 66.5; 1.3.1

and 1.

130 a philosophie de Saint Thomas d'Aquin, I, pp. 167, 188-9.

131

See St. Thomas, S.

Theol.

1.4.2; 1.12.12; 1.13.1; 1.13.5; 1.13.10; 1.13.12;

S.c.G.

I 14, 29, 33; III 39;

III

49;

I Sent.

d. 22 q. 1 a.2;

De Potentia

7.5c.

Cfr.

In B. Dionysii De Divinis Nominibus

(pera edit.), 96: 'Theologians. . .

reflecting on the fact that God is separated from all things and yet is the cause

of all, sometimes call

Him

Unnameable, and at other times attribute

to Him

the

names

of

all things'.

132 John Wilson, in Language and Christian Belief (p. 14 writes: 'Instead of

the Vedantist's Not this,

not

this , Christians must be able

to

say, A t least

this,

and

at

least

this .

They must be able

to

assert definitely

about

God,

whilst

admitting that there is far more to

be

known about Him than we

can.

. . ever

hope to know'.

133 St. Thomas, S.c.G. I 14, III 49, S. Theol. 1.13.1; 1.13.5; 1.13.8.

Father

Garrigou-Lagrange writes: '(The ways of negation and eminence) withdraw us

from the "reated

mode of

the absolute perfections

and

remind us

that

the intimate

life

of

God is infinitely superior to the manifold ideas we can form of it, ideas

which would become idols if we took them for adequate representations of the

Deity' (God, His Existence and Nature, II, pp. 400-1). Few of the Fathers have

so strongly asserted the Incomprehensibility of God as St. John Chrysostom in his




way of ignorance but a way of knowing. st. Thomas writes:

, Having arrived at the limit of our knowledge, we know God as

Unknown; and our mind enters into the knowledge of God

perfectly when it knows that the divine Essence is above all that

our mind can grasp in this life'.134

'He

knows God the most

perfectly who holds this to be true

of

Him, that everything that

can be thought or said about Him is less than what God is .135

I t

is noteworthy that the silence

of

unknowing in St. Thomas falls

after, not before, the exercise of proving, naming and knowing

God. The silence marks the point at which the knower, because

of what he knows, goes down upon his knees.136

St. Thomas

dee:>

consistently say that we

do

know something

positively about what God is; that when we attribute 'pure

perfections' to God

we

do grasp something positively and properly

about the Substance of God.137 Indeed he writes:

I t

is not

possible to know

whether

any thing exists unless we somehow

know

what

that thing is, at least with

an

imperfect knowledge

In the same way, we could not know

that

God is unless we had

some sort

of knowledge,

at

least a confused knowledge, of what

He is ' .138 St. Thomas insists that the names of the ' pure' or

transcendental perfections

'do

signify the Divine Substance and

are predicated of God substantially; but they fall short of repre

senting Him as He is in Himself' 139 All these names signify the

Divine Substance, though they do so imperfectly.14o 'When we

predicate the term wise of a man, the term somehow defines

and limits the content of what we are. meaning by wisdom; but

homilies on this theme against the Anomaeans; but the concern of the saint was

to defend the transcendence of God against rationalistic claims to an adequate and

complete knowledge of Him. He is, however, careful to distinguish his position

from agnosticism: what he is denying is complete knowledge of the Divine Essence

as is in itself. See the • Sources Chn:tiennes' edition, with translation, and the

introduction by

F.

Cavallera and J. Danielou (esp. pp. 30-3) (Cerf, Paris, 1951).

134 In Boethii De Trinitate 1.2.ad 1; cfr. S. Theol. 1.12.13.ad 1. See Journet.

The Dark Knowledge

of

God, pp. 29-30; Maritain, Les degres du sa voir, pp. 468-

474; E. trans . pp. 236-9.

136

In Librum De Causis,

prop. VI leet. 6 (Pera edit. Marietti, Rome, 1955, 160);

cfr. De Potentia, 7.5.ad

14.

Compare the Vatican Council Constitutio Dogmatica

de Fide Catholica, cap. I, De Deo rerum omnium creatore: • Deus

•

praedicandus

est . . . super omnia quae praeter ipsum sunt et concipi possunt, ineffabiliter

excelsus' (Denzinger, 1782).

136

Compare the late Monsignor Knox's desire for an argument for the existence

of God which'

shaH

convince (the reader) purely as argument; but when, it does

so, shall find him on his knees' (Proving God, p. 30).

13.

See Penido,

e

role de l analogie

pp. 180-3; Maritain

Les degres

du

sa voir, pp. 473-8; E. trans ., pp. 239-241.

138 In Boethii De Trinitate, 6.3; cfr. De Potentia 7.5; S.c.G. I 14, IV 1; S. Theol.

1.13.2 and 5. In B. Dionysii De Divinis Nominibus (Pera edit.),

77,

83 H. Bouillard

writes: • (St. Thomap' negative theology) presupposes the natural knowledge

of

God.

• . St. Augustine, who liked to speak

de summo il o Deo, qui scitur melius

nesciendo, also put this question: Qui nondum Deum nosti unde nostl nihil te nosse

Deo simile? (Karl Barth, t.lIl, p. 190; references in loc.).

139 S. Theol. 1.13.2; cfr. 1.13.4-6 and 8.

140 S. Theol. 1.13.3. and 4; De Potentia 7.5.




133

when it

is

predicated of God, this

is

not

SO;

because our term

leaves the Divine Wisdom completely uncomprehended and un

limited by our understanding of the term ' .141

t

is

not that God

is

other than what

we

mean by Being, Good,

Wise; but He is infinitely more and otherwise Being and Good

and Wise than

we

can know or say.

Rudolf Otto continually opposes reasoning about God to the

numinous sense which alone he holds to be the properly religious

attitude before God.

142

His book was a protest against rationalistic

theology and its destruction of mystery. But his protest overreaches

itself and becomes, at times, very like an irrationalistic rejection

of all theology. Seeking to show that God is utterly Other than

reason, Otto sometimes depicts God

as

though He were irrational,

arbitrary, unmoral, beyond good and evil. The way to safeguard

Divine Transcendence is not by repudiating philosophical theology

but by keeping it filled with the sense of mystery.1

4

The great

and unequalled strength of St. Thomas Aquinas' natural theology

is that it

is

pervaded through and through with the Mysterium

Tremendum and the Mysterium Fascinans. To adapt words of

Maritain's, his very concepts fall on their knees and adore.

144

4.7. Metaphysics and Mysticism

In

this sense, mysticism

is

the prolongation, in another dimen

sion,

of

St. Thomas' metaphysics. Mysticism

is

not a new way

of

knowing about God, different from theology and, as knowing,

superior to it. Mysticism

is

not properly a way of knowing at all

but of

loving union with God who

is

known.

It

makes us judge

and appreciate better what we know by faith but does not put us

in possession of any object of knowledge that the faith does not

attain

' .145 t

is, speaking naturally, a turning

of

theological

notions

into religious

real assents;

a prayerful, lived awareness

of

the Ineffable Mystery contained in the notions of natural reason

and of theology and dogma and creed.

146

t is faith energised

141 S. Theol. 1.13.5.

142

The Idea of the Holy, especially pp. 1-3, 60-1, 97-100. Compare the same

author's Religious Essays, E. trans . Oxford, 1931, especially the essay, • The Wholly

Other',

pp. 78-94.

143 Compare J. Danielou, Culture et Mystere. Edits. Universitaires, Paris, 1948.

44 Les degres

du s

voir, p. 445; E. trans . p. 225. Compare op. cit., p. 457 (E.

trans ' p. 230): • In saying

..

Subsistent Being

Itself , or ..

In Him there is no

distinction

of

essence and

existence ,

the metaphysician is designating, without

seeing it, the Sacred Abyss which makes the angels tremble with love and awe.'

145 Maritain, Les degres du sa voir, p. 524; E. trans . p. 264; cfr. A. Leonard,

in

ystery

and Mysticism, E. trans ., Blackfriars, London, 1955, pp. 107 foil.; R.

Verneaux, article

on

• L'experience mystique

et

la philosophie', in Recherches de

Philoosphie, III-IV,

•

De la connaissance de Dieu " esp. pp. 361-4.

146 Compare St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, b . II, c.21.4. Com

plete Works, Vo ' I, trans ' by E. Allison Peers, Burns and Oates, London (1935),

1953, p. 155; compare

Spiritual Canticle,

Stanza 4

Complete Works,

vo . II, pp.

45-6,

207-8}.




by love; it is doing the

truth

in love . But its knowledge

content is the same

as

that

of

catechism and creed,

of

theology

and metaphysics.

The arid arguments

of

scholastic metaphysicians are frequently

contrasted with the personal encounter of saints with the Living

God.

147

This is to forget that the greatest of the scholastic meta

physicians were themselves saints who studied metaphysics precisely

in order to give expression to their sense of the Living God, and

who treated

of

God s attributes only in order to praise and adore

Him.us t is significant that when the saints and mystics have

exhausted the resources of poetry, metaphor and symbolism in

their language about God, they return to the terms

of

scholastic

metaphysics. Christian mysticism has no more familiar words for

God and for the creature s status before God than Being and

Nothingness, which are the key words of metaphysics from the

Vedanta to Plato and from Parmenides to Sartre. The mystics, who

lived with God as one lives with a Friend, who seemed to touch

and taste and feel God as one does an object of direct experience,

could not better or otherwise name Him than as St. Thomas in

his metaphysics named Him, as He Who Is. These words, to the

mystics, were not an abstract formula but an invocation to the

Father

of

spirits; and a response

of

the whole being to His

creative and sustaining and inviting Love.

t

is the saints who

teach us the meaning

of

scholastic metaphysical terminology.

The fourteenth-century English mystic who wrote The Cloud o

Unknowing, begins another treatise, The Epistle

o

Privy Counsel,

by exhorting the reader:

• Look that nothing remain in thy working mind but a naked

intent stretching unto God, not clothed in any special thought of

God

but only that

He

is

as He is.

Let Him

be so

I pray thee,

and

make

Him on

no

otherwise.

Seek

no further in Him

by

subtlety of wit; let that belief

be

thy ground. This naked intent,

freely fastened and grounded in very belief shall be nought else to

thy thought and to thy feeling but a naked thought and a blind

feeling

of thine own

being

as if thou saidst thus to God within

thy meaning: .. That that I am, Lord, I

offer

unto Thee, without

any looking to any quality of Thy being but only that Thou art

as Thou art, without any more. . For

He

is thy being and in

147 Classically,

of

course, by Pascal, particularly

in

his Memorial

of

23 November,

1654: •

FEU.

Dieu d Abraham, Dieu

d

Isaac, Dieu de Jacob.

Non

des philosophes

et

des savants . . .

148

How

much more true of them what Descartes confessed of himself,

that

he

• never treated

of

the Infinite except in order to submit himself

to

it

. The

great

Scholastics were never guilty

of

the faults that Monsignor Knox deplored

in

some

apologetics, of isolating their intellectual effort from their moral

and

spiritual witness,

or of

• handing

out

the doctrine

of God s

existence as if i t were

an

investigation

into the square

root of

minus

one

Proving God p. 15). They realised all the time

that

• the recognition

of our

own inadequacy as creatures is

at

once the guarantee

of

God s

existence and the basis of all worship ibid.,

p.

29).




135

Him thou art what thou

art,

not only by cause and by being but

also He is in thee both thy cause and thy being. .

. .

For though

it be so that all things be in Him by cause and by being, and He

be in all things their cause and their being, yet in Himself only He

is

His own cause and His own being

' .149

In

the same English fourteenth-century,

Mother

Julian

of

Norwich wrote of

'How God is to us everything that is good, tenderly wrapping

us:

n

this same time, Our Lord showed me a ghostly sight of His

homely loving. I saw that He is to us everything that is good and

comfortable for us. He

is

our clothing that for love wrappeth us,

claspeth us and all becloseth us for tender love, that He may never

leave us; being to us all thing that is good. Also in this He showed

me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm

of

my

hand. I looked thereupon with the

eye

of my understanding, and

thought: What may this be? And it was generally answered

thus: I t is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last, for

methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for littleness.

And I was answered in my understanding: I t lasteth and ever

shall, for that God loveth it. And so all thing hath the being

by

the love of God. In this little thing, I saw three properties. The

first

is

that God made it: the second

is

that God loveth it: the

third that God keepeth it. But what

is to me soothly the Maker,

the Keeper, the

Lover-I

cannot tell; for till I am substantially

oned to Him, I may never have full rest nor very bliss. .

I t

needeth us to have knowing of the littleness of creatures and to

naughten all thing that is made, for to love and to have God that

is unmade. . . . God willeth to be known. and i t liketh Him that

we rest in Him; for all that is beneath Him sufficeth not us . . . '.150

A great contemporary of

Mother

Julian, St. Catherine of Siena,

felt Our Lord say to her: I am He who is; thou art she who is

not.' Mother Mary of the Incarnation, the French Ursuline of

the

seventeenth century,

wrote:

, My soul has always known that she was the nothing to which

the All was pleased to show mercy . . . and I have in this always

seen and known the nothing of the creature '.151 'Thus it is not

hard for me to understand that the love which He has for us inspires

the love which we bear Him; since His love is the cause of ours

and since we can love Him only because He loves us '.152

149 The Cloud o Unknowing,

ed. Justin McCann, O.S.B., Burns and Oates, London

(1924) 1952, pp. 103-4. For the scholastic sources of this writer's thought, see

Conrad Pepler, O.P. The English ReligiOUS Heritage, Blackfriars, London, 1958

pp. 222-3; cfr. pp. 288-301

on

the difference between this author's •

Unknowing'

and

agnosticism.

150

Revelatic ns

o Divine Love, ed. Dom Roger Hudleston, O.S.B., Burns and

Oates, London (1927) 1952, pp. 8-9. See also Conrad Pepler, op. cit., pp. 305 foil.:

on p. 306, he remarks: • I t is as though she had been a student of St. Thomas's

Prima Pars

for the greater

part of

her life.'

,.,

Marie de [ Incarnation, Ursuline. Oeuvres prefacees par Paul Renaudin. (Les

maitres de la spiritualite chretienne. Textes et Etudes.) Aubier, Paris, 1942, p. 104.

There is a useful study of Mere Marie in M. T-L. Penido's a Conscience religieuse,

Tequi, Paris, 1935,

pp.

177-244.

1520p. cit.,

p. 173.



136

PIDLOSOPIDCAL STUDIES

A young Carmelite nun, Sister Elizabeth of the Trinity, who

died in 1906, at

the age

of

twenty-six, wrote: 'The shadows pass:

He

who is alone remains'. Another Carmelite, St. Therese

of

Lisieux, who died in

1897

at the age

of

twenty-four, knowing

scarcely the name of metaphysics, can, in a page which rivals, as

it resembles, the best pages of Aquinas, show how there is no

incompatibility between God s Infinite Justice and His Infinite

Love, because God s Justice will not expect more than the creature

can give, and the creature exists only by God s eternal love.

I53

It is well known that St. Thomas, when he had reached question

ninety of the

Summa Theologica,

laid down his pen and left his

great work unfinished, saying, in answer to Brother Reginald s

repeated entreaties that he resume and finish it:

I

can write no

more. I have seen what shows me that all I have written was

but straw'. let us not misunderstand this concluding silence in

his life. Someone has remarked that he did not, like Faust, burn

his books. He knew well, like Origen, that it is dangerous to

speak

of

God.

I54

But he knew that

it

is death not

to

speak

of

Him, to know whom

is

eternal life. He knew above all that all

speaking

about

God

is

useless chatter unless

it

leads us into silent

speaking

to

God. That is the meaning

of

the silence

of

St. Thomas

Aquinas.

It

is his last and greatest tribute

to

the Mystery

of

which

Metaphysics speaks.

I55

St. Thomas wrote:

, The last word of human knowledge about God is that i t should

recognise

that

it

does not

know Him

because it recognises that

what God

is

transcends

all

that we can

know

about Him ' .156

'We

know God truly only when we believe Him to be

more

(wonderful)

than anything which it is possible for man to think about Him '.157

'God is

greater than

all

we can say greater than

all

that we can

know; and not merely

does

He transcend our language and our

knowledge but He

is

beyond the comprehension of every mind

whatsoever, even angelic minds, and beyond the being of every

substance .158

Yet the inadequate, defective, poverty-stricken knowledge which

we do have, and language which

we

do speak, about God, is more

desirable and more precious and more satisfying than the most

exact knowledge and precise language about what

is

less than

God.

59

It

is

only a glimmer of light.

l6O

But it

is

enough to show

153

Manuscrits autobiographiques,

Carmel de Lisieux, 1957, p. 209.

15 Cited by De Lubac, Sur les chemins e Dleu, p. 165.

155

Compare

De Lubac,

op. cit., pp.

143-4.

IS.

De Potentia,

7.5 ad 14.

157 S.c.G. I 5.

'sIn

B. Dionysii De Divinis Nominibus (Pera ectit.), 77; cfr. 83.

159 See St. Thomas,

S.c.G.

1.5: Even the most imperfect knowledge about the

highest realities confers the greatest satisfaction on the

mind'.

160

St. Thomas, In IV Sent. d.49, q.2, a.7 and 7: quantulacumque cognitio. See

Penido,

La role de / analogie

, p. 191.



THE KNOWABLENESS

OF

GOD

137

us that God

is

there, and that He alone suffices. That

is

why this

miserable knowledge

is

so enriching.16l St. Therese of Lisieux

said: If the desire of love can give such bliss, what will it be to

possess Love in Itself and to enjoy it for ever

.162

We

could

similarly say:

f

the poor, ignorant knowledge of God, in a glass

darkly, which is all

we

can have on earth, can so exalt and over-

whelm us, what will it be to know as

we

are known, to know how

we

have been loved?

Queen s University, Belfast C. B DALY

161 St. Thomas, S.c.G., III.25. See Penido, lac. cit. Le Senne said: • For me

the greatest

proof of God

is

the joy I feel

at

the thought that

He

exists.

(La

decouverte e Dieu, p. 18 . Somewhat similarly, Claudel wrote: • Joy and

truth

are the same thing;

and

wherever there is most joy, there is most

truth

(See Pages

de prose, ed. A. Blanchet, Gallimard, Paris, 1944, p. 325).

162

Manuscrlts Autobiographiques, p. 233.

C.B. Daly - The Knowableness of God

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