The God Of Faith And Reason
May 13, 2009The following is a one page distillation of critical Catholic theology: compact, dense, obscure to those not accustomed to its expression and its language. If you are an atheist looking to explore the finest in Christian thought, I would urge you to print it out and spend a month glancing at it from time to time.
Anselm And The Christian Understanding Of God
“No perfection would be lost if God had not created the world. The world and God must be so understood that nothing but God could be all that there is, and there would be no diminution of greatness or goodness or perfection. God is not better or greater because of creation, nor is “there” more goodness or greatness because God did create. (In Chapter 20 of the Proslogion, “You are in no way less, even if they should return to nothing”). This does not imply that God does not care about his creation, or that what is created is not worth anything. On the contrary, God’s benevolence is so great that even though he does not need creation in any sense at all – he does not need it to be himself, nor does he need it for “there” to be greater excellence; nullo alio indigens (the highest good, requiring nothing else)– still he has created and, beyond that, has entered into his creation in the person of Jesus….
This understanding of God, as capable of being without the world, as capable of being all that there is, with no lessening of goodness or greatness, is a Christian understanding. It is not the appreciation that pagans have of the divine, and it is not that which naturally comes to mind when people think about the sacred and the ultimate….Anselm’s argument could not be detached from the Christian setting in which it occurs, because the understanding of God that it implies has risen and is sustained in the Christian faith. And yet, nevertheless, there is something simply “reasonable” about Anselm’s argument and about this understanding of God. This is why Anselm is so strategic a figure in the differentiation of reason and faith.”
The Christian Distinction Between The World And God
“Christian theology is differentiated from pagan religious and philosophical reflection primarily by the introduction of a new distinction, the distinction between the world understood as possibly not having existed and God understood as possibly being all that there is, with no diminution of goodness or greatness.
It is not the case that God and the world are each separately understood in this new way, and only subsequently related to each other; they are determined in the distinction not each apart from the other. The Christian distinction between the world and God may receive its precise verbal formulation in a theoretical context, since it is described especially by theologians and philosophers, but the distinction does not emerge for the first time in this theoretical setting. It receives its formulation in reflective thought because it has already been achieved in the life that goes on before reflective thinking occurs.
The distinction is lived in Christian life, and most originally it was lived and expressed in the life of Jesus, after having been anticipated, and hence to some extent possessed, in the Old Testament history which Jesus completed. The Christian distinction is there for us now, as something for us to live and as an issue for reflection, because it was brought forward in the life and teaching of Christ, and because that life and teaching continue to be available in the life and teaching of the Church. It is a massive theological and philosophical fact that this understanding arose and is maintained by Christian belief.”
The Strangeness Of The Christian Distinction
“When we turn away from the world or from the whole and turn toward God, towards the other term of the distinction that comes to light in Christian belief, we begin to appreciate the strangeness of the distinction itself.
In the distinctions that occur normally within the setting of the world, each term distinguished is what it is precisely by not being that which it is distinguishable from. Its being is established partially by its otherness, and therefore its being depends on its distinction from others.
But in the Christian distinction God is understood as “being” God entirely apart from any relation of otherness to the world or to the whole. God could and would be God even if there were no world. Thus the Christian distinction is appreciated as a distinction that did not have to be, even though it in fact is.
The most fundamental thing we come to in Christianity, the distinction between the world and God, is appreciated as not being the most fundamental thing after all, because one of the terms of the distinction, God, is more fundamental than the distinction itself.
In Christian faith God is understood not only to have created the world, but to have permitted the distinction between himself and the world to occur. No distinction made within the horizon of the world is like this, and therefore the act of creation cannot be understood in terms of any action or any relationship that exists in the world. The special sense of sameness in God “before” and “after” the creation, and the special sense of otherness between God and the world, impose qualifications on whatever we are to say about God and the world, about creation out of nothing, about God’s way of being present and interior to things and yet beyond them.
Furthermore, if “being” is the term that philosophers use to name that which is articulated in the sameness and otherness that reason can register, if “being” is used of the world as last horizon, it is appropriate that another term, like “esse,” be introduced for use in the “whole” made up of God and the world, as a name for what is articulated in the identities and differences occurring in this new context.”
The God Who Became Incarnate
“The Council of Chalcedon, and he councils and controversies that led up to it, were concerned with the mystery of Christ, but they also tell us about the God who became incarnate in Christ. They tell us first that God does not destroy the natural necessities of things he becomes involved with, even in the intimate union of the incarnation.
What is according to nature, and what reason can disclose in nature, retains its integrity before the Christian God. And second, they tell us that we must think of God as the one who can let natural necessity be maintained and let reason be left intact; that is God is not himself a competing part of nature of a part of the world.
If the incarnation could not take place without a truncation of human nature, it would mean that God was one of the natures of the world that somehow was defined by not being the other natures; it would mean that his presence in one of these other natures, human nature, would involve a conflict and a need to exclude some part of what he is united with.
Either God would only seem to have become man, or he would have become united to something less than man and would have become a new kind of being in the world. These are all ways in which the pagans thought the gods could take on human form or bring about beings that were higher than the race of men but lower than the gods.
The reason the pagans could not conceive of anything like the incarnation is that their gods are part of the world, and the union of any two natures in the world is bound to be, in some way, unnatural, because of the otherness that lets one thing be itself only by not being the other.
But the Christian God is not part of the world and is not a “kind” of being at all. Therefore the incarnation is not meaningless or impossible or destructive. To consider the early Christological controversies and their attendant councils as merely historical episodes, or to suppose that they are just an importation of Hellenistic thought-patterns into Christianity, is to fail to take seriously the need to distinguish Christian faith and its theology from simply natural religion and philosophy.”
Mysteries Not Incoherences
“The Christian distinction between God and the world serves to permit the other Christian mysteries to be thought as mysteries and not as incoherences. The Christian understanding of God is necessary to open the space within which the other Christian mysteries can be believed. After Ephesus and Chalcedon we can say that Jesus is one person or one agent and that there are two natures in him, but these statements do not explain the mystery of Christ. In fact, we are familiar only with agents who act according to their own single nature, and if we were to try to think of two complete mundane natures as forming one being, we would find it self-contradicting and unthinkable.
Only if the divine is not one of the natures in the world can the incarnation, and the salvation it achieved, occur; only then can the church assert the special kind of identity and difference that it maintains took place in the being and the life of Jesus. Unless the Christian sense of the divine is differentiated from anything and everything in the being of the world, unless the Christian God is differentiated from what philosophers have called the whole, all the Christian mysteries cease to be mysteries. Either they become impossibilities, or they become accommodated to natural necessities, or they are made to compete with what is natural and to obfuscate the way things have to be. The Christian distinction between God and the world allows the formulations of the other mysteries to say something and prevents them from shattering as statements.”
All quotations from “The God Of Faith And Reason” by Robert Sokolowski
It always amazes me when I read or reread this stuff because I think of the two thousand years of thought that generated these lines and that in Aquinas’ time only a handful of scholastic scholars understood what I can summarize in this post. It is awesome, just as a simple achievement of a human thought, and it makes the scientific materialism of our secular age look like some lego play toy.
Problem is no one spends any time with this anymore and the iphone is far more sexier and “awesome” is rendered with a Californian twang, as in “Surf’s up. I mean, what else is there, dude?
