Western Philosophical Concepts of God

Ancient and Early Medieval

Plato viewed as the highest of all things the good that was above all being and all knowledge, identified it with the divine nous, and attempted to raise the human spirit into the realm of ideas, into a likeness with the Godhead; which taught men to rise to the highest by a process of abstraction disregarding particulars and grasping at universals, and conceived the good of which it spoke not in a strictly ethical sense, but as, after all, the most utterly abstract and indefinable, entirely eluding all attempts at positive description. Neoplatonism went the furthest in this conception of the divine transcendence; God, the absolute One, was, according to Plotinus, elevated not only above all being, but also above all reason and rational activity. He did not, however, attempt to attain to this abstract highest good by reasoning or logical abstraction, but by an immediate contact between God and the soul in a state of ecstasy.

This tendency was shared by a school of thought within Judaism itself, whose influence upon Christian theology was considerable. The more Jewish speculation, as was the case especially at Alexandria, rose above an anthropomorphic idea of God to a spiritual conception, the more abstract the latter became. In this connection Platonism was the principal one of the Greek philosophical systems toward w c this Jewish theology maintained a receptive attitude. According to Philo, God is to on, " that which is " par excellence, and this being is rather the most universal of all than the supreme good with which Plato identified the divine; all that can be said is that God is, without defining the nature of his being. Between God and the world a middle place is attributed by Philo to the Logos (in the sense of ratio, not at all in the Johannine sense), as the principle of diversity and the summary of the ideas and powers operating the world.

When the Gnostics attempted to construct a great system of higher knowledge from a Christian standpoint, through assimilating various Greek and Oriental elements, and worked the facts of the Christian revelation into their fantastic speculation on general metaphysical and cosmic problems, this abstract Godhead became an obscure background for their system; according to the Valentinian doctrine, it was the primal beginning of all things, with eternal silence (sige) for a companion.

In the development of the Church's doctrine with Justin and the succeeding apologists, and still more with the Alexandrian school, the transcendental nature of God was emphasized, while the Scriptures and the 'religious conscience of Christendom still permitted the contemplation of him as a personal and loving Spirit. Theology did not at first proceed to a systematic and logical explanation of the idea of God with reference to these different aspects. Where philosophical and strictly scientific thought was active, as with the Alexandrians, the element of negation and abstraction got the upper hand. God is, especially with Origen, the simple Being with attributes, exalted above nous and ousia, and at the same time the Father, eternally begetting the Logos and touching the world through the Logos. In opposition to this developed a Judaistic and popular conception of God which leaned to the, anthropomorphic, and also a view like Tertuilian's' which, under the influence of Stoic philosophy, felt obliged to connect with all realities, and thus also with God, the idea of a tangible substance. In this direction Dionysius the Areopagite finally proceeded to a really Neoplatonist theology, with an inexpressible God who is above all categories, both positive and negative, and thus is neither Being nor Not-being; who permits that which is to emanate from himself in a descending scale coming down to things perceived by the senses, but is unable to reveal his eternal truth in this emanation. With this doctrine is conconnected, after the Neoplatonist model, an inner union with God, an ecstatic elevation of the soul which resigns itself to the process into the obscure depth of the Godhead. The ethical conception of God and redemption thus gives place to a physical one, just as the emanation of all things from God was described as a physical process; and as soon as speculation attempts to descend from the hidden God to finite and personal life, this physical view connects itself with the abstract metaphysical.

In the West there was long a lack of scientific and speculative discussion of the idea of God. Augustine, the most significant name in Western theology, sets forth the conception of God as a self-conscious personal being which fitted in with his doctrine of the Trinity; but as his own development had led him through Platonism, the influence of that philosophy is found in the idea of God which he developed systematically and handed down. He conceives God as the unity of ideas, of abstract perfections, of the normal types of being, thinking, and acting; as simple essential in which will, knowledge, and being are one and the same. The fundamentally determinant factor in the conception of God by the Augustinian theology is thus pure being in general.

Later Medieval

Scotus Erigena, who gave Dionysius the Areopagite to Western theology, though Augustine was not without influence upon him, fully accepted the notion of God as the absolute Inconceivable, above all affirmation and Erigena. all negation, distinguishing from him a world to which divine ideas and primal forms belong. He emphasizes the other side of this view-that true existence belongs to God alone, so that, in so far as anything exists in the universe, God is the essence of it; a practical pantheism, in spite of his attempting to enforce a creative activity on the part of God. The influence of this pantheistic view on medieval theology was a limited one; Amalric of Bena , with his proposition that God was all things, was its main disciple.

In accordance with its fundamental character, scholasticism attempted to reduce the idea of God into the categories which related to the laws of thought, to being, in general, and to the world. It began by adapting the Aristotelian terms to its own purposes. God, or absolute being, was to Aristotle the primum mobile, regarded thus from the standpoint of causation and not of mere being, and also a thinking subject. The ideas and prototypes of the finite are accordingly to be found in God, who is the final Cause. God, in Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, is not the essential being of things, but he is their esse effective et exemplariter, their primum movens, and their causa finalis. Aristotelian, again, is the definition of God's own nature, that be is, as a thinking subject, actus purus, pure, absolute energy, without the distinction found in finite beings between potentiality and actuality. In opposition to Thomas, Duns Scotus emphasized in his conception of God the primum ens and primum movens, the element of will and free causation. The arbitrary nature of the will of God, taught by him, was raised by Ockham to the most important element of his teaching about God. Upon this abstract conception of the will of God as arbitrary and unconditioned depend the questions (so characteristic of scholasticism from Abelard down) as to whether all things are possible to God.

About the end of the thirteenth century, by the side of the logical reasonings of scholasticism, there arose the mystical theology of Eckhart, which attempted to bring the Absolute near to the hearts of men as the object of an immediate intuition dependent upon complete self-surrender. The Neoplatonic conception of the Absolute is here pushed to its extreme, and Dionysius has more influence than Thomas Aquinas. The view of God's relation to the world is almost pantheistic, unless it may be rather called acosmistic, regarding the finite as naught. This is Eckhart's teaching, although at the same time he speaks of a creation of the world and of a Son in whom God expresses himself and creates. This God is regarded as goodness and love, communicating himself in a way, but not to separate and independent images of his own being; rather, he possesses and loves himself in all things, and the surrender to him is passivity and self-annihilation. The ruling ideas of this view were moderated by the practical German mystics and found in this form a wide currency. On the other hand, pantheistic heretics, such as the Brethren of the Free Spirit combined antinomian principles with the doctrine that God was all things and that the Christian united with God was perfect as God.

Modern German Philosophers

The independent metaphysical systems of the philosophers, which embraced God and the world, did not at first make any profound impression on the thought of theologians. Spinoza's pantheism was by its very nature excluded from consideration; but the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff, with its conception of God as a supremely perfect, personal Being, in whom all possible realities were embraced in their highest form, and with its demonstration of God's existence, offered itself as a friend to Christian doctrine, and was widely influential. In so far, however, as the theologians adopted any of its conclusions, it was with little clearness of insight or independent thought as to the relation of these metaphysical concepts to the Christian faith or as to their own validity.

A new epoch in German philosophy, with which theology had and still has to reckon, came in with Kant. Confidence in the arguments by which God's existence had been proved and defined was at least shaken by his criticism, which, however, energetically asserted the firm foundation of moral consciousness, and so led up to God by a new way, in postulating the existence of a deity for the establishment of the harmony required by the moral consciousness between the moral dignity of the subjects and their happiness based upon the adaptation of nature to their ends. Fichte was led from this standpoint to a God who is not personal, but represents the moral order of the universe, believing in which we are to act as duty requires, without question as to the results.

But for a time the most successful and apparently the most dangerous to Christian theology was a pantheistic philosophical conception of God which took for its foundation the idea of an Absolute raised above subject and object, above thinking and being; which explained and claimed to deduce all truth as the necessary self -development of this idea. With Schelling this pantheism is still in embryo, and finally comes back (in his "philosophy of revelation ") to the recognition of the divine personality, with an attempt to construct it speculatively. In a great piece of constructive work the philosophy of Hegel undertook to show how this Absolute is first pure being, identical with not-being; how then, in the form of externalization or becoming other, it comes to be nature or descends to nature; and finally, in the finite spirit, resumes itself into itself, comes to itself, becomes self-conscious, and thus now for the first time takes on the form of personality. For Christian theology the special importance of this teaching, was its claim to have taken what Christian doctrine had comprehended only in a limited way of God, the divine Personality, the Incarnation, etc., and to have expressed it according to its real content and to the laws of thought.

The conservative Hegelians still maintained that God, in himself and apart from the creation of the world and the origin of human personality, was to be considered as a self-conscious spirit or personality, and thus offered positive support to the Christian doctrine of God and his revelation of himself. But the Hegelian principles were more logically carried out by the opposite wing of the party, especially by David Friedrich Strauss (in his Christliche Glaubenslehre, Tubingen, 1840) in the strongest antithesis to the Christian doctrine of a personal God, of Christ as the only Son of God and the God-Man, and of a personal ethical relation between God and man. Some other philosophers, however, who may be classed in general under the head of the modern speculative idealism, have, in their speculations on the Absolute as actually present in the universe, retained a belief in the personality of God.

The realist philosopher Herbart, who recognized a personal God not through speculations on the Absolute and the finite, but on the basis of moral consciousness and teleology, yet defined little about him, and what he has to say on this subject never attracted much attention among theologians. The Hegelian pantheistic " absolute idealism," once widely prevalent, did not long retain its domination. Its place was taken first in many, quarters, as with Strauss, by an atheistic materialism; Hegel had made the universal abstract into God, and when men abandoned their belief in this and in its power to produce results, they gave up their belief in God with it. Among the post-Hegelian philosophers the most important for the present subject is Lotze, with his defense and confirmation of the idea of a personal God, going back in the most independent way both to Herbart and to idealism, both to Spinoza and Leibniz. Christian theology can, of course, only protest against the peculiar pantheism of Schopenhauer, which is really much older than he, but never before attained wide currency, and against that of Von Hartmann. The significance for the doctrine of God of the newer philosophical undertakings which are characterized by an empiricist-realist tendency, and based on epistemology and criticism is found not so much in their definite expressions about God-they do not as a rule consider him an object of scientific expression, even when they allow him to be a necessary object of faith-as in the impulse which they give to critical investigation of religious belief and perception in general.

Theology, at least German theology, before Schleiermacher showed but little understanding of and interest in the problems regarding a proper conception and confirmation of the doctrine of God which had been laid before it in this development of philosophy beginning with Kant. This is especially true of its attitude toward Kant himself and not only of the supranaturalists who were suspicious of any exaltation of the natural reason, but also of the rationalists, who still had a superficial devotion to the Enlightenment and to Wolffian philosophy. In Schleiermacher's teaching about God, however, the results of a devout and immediate consciousness were combined with philosophical postulates. In his mind the place of all the so-called proofs of the existence of God is completely supplied by the recognition that the feeling of absolute dependence involved in the devout Christian consciousness is a universal element of life; in this consciousness he finds the explanation of the source of this feeling of dependence, i.e., of God, as being love, by which the divine nature communicates itself. For his reasoned philosophical speculation, however, on the human spirit and universal being, the idea of God is nothing but the idea of the absolute unity of the ideal and the real, which in the world exist as opposites. (Compare Schelling's philosophy of identity, unlike which, however, Schleiermacher acknowledges the impossibility of a speculative deduction of opposites from an original identity; and the teaching of Spinoza, whose conception of God, however, as the one substance he does not share.) Thus God and the universe are to him correlatives, but not identical-God is unity without plurality, the universe plurality without unity; and this God is apprehended by man's feeling, just as man's feeling apprehends the unity of ideal and real.

Modern British and American Philosophers

In Great Britain and America the idea of God has undergone many vicissitudes. In the period of Deism , 1650-1800, the doctrine of God was profoundly affected by certain modern questions which were already emerging: the scientific view of nature as a unity, the denial of the principle of external authority, the right and sufficiency of reason, and the ethical as compared with the religious value of life. The deists yielded to none of their contemporaries in affirming that God was personal, the cause of the fixed providential order of the world, and of the moral order with its rewards and punishments both here and hereafter. The cosmological was the only theistic argument. God's wisdom and power were expressed neither in supernatural revelation nor in miracle. His nature was perfectly apprehensible to man's reason. He was, however, absolutely transcendent, i.e., not merely distinct from but removed from the world, an absentee God. This process of thought reached its negative skeptical result in David Hume; the being of God could be proved neither by rational considerations nor by the prevailing sensationalist theory of knowledge. Outside of the deists, the demonstration of the being and attributes of God by Samuel Clarke was thoroughly representative of the time. Something must have existed from eternity, of an independent, unchangeable nature, self-existent, absolutely inconceivable by us, necessarily everlasting, infinite, omnipotent, one and unique, intelligent and free, infinitely powerful, wise, good, and just, possessing the moral attributes required for governing the world. Bishop Butler (Analogy of Religion) held as firmly as the deists the transcendence of God, and if he made less of the cosmic, ethical, and mysterious than of the redemptive side of the divine nature, this is to be referred not to his underestimate of the redemptive purpose of God, but to the immediate aim of his apologetic. Accepting the fundamental tenet of Matthew Tindal , i.e., the identity of natural and revealed religion, he shows that the mysteries of revealed religion are not more inexplicable than the facts of universal human experience. Thus he seeks to open a door for God's activity in revelation-prophecy, miracles, and redemption A new tendency in the idea of God appears in William Paley. The proof of the existence and attributes of the deity is teleological. Nature is a contrivance of which God is the immediate creator. The celebrated Bridgewater Treatises follow in the same path, proving the wisdom, power, and goodness of God from geology, chemistry, astronomy, the animal world, the human body, and the inner world of consciousness. Chalmers sharply distinguishes between natural and revealed theology, as offering two sources for the knowledge of God. In this entire great movement of thought, therefore, God is conceived as transcendent. God and the world are presented in a thoroughly dualistic fashion. God is the immediate and instantaneous creator of the world as a mechanism. The principal divine attributes are wisdom and power; goodness is affirmed, but appears to be secondary: its hour has not yet come.

In America during the same period Jonathan Edwards is the chief representative of the idea of God. His doctrine centers in that of absolute sovereignty. God is a personal being, glorious, transcendent. The world has in him its absolute source, and proceeds from him as an emanation, or by continuous creation, or by perpetual energizing thought. As motive for the creation, he added to the common view-the declarative glory of God-that of the happiness of the creature. On the basis of causative predestination he maintains divine foreknowledge of human choice-a theory pushed to extreme limits by later writers, Samuel Hopkins and Nathanael Emmons. His doctrine of the divine transcendence was qualified by a thorough-going mysticism, a Christian experience characterized by a profound consciousness of the immediate presence, goodness, and glory of God. His conception of the ethical nature of God contained an antinomy -which he never resolved; the Being who showed surpassing grace to the elect and bestowed unnumbered common favors on the nonelect in this life, would, the instant after death, withdraw from the latter every vestige of good and henceforth pour out upon them the infinite and eternal fury of his wrath. Edwards' doctrine of God and its implications later underwent, however, serious modifications. In the circle which recognized him as leader, his son reports that no less than ten improvements had been made, some of which, e.g. concerning the atonement, directly affected the idea of God. Predestination was affirmed, but, instead of proceeding from an inscrutable will, following Leibniz, rested on divine foreknowledge of all possible worlds and included the purpose to realize this, the best of all possible worlds (A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, New York, 1900; S. Harris, God, the Creator and Lord of All, ib., 1896). The atonement was conceived as sufficient but 'not efficient for all (C. Hodge, Systematic Theology, Philadelphia, 1865), or, on the other hand, as expressing the sincere purpose of God to redeem all sinners (A. E. Park, The Atonement; Introductory Essay, Boston, 1859). Divine sovereignty was roundly affirmed; for some it contained the secret of a double decree, for others it offered a convincing basis for the larger hope.

Nineteenth-Century Developments

During the nineteenth century a new movement appeared in English thought. Sir William Hamilton held that God was the absolute, the unconditioned, the cause of all (Philosophy of the Unconditioned, in Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1829). But since all thinking is to condition, and to condition the unconditioned is self-contradictory, God is both unknown and unknowable. Following in the same path H. L. Alansel (Limits of Religious Thought, London, 1867) found here the secret by which to maintain the mysteries of the faith of the church in the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, and other beliefs. Revelation was therefore required to supplement men's ignorance and to communicate what-human intelligence was unable to discover. Hence the dogmas concerning God which had been found repugnant or opaque to reason were philosophically reinstated and became once more authoritative for faith. In his System of Synthetic Philosophy Herbert Spencer (First Principles, London, 1860-62) maintains on the one hand an ultimate reality which is the postulate of theism, the absolute datum of consciousness, and on the other hand by reason of the limitations of knowledge a total human incapacity to assign any attributes to this utterly inscrutable power. In accordance with his doctrine of evolution he holds that this ultimate reality is an infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed, the same which wells up in the human consciousness. He is neither materialistic nor atheistic. This reality is not personal according to the human type, but may be super-personal. Religion is the feeling of awe in relation to this inscrutable and mysterious power. With an aim not unlike that of Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold sought to reconcile the conflicting claims of religion, agnosticism, evolution, and history, by substituting for the traditional personal God the " Power not ourselves that makes for righteousness." Side by side with this movement appeared another led by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, based upon a spiritual philosophy, which found in the moral nature a revelation of God (Aids to Reflexion, London, 1825). This has borne fruit in many directions: in the great poets, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning; in preachers like Cardinal Newman, Dean Stanley, John Tulloch, Frederick William Robertson, and Charles Kingsley; in philosophical writers, as John Frederic Denison Maurice and James Martineau. The idea of God is taken out of dogma and the category of the schools and set in relation to life, the quickening source of ideals and of all individual and social advance. Religious thought in America has fully shared in these later tendencies in Great Britain, as may be seen by reference to John Fiske, Idea of God (Boston, 1886), unfolding the implications of Spencer's thought, and, reflecting the spirit of Coleridge, William Ellery Channing, Works (6 vols., Boston, 1848), W. G. T. Stead, " Introductory Essay " to Coleridge's Works (New York, 1884), and Horace Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, and Sermons (in Centenary edition of his Works, New York, 1903). An idea of God based on idealism, represented in Great Britain by John Caird, Philosophy of Religion (London, 1881), Edward Caird, The Evolution of Religion (ib. 1893), in Canada by John Watson, God's Message to the Human Soul (New York, 1907), has received impressive statement by Josiah Royce, The Conception of God (ib., 1897), and The World and the Individual (2 vols., 1899-1901). God is a being who possesses all logical possible knowledge, insight, wisdom. This includes omnipotence, self-consciousness, self-possession, goodness, perfection, peace. Thus this being possesses absolute thought and absolute experience, both completely organized. The absolute experience is related to human experience as an organic whole to its integral fragments. This idea of God which centers in omniscience does not intend to obscure either the ethical qualities or the proper personality of the absolute.