© 1997 Peter Vardy
© 1997 The Brotherhood of Man Library
The Divine Spirit Must Dominate... | Volume 4 - No. 5 — Index | Why we need to know 'The Earthly Life of Jesus and How He Lived It.' |
If a human being is said to be good, this means that the person has some characteristics which are regarded as admirable when they might have been otherwise. A person who is kind, gentle, forgiving, compassionate, who gives to the poor, visits the sick, and acts unselfishly might well be regarded as good and might be praised for these virtues when so many other people are selfish, impatient, cold and indifferent to the needs of others. In this case good is being used in a moral sense.
In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates is portrayed in dialogue with a young man, Euthyphro, and the issue is whether the gods will what is good independently of their willing it, or whether what they will is good just because they will it.
All finite knowledge and creature understanding are relative. Information and intelligence, gleaned from even high sources, is only relatively complete, locally accurate, and personally true. (UB 2:7.1)
In its true essence, religion is a faith-trust in the goodness of God. (UB 2:6.1)
This gives rise to the Euthyphro Dilemma:
Whichever option is chosen gives rise to difficulties:
Aquinas’ answer to the problem was to reject both horns of the dilemma and say that God’s goodness is not to be considered in moral terms at all. Instead it should be looked at in a totally different way. Aquinas considered that it is possible to prove the existence of God through the Five Ways—these he held demonstrate that there is a being ‘X’ such that ‘X’ explains the existence of the universe. To this ‘X’ Aquinas gave the name ‘God.’
Aquinas maintained that this God is wholly simple and therefore timeless, spaceless, bodiless, and totally unchangeable. But if so, how can language drawn from our spatio-temporal universe be applied to God? One of the hallmarks of Aquinas’ genius was to respond to this challenge.
Aquinas rejected two options. Language about God cannot be:
Univocal. If language about God has only one meaning (univocal), it would mean that language can be applied to God in broadly the same way as language is applied to things in our universe. Hence God would be part of the universe, a view utterly rejected by Aquinas.
Equivocal. If language about God was equivocal, it would mean that the same words were being used in totally unrelated ways when applied to God and when applied to the universe. (e.g. the word pen is equivocal when applied to a pen we write with and a pig pen). So if language about God was equivocal, it would be devoid of meaningful content.
Aquinas’ solution is to show how language about God can be used analogically. There are two types of analogy of which the first is analogy of attribution. Some examples will help explain this form of analogical language, but first a little background will help. At the time Aquinas was writing (13th century), doctors were not allowed to cut open human bodies. One of the few ways they could tell what was happening inside a human body was to examine the urine. Doctors were experts at the smell, taste, color, etc., of urine and they could determine, by these signs, whether urine was healthy or not. Taking another example:
Again the bellow is linked to the bull because the bull produces the bellow, but the bellow is healthy because of its sound and this is different from the health of the bull. Now a further example
Ellie is, per Aquinas, created by God. Just as the bull produced the urine and the bellow, so God produced Ellie—there is a causal connection between Ellie and God. It is therefor true that God is good because God has what it takes to produce goodness in Ellie but this does not mean that the goodness of God is in any way similar to the goodness of Ellie. Brian Davis OP has an excellent example that illustrates this.
The bread is good because it is crusty and tasty and the baker has whatever it takes to bake this good bread but this does not mean that the baker is crusty and tasty! Similarly just because Ellie is morally good this does not mean that God is morally good. Indeed, Aquinas would consider the whole idea of God being morally good to be nonsense as this would imply that God was in time and had potential to act in one way rather than another (which is impossible if God is wholly simple, timeless and spaceless) and it also implies that there is a standard of goodness independent of God against which God can be judged.
Through analogy of attribution, statements about God such as God is good or God is wise, God is just or God is loving can be held to be true, but we have almost no idea what it means for these statements to be true when applied to God. It would be tempting to say we have no idea but this would not be the case—at least we know that they mean God has whatever it takes to produce goodness, wisdom, love or justice in human beings—so there is some content, albeit very little.
An obvious problem that arises if we talk of someone who is evil instead of someone who is good. Take the following:
The logical form of this is identical to all the previous statements and it would seem reasonable to hold that this is true as well. Why cannot it be said that God has whatever it takes to bring about evil in Peter Vardy? Aquinas deals with this problem and his answer depends on how evil is defined. For Aquinas, evil is a privation or falling short of the good. Something is evil to the extent that it falls short of what it should be. Human beings, therefore, are evil to the extent that they fall short of what it is to be a human being. It is impossible for God to be evil since it is logically impossible for God to fall short of what it is to be God. Being timeless, spaceless, etc., God cannot be other than God is—so talk of God as being evil is nonsensical.
Analogy of Proportion is different from analogy of attribution and is based on the idea that each thing has its own genus or species. A thing is good in proportion to whatever it is to be that thing. Thus
All are different things. A thing is good to the extent that it is fully whatever it is to be that thing. On this view, to say that “God is perfectly good” is to say that God is perfectly whatever it is to be God. This must be necessarily true, since God cannot be other than what God is. Therefore God must be perfectly good. It is vitally important to recognize that this has nothing to do with the idea of God being morally good. Notice that we can say that God is good even though we may not know whatever it is to be fully God.
In the final analysis, analogy enables language drawn from our spatio-temporal universe to be applied to a timeless and spaceless God and for this language to be held to be true—but the content of this language is extremely limited.
Man’s mortal sojourn on earth acquired new meanings consequent upon the recognition of a noble destiny. (UB 170:2.7)
. . . the kingdom of heaven was their personal experience of realizing the higher qualities of spiritual living. (UB 170:2.16)
Instead of talking about God analogically we can also talk of the timeless and spaceless God using metaphors. Metaphors that have been applied to God include:
No serious theologian would think that God is literally a rock, fire, male, etc. Metaphors can be used to refer to God without describing God, they can be helpful ways of talking about God which do not actually describe what God is. Metaphors can also have a truth value. Assume I say:
No one thinks these statements are to be taken literally but they are each expressing opposite truth claims which may be accepted or rejected. Gerry Hughes SJ maintains that it is preferable to use metaphorical language about God as it is less likely to mislead and it does not even try to describe God. Instead metaphors express something of God’s reality.
Blaise Pascal referred to the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not the God of the philosophers.” In saying this he was expressing reservations about the timeless and spaceless God of traditional theology, derived from Aristotle, with the very limited content that can be understood in language about such a God.
One alternative is to maintain that language about God is univocal—in other words language about God is to be understood in broadly the same way as language about human beings. The problem with this is that God must then be in time and one would be thinking of a God in time (some Catholic liberation theologians take this view as well as many Anglicans, Methodists and Baptists).
A God in time has advantages from the point of view of language about God, but there is a heavy price to pay as God then becomes subject to time and change and some would then maintain that such a God is too limited.
It can also lead to an anthropomorphic view of God as, if God is in time, God can also be in space. This then raises questions about where God is. The timeless and spaceless view of God, however, maintains God’s transcendence at the price of God being almost completely unknowable.
[This article appeared in the Catechist Newsletter published by Brisbane Catholic Education.]
[Comments: Urantia Paper #2 “The Nature of God” informs us that, “the most enlightening and spiritually edifying of all revelations of the divine nature is to be found in the comprehension of the religious life of Jesus of Nazareth.” (UB 2:0.2) The book also says, “Although Jesus revealed the true nature of the heavenly Father in his earth life, he taught little about him. In fact, he taught only two things: that God in himself is spirit, and that, in all matters of relationship with his creatures, he is a Father.”
The gospel of John (14:9) reports Jesus as saying words such as, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” and in 14:11, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” Christianity generally has a firm belief in the divinity of Jesus, so combined with the evidence from John’s gospel, it is difficult to conceive how the life of Jesus can be interpreted in any other way than as a revelation of the nature of God—which means that there are things we can know about God.
Thus it appears that the 13th century re-discovery of Aristotelian logic in the Western world, and its subsequent application to Christian theology, may have had enormous deleterious effects on the progressive spiritualization of Christians]
De todos los conocimientos humanos, el que posee mayor valor es el de conocer la vida religiosa de Jesús y la manera en que la vivió. (UB 196:1.3)
The Divine Spirit Must Dominate... | Volume 4 - No. 5 — Index | Why we need to know 'The Earthly Life of Jesus and How He Lived It.' |