Author: Albert C. Knudson
[p. 285]
“PERSONALITY is the form in which the idea of God is given through Revelation.” This statement by Ritschl 1 would perhaps not be seriously questioned by any one who admits the fact of revelation, and even one who denies it would hardly call in question the view that the God of the Christian Scriptures is a personal Deity. But whether and to what extent the personality of God is a distinctively biblical or Christian teaching, Ritschl does not say. It would probably be generally conceded that Christianity has laid more stress upon personality as applied to the Deity than any other religion, 2 and in this sense the doctrine might be said to be a “revealed” truth. But, on the other hand, it may justly be urged that revelation at this point is only the culmination of natural religion. There is, as we have already seen, a theistic bent in all religion. No doubt there have been religions without a personal God and, for that matter, without any God. But these were imperfect and undeveloped forms of religion. In its vital and unperverted form religion tends toward the belief in a personal [p. 286] God. Indeed, the earliest gods were personal beings. It was this that differentiated them from mere spirits or demons. What made them gods was their possession of personality. Absoluteness and perfect goodness were not ascribed to them, and could not be. Polytheism rules out the idea of absolute power and absolute goodness as inherent in any one being. Only monotheism makes possible the ascription of these attributes to Deity. This is worth noting, that God was personal before he was regarded as absolute or as perfectly good. Such was the case with Jehovah. It was not until after the lapse of centuries that omnipotence and absolute righteousness came to be attributed to him. Personality may, then, be said to be the earliest and most general characteristic of divine beings. “God” meant originally a personal God. It is only in a derived sense that the term has come to be applied to impersonal beings, though it is, of course, true that the line of demarcation between “personal” gods and “impersonal” spirits has not always been sharply drawn in popular thought.
In view of the importance of personality in the conception of God it is somewhat strange that the term did not come into general use, as applied to the Deity, until comparatively recent times. The word “person” figures prominently in the early Trinitarian and Christological controversies and in that connection received its first clear definition as a philosophical and theological term. “A person,” said Boethius in a treatise written at the beginning of the sixth century, “is the individual subsistence of a rational [p. 287] nature.”[1] In this sense Christ was a person, though possessed of two distinct natures. But the word “person” was not applied to God as a unitary Being; rather, was it said that there are three “persons” in the Godhead. Personality in God was thus the teaching of the church, and not the personality of God. [2] This continued to be the case till toward the close of the eighteenth century.
Several reasons for this use of the term “person” or “personality” may be noted. First, early Christian thought under the influence -of Platonic realism tended to subordinate the individual to the universal. The general notion of being or essence seemed consequently a more ultimate idea than that of personality, which involves more or less individuation or limitation. A personal being may be the highest form in which the ultimate essence manifests itself, but in and of itself the essence, at least in idea, transcends personality by its unity and simplicity. As one and simple God is essence. As personal he is three, and hence in that respect not ultimate and absolute. This logically secondary and subordinate character of personality is suggested by the word “substantia” in Boethius’ definition. The word is the Latin equivalent of the Greek hypostasis, and is rendered more precisely by the English word “subsistence” than by the word “substance.” It denotes a distinction within the ultimate substance or reality rather than that reality itself. As the ultimate, simple, and unitary [p. 288] essence God is not a person. It is the three hypostatic distinctions within his being that are persons. To this conclusion early Christian thought was led by the metaphysical universalism of Greek philosophy.
Another aspect of Greek thought that contributed to the same end was the philosophical reaction against polytheism. The Greek gods were personal, too personal; and so the profounder and more earnest minds turned away from them and fixed their attention upon divinity in general. The Divine in the abstract and ideal seemed to them nobler and more adorable than the gods of popular belief. A kind of impersonal Divinity thus supplanted the personal divinities in the higher religious faith of the day; and this meant that in any fusion that might be attempted of personalism with impersonalism the primacy in worth as well as in logic would fall to the latter. The result was that the Graeco-Roman idea of religious value combined with Platonic realism in preventing the complete personalization of the idea of God in Christian theology. Personality was regarded as an eternal and constituent element in Deity, but Deity itself was not thought of as personal.
A third and perhaps more serious difficulty in the way of a thoroughgoing theological personalism was its apparent bearing on the divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit. If God himself in the innermost fiber of his being is a Person, the question would naturally arise as to whether the Son and the Holy Spirit may also be regarded as persons. The difficulty here might perhaps be said to be verbal rather than real, but in [p. 289] the early and medieval church it seemed real and significant. To have ascribed personality to the innermost essence of Deity at that time would have been to advocate a Unitarian as opposed to a trinitarian type of Christianity. At any rate, it seemed then easier and more natural to protect the divinity of the Son and the Spirit by treating them as eternal persons within a larger divine whole than by regarding them as somehow included within an all-embracing divine personality. In other words, a trinitarian personalism with its impersonal background seemed more congenial to the historic faith than a thoroughgoing Unitarian personalism. The latter view seemed to crowd out the unique and essential deity of the Son and the Spirit.
It was such considerations as the foregoing that kept Christian thinkers for upward of seventeen centuries from affirming the personality of God. They believed most emphatically in God as a personal and spiritual Being. Not for a moment did they belie the profound personalism of the Christian faith. But they did not look upon personality as so completely constitutive of the divine as to be identical with its essence. For them God was personal, but he was not personal to the very core of his being. Hence it did not seem fitting to speak of him in his unity and totality as a person. But in the latter part of the eighteenth century this reserve in mode of expression disappeared. Theologians now began to refer to God as a person and to lay stress upon his personality. William Paley, for instance, in his Natural Theology, published in 1802, had a chapter on “The Personality [p. 290] of the Deity.” The argument of this chapter he concluded by saying that “after all the struggles of a reluctant philosophy the necessary resort is to a Deity. The marks of design are too strong to be got over. Design must have had a designer. That designer must have been a person. That person is God.” Since Paley’s day less stress has perhaps been laid upon the idea of design in connection with that of personality, but upon the idea of personality itself as applied to the Deity there has been a steadily increasing emphasis. The expression, the personality of God, is now commonly accepted as a proper formulation of a fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith.
For this change a number of reasons may be given. One was the new stress placed on the unity of the world; and the consequent unity of its underlying cause, occasioned by the scientific theories with which the names of Copernicus and Newton are particularly connected. This emphasis tended to push into the background the Trinitarian distinctions which had engaged the thought of an earlier day, and to concentrate attention upon the divine unity. Not the personal distinctions within this unity, but the personal character of the unitary agent himself became thus the object of special interest. Then, too, the peril involved in the materialistic monism of the eighteenth century naturally led Christian thinkers to emphasize the personality of the world-ground.
Another factor contributing to the change was the revival of pantheistic modes of thought toward the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nine [p. 291] teenth century. The revival, taking its start from Spinoza, was reflected in the great idealistic movement represented by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, and in the theology and philosophy of Schleiermacher. If these thinkers did not expressly reject the personality of God, they at least took an uncertain and hesitating attitude toward it, and, on the whole, seem to have been inclined toward an impersonal view of the Absolute. This was particularly true of some of the later Hegelian theologians such as Strauss and Biederinann. By way of reaction against this tendency, there consequently arose a conscious need of a new emphasis upon the personality of God. Christian thinkers, who previously had taken the doctrine for granted, now felt it incumbent upon them to make it central in their teaching.
At the same time there grew up, especially under the influence of Leibnitz, Berkeley, Kant, and Lotze, a new insight into the metaphysics of personality, which has given to theistic personalism a new vogue. It now came to be seen that personality does not stand in an adjectival relation to ultimate reality, nor is it a mere hypostatic distinction within it, but it is itself the key to ultimate reality and identical with it. Only in and through the personal can we arrive at an understanding of the Absolute. This insight made possible not only a more complete personalization of the idea of God than had been current in earlier times, but also a more adequate and convincing justification of it. Modern metaphysics thus co-operated with the monism of modern science and with the instinctive Christian reaction against [p. 292] modern materialism and pantheism in establishing and giving currency to the belief in the unitary personality of God.
Thus far we have used the words person and personality as though their meaning was self-evident and such it no doubt is in a general way. But before we proceed further we need to define their meaning more precisely.
Personality is known to us directly only in its human form; and here it is always associated with a body. Consequently, we might conclude that corporeality is essential to personality. Indeed, this is the view which men at first instinctively and almost inevitably adopt. In early religious thought it was reflected in the belief in the resurrection of the body and in the worship of images. The gods were supposed to have bodies or something akin to them. But with the rise of ethical monotheism in Israel Deity was detached from material form of every kind; and this conclusion, reached through religious insight, was later ratified by speculative thought. In the case of Deity personality was thus separated from corporeality, and the possibility of a similar separation in the case of human personality was taught by Plato and later by Christian theology. There have been, however, and still are two streams of thought that have resisted this conclusion the materialistic, or naturalistic, and the pantheistic. Both of these types of philosophy have maintained that personality is indissolubly bound up with a material organism, and [p. 293] that with, the disappearance of the latter human personality vanishes. Materialistic naturalism, furthermore, denies the independent existence of spirit altogether, while pantheism denies to the absolute Spirit personality. The fact that God does not have a body as we do is supposed to exclude his being a Person. This linking up of personality with corporeality lies at the basis of one of the most common criticisms directed against theism since the time of Xenophanes. The response to it is found in the fact that the body is not an analytically necessary factor of our mental life. Our inner personal life might conceivably go on apart from its present material organism. Personality as such does not necessarily imply corporeality.
In its essence personality is, then, psychical and spiritual. It is necessary to affirm this because there has been of late a tendency to ascribe personality to God in a nonpsychical sense. A German writer [3] has, for instance, distinguished between “psychical” and “spiritual” personality. The former may be subdivided into “natural” and “cultural” personality, but in principle it remains the same in both forms. Stress is here laid on the unity and identity of the self and on the principle of self-preservation. These are the fundamental factors constitutive of psychical personality. It is personality in this sense of the term that is attributed to the gods on the polytheistic plane. They are simply magnified men, and the method employed in ascribing existence to them is the “mythological.” It is the unbridled fancy that [p. 294] gives to them their being. To the one God personality in its “psychical” sense is not, then, to be ascribed.
Spiritual personality on the other hand, is characterized by devotion to social and ideal ends. Not self-preservation, but the fulfillment of tasks and duties is its ruling aim. Struggle and achievement are thus inherent in the very idea of spiritual personality. To be a person in this sense means to be in the process of becoming one. At least this is true of men. Human personality is incomplete and always remains such, an ideal to be attained; and so the poet speaks of
“. . . . progress, man’s distinctive mark alone, Not God’s, and not the beasts: God is, they are, Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.”
This quotation from Browning [4] answers in advance the question we were about to ask as to whether spiritual personality in its human form may be ascribed to God; and the answer is a negative one. God is not a struggling and developing Being; he is “complete.” It is consequently, according to Steinmann, only symbolically that personality is to be affirmed of him. He is personal in the sense that he stands in a “causal” relation to our higher spiritual life. By virtue of this relationship he may himself be said to be spiritual. But his spirituality does not consist in a flexible adjustment on his part to our changing needs. It is, rather, to be found in the firmness and faithfulness with which he adheres to his saving purpose, in the unchangeable steadiness of his holy will. What it [p. 295] implies beyond that we cannot say. To attempt to define the divine personality more precisely is to forsake the firm ground of religious experience and conviction and fall back upon an illusory “knowledge” derived from human tradition and human desire.
A somewhat similar, though more extreme view, was expounded a few years ago in a book that had considerable vogue in America. [5] In it we were warned against “psychologizing the consciousness of God.” Just what “consciousness” could possibly mean if every psychical element were eliminated from it, it would be difficult to say. We were told that “self-consciousness” and “the power to know” do not hold true of God in any sense which these words bear in our human experience and speech. From this the only conclusion would seem to be that as applied to the Deity they have no intelligible meaning whatsoever. And if so, one would naturally suppose that the only consistent thing would be to deny personality to him. But this, the author, who was a teacher of theology, did not have the hardihood to do. So he told us that his conception of the personality of God did not rest on a theory of the divine consciousness, but on the character of the ends disclosed in the universe. “Ends,” however, are as meaningless without consciousness as “consciousness” is without the psychical. What we call ends in nature would be simply effects, results, without a purposing intelligence. To talk about “ends” and “consciousness” and “personality” as though they did not imply such psychological elements as willing and knowing is merely to befog [p. 296] oneself and one’s readers. Personality as applied to God must mean more or less of what we understand by the term when applied to ourselves, or it is a misleading symbol.
But while personality must be construed in psychological terms, it does not necessarily imply limitations and imperfections such as those incident to the growth and development of the human spirit. If it did, we should either have to transform God into a finite and developing being or deny personality to him. Neither of these alternatives is necessary. The objections to the first we considered in the preceding chapter, and a little later we shall deal more fully with the question as to whether the idea of absoluteness excludes that of personality. Here we wish simply to point out that the essential psychical elements in personality do not in and of themselves involve the kind of finitude to which we have just referred. These elements, as commonly given, are knowing, willing and feeling; or, if we wish to combine the last two, we may designate them as self-consciousness, self-knowledge, or the power to know, on the one hand, and self-control or self-direction, on the other, “control” and “direction” containing an implicit reference to feeling. In none of these is there any implication of dependent limitation. Indeed, the lack of any of these powers, the power to know or to will or to feel, would itself be a limitation. We are ourselves dependent beings and in us these powers necessarily manifest themselves in an imperfect and limited way, but there is no reason why they should not be possessed by an absolute Being and in him [p. 297] manifest themselves in a perfect form. The particular methods by which we acquire self-knowledge and selfcontrol are not essential to such knowledge and control in and of themselves. They may quite conceivably exist as eternal possessions of an Infinite Spirit. And wherever we find them in any being, we have a person. Personality in its essence means “self -hood, self-knowledge and self-direction,” [6] and in these respects it may be either finite or infinite.
Yet another point relative to the meaning of personality remains to be noted. This has to do with the idea of selfhood and the relation of selves to each other. Some lay stress upon the exclusiveness and isolation of the self. “Personality,” said D. F. Strauss, [7] “is that selfhood which shuts itself up against everything else, excluding it thereby from itself.” In a passage which he says he has since had occasion to regret putting in that form, Pringle-Pattison declared that “each self is a unique existence, which is perfectly impervious … to other selves impervious in a fashion of which the impenetrability of matter is a faint analogue. . . . The self is in truth the very apex of separation and differentiation. . . . Though the self is in knowledge a principle of unification, it is in existence or metaphysically a principle of isolation.” [8] In this view there is no doubt a large element of truth, but it is only a half truth. Personality is also social. It implies reciprocal intercourse with other persons. A completely [p. 298] isolated person would not be a person in the full sense of the term. For this reason the god of Aristotle does not measure up to what we mean by a “personal God.” He is a self-conscious individuality, but his activity is directed wholly upon himself, upon his own thinking. He does not have that forth-going energy which we associate with self-control or self-direction and which is suggested by the idea of a personal will. He is a shining ideal which attracts the world, and in this sense the world loves him, but he does not love the world. He stands aloof from it. There is no reciprocal intercourse between him and men. He lacks that warmth and intimacy which we connect with personal relationships, and hence is not himself truly personal. What we especially have in mind when from the religious point of view we speak of the personality of God, is the thought of -fellowship with him. He is a Being who knows us and loves us and whom we can trust. It is because the personality of God implies all this that we regard it as so vital to religion.
In addition, then, to self-knowledge and self-control we need to emphasize in personality the thought of communion with others. This communion is ethical, not metaphysical. It presupposes selfhood and the general psychical functions of knowing, willing, and feeling; without these there could be no communion. But there must also be something more, if there is to be true communion. There must be mutual trust and mutual goodwill. In the case of God and man these feelings naturally take a different form from what they do in the relation of equals to [p. 299] each other, but in principle they are the same. They rest on an ethical basis. It is the appropriate ethical attitude of two or more persons to each other that alone makes true fellowship possible; and this attitude is one of mutual regard based on a mutual recognition of worth. Hence if fellowship or reciprocal intercourse is essential to a complete personality, we must regard worth or dignity as a constituent element in it. In other words, personality must be viewed as an end in itself.
Summing up, we may say that personality does not necessarily imply either corporeality or dependent limitation. In its essence it is selfhood, self-knowledge and self-control; or, more concretely, a person is one who thinks and feels and wills. Such a being by his> very nature seeks communion with others. He does so because only in this way can his own true self and his own intrinsic worth, and the like self and worth of others, come to full expression and realization.
In the preceding paragraph and elsewhere we have already pointed out that dependent limitation is not a necessary implication of personality. A being might be personal, and yet might conceivably be free from all dependent limitation, or, in other words, be absolute. Between absoluteness and the essence of personality there is no inconsistency. This, we believe, has been made reasonably clear. But the contrary view has so frequently been maintained that the subject calls for more extended discussion.
To some extent the controversy at this point has [p. 300] been merely one about words. It has been argued that “personality” naturally and almost inevitably suggests human limitation of some kind and that to apply it to Deity is a piece of anthropomorphism that ought to be avoided. The Absolute is spirit and as such embraces all that is of value in personality, but it is not itself personal; it is “superpersonal.” If this means that Deity represents a higher type of consciousness and will than that represented by human personality, it simply states what has not only been conceded, but maintained by all theistic personalists. The “name person” said Thomas Aquinas, “is fittingly applied to God; not, however, as it is applied to creatures, but in a more excellent way (via eminentiae)” Human personality is, then, a symbol rather than a mirror of the inner life of God. What that life is we cannot fully understand. It transcends us. But if it is a life of free intelligence, it does not matter whether we have any further understanding of it or not, nor does it matter whether we call it personal or not. So long as free intelligence of any kind whatsoever is ascribed to the Absolute, the difference between the personalist and the “superpersonalist” is only one of words.
But in the dispute over the %)rd “person” and its applicability to the Absolute something far more significant is usually at stake than the mere meaning of the term. The real point at issue is as to whether the Absolute is to be thought of as a self-conscious and self-directing Being. Those who deny personality to him or it usually mean that he is not a Being to whom intelligence and freedom may be ascribed. He [p. 301] is pure will without intellect, as Schopenhauer taught, or unconscious intelligence, as Hartmann held, or blind force, as has often been maintained. It is this view of the world-ground as unintelligent that alone gives significance to the contention that personality is inconsistent with absoluteness. Personality does not stand opposed to a higher type of divine intelligence, but to nonintelligence. To deny personality to the Absolute or world-ground means that it is not intelligent and free. The real question consequently is as to whether conscious and free intelligence is consistent with the idea of absoluteness.
In dealing with this question it is important that we distinguish the different senses in Which the word “absolute” is used. We noted three in the preceding chapter: the agnostic, the logical and the causal. In its agnostic sense the absolute means the unrelated, and since nothing can be known except in its relations it follows that an absolute Being must be unknowable. Personality cannot be affirmed of it nor can anything else. But such a Being, as we have previously said, is not only unknowable, but also unaffirmable. It serves no purpose in the universe, and may be dismissed as a mere shadow of the mind’s own throwing. The only rational ground for affirming an Absolute is that its existence helps us to explain the world of appearance, but if it is itself entirely unknowable, it manifestly cannot serve as a principle of explanation. A thoroughgoing agnosticism contradicts itself.
The “logical” Absolute is arrived at by the subordination of the individual to the universal. The assumption [p. 302] is that the highest universal is the ultimate reality. Such a universal transcends all finite modes of being and yet embraces them all. It may take the form of the all-inclusive unity of Neoplatonism, or the all-inclusive substance of Spinoza, or the all-inclusive spirit of Hegel. In any case it is a transcendent reality which cannot be identified with any concrete mode of being. It expresses itself in and through the finite, but nothing finite expresses its essential nature. We cannot, therefore, attribute consciousness or personality to it. For that would be to limit it to one mode of being, and to do so would be to destroy its universality and its absoluteness. Personality, it is urged, is only one of many forms of existence, and not only that, it is a form of existence which bears in itself the stamp of finitude. “We have already quoted Strauss as saying that “personality is that selfhood which shuts itself up against everything else, which it thereby excludes from itself.” To this he added that “the Absolute, on the other hand, is the comprehensive, the unlimited, which excludes nothing from itself but just the exclusivity which lies in the conception of personality.” [9]
Again, it is argued that there is a necessary duality in personality which implies its finitude. “Can an infinite reason and an infinite will,” asked Schleiermacher in a letter to Jacobi, “really be anything more than empty words, when reason and will, by differing from each other, also necessarily limit each other? And if you attempt to annul the distinction between reason and will, is not the conception of personality [p. 303] destroyed by the very attempt?” [10] The assumption here is that ultimate reality lies beyond all differences. It is pure unity or pure identity.
Another and more common method of trying to prove the necessary finitude of personality is to say that consciousness implies a distinction between subject and object or between ego and non-ego, and hence is impossible to an absolute Being who embraces all reality. Such a Being can have no object, for there is nothing external to itself, nor can there be a nonego standing apart from it. It cannot, therefore, be a conscious Being. But this line of argument, as has often been pointed out, confuses a logical or psychological form with an ontological otherness. [11] The Absolute might make himself his own object; and being absolute there would, of course, be no need of a non-ego to condition the development of his consciousness, as is the case with us.
The fundamental objection, however, to the foregoing attempts to establish an antithesis between personality and absoluteness is the abstract way in which they conceive of the Absolute. For them the Absolute is a logical universal. Its existence is arrived at by a process of logical subordination. The individual is subordinated to the class to which it belongs, and this class to the class above it, until finally the ultimate universal is reached which embraces all finite beings. Throughout the process the fiction is maintained of supposing that the broader [p. 304] the universal the greater the depth and richness of its being. But this is the reverse of the truth. Only the individual is real. The universal is a concept, and the more inclusive it is the more barren it is of content. The ultimate universal is thus the emptiest of all terms; and this the Absolute becomes when it is arrived at by a process of logical subordination and is identified with universal being. When conceived of as pure unity or pure substance or pure spirit it is a mere abstraction. It has no analogue in concrete reality. It transcends all forms of finite being and is the all-embracing and indefinable element common to them all. As such it is necessarily nonpersonal, but it is also devoid of any definite character whatsoever, and may be set aside as a fiction of conceptual thought.
If the idea of a metaphysical Absolute is to be retained, it should be in the causal sense of the term; and in this sense there is no inconsistency between it and the idea of personality. From the causal point of view the Absolute is the independent ground or cause of the universe. It is dependent upon nothing outside of itself; but it is not completely unrelated and unlimited. It stands in relation to the world and is to some extent limited by it. But the limitation is one that is self-imposed. The Absolute is not itself the All nor is it the Unknowable. Its causal relation to the world makes it to some degree knowable, and its creative activity makes it possible for us to distinguish between it and its work. Everything is dependent upon it for its existence; and it is this that constitutes its absoluteness. But absoluteness [p. 305] thus understood does not exclude self -limitation. Indeed, not to have this power would itself be a limitation. And the same is to be said of the power to know and the power of self-control. These powers, which are the essential constituents of personality, are also essential to the Absolute, if he be regarded as absolute in power. The power to know is certainly not a limitation, nor is the power of self-control. The only limitation connected with them is to be found in the degree in which they are possessed by finite beings. We have these powers only to a limited extent; and hence it is proper to say that we represent personality only in an imperfect form. If we had perfect knowledge and perfect self-control, we would be more truly personal than we now are.
The common judgment must, then, be reversed. Instead of saying that personality is inconsistent with absoluteness, we must say, rather, that perfect personality is possible only in the Absolute. The contrary view rests upon a mistaken conception of what metaphysical absoluteness is. [12]
The real ground, however, for holding to the personality of God must be found, not in its consistency with the idea of absoluteness, but in its positive religious and philosophical value. These values have already been incidentally noted, but it may be well at this point to summarize them.
There are two fundamental religious values. One [p. 306] is fellowship with God, the other is trust in his goodness; and both of these imply his personality. No fellowship is possible without freedom and intelligence. There may be interactions between impersonal beings, both organic and inorganic. But true communion can exist only between beings who know each other and take an emotional and volitional attitude toward each other. If God were pure intellect, as Aristotle conceived him to be, no communion with him would be possible. And the same would be true of him if he were made on the Epicurean model and sat apart
“Where never falls the least white star of snow, Where never lowest sound of thunder rolls, Nor sigh of human sorrow mounts to mar His sacred, everlasting calm.”
Fellowship requires something more than thought, something more than power to know; it requires an outgoing of feeling and will. This it is that underlies that moving word of Scripture, the “living” God. Life, as applied to God, does not mean something less than intelligence; it means something more. It means that in God there are a heart and will, responsive to human need, an attitude of mind that both evokes and answers prayer. This is perhaps the aspect of personality that is most characteristic of it. Personality stresses will even more emphatically than it does intelligence. And here it is that we have the difference between intellectualism and personalism. The former, representing the classical tradition, puts the stress on the theoretical reason; the latter, reflecting [p. 307] biblical teaching, lays the stress on the practical reason. It is the moral and emotional nature that forms the basis of that living fellowship with God which constitutes the essence of true religion.
Even on the impersonal plane religion seeks union with the Divine Being. But there is a vast difference between a mystical, metaphysical union with an impersonal Being and the kind of union with the Divine taught us in Scripture. Here we have to do not with the union of absorption, but with a union that grows out of reciprocal intercourse, a union of heart and will and intellect; and such a union is possible only between personal beings. Only the personality of God makes possible the union of communion with him.
His personality is also the presupposition of his goodness. There can be no goodness in the ethical sense of the term without freedom and intelligence. In other words, only a personal being can be good. Things and subpersonal beings may be useful, but they are not morally good. Goodness is an attribute of personality and apart from it is a mere abstraction. All those religious values consequently that are bound up with the belief in the divine righteousness and love are dependent for their very being on a personalistic view of the world. Providence with all that it implies would be meaningless without a personal God, and so would prayer. The very heart of our prophetic and Christian religion would vanish without him. It is, then, no erring instinct and no theological aberration that has: led to the insistence on the personality of God which has been characteristic [p. 308] of Christian thought. The basic values of Christian experience are wrapped up in it.
Another religious value that attaches to the personalistic conception of Deity is the bearing that it has on our conception of man. In emphasizing the personality of God we affirm, not the likeness of God to man, but, rather, the likeness of man to God. We declare that man is made in the image of God, and in so doing we affirm not only the high dignity of man, but also the love of God. For the divine love would not be the highest form of love if it did not lead God to communicate his own life and his own likeness to his creatures. [13] The personality of God means, then, that he has imparted his own self to men and has thus exhibited his love to us. So his personality is not only a metaphysical presupposition of his love, it is itself an affirmation of our kinship to him and his loving relation to us.
The philosophical value of the idea of personality as applied to God has been slower in coming to recognition. The word “person” as used in the doctrine of the Trinity was a source of embarrassment to reason rather than otherwise. Augustine felt keenly its inadequacy, and said that the answer “three persons” was given to the inquirer “not that it might be spoken, but that it might not be left unspoken.” [14] Later, under the influence of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, the doctrine of the Trinity was lifted above the plane of rational justification altogether [p. 309] and based exclusively on the authority of revelation. But with the advent of the modern era and the new direction given to philosophy by Descartes a new importance came to be attached to the idea of personality and eventually it came to be applied to the entire Godhead.
Two considerations in particular have tended to give to the idea added metaphysical significance. One is the concrete character of personality, the fact that it is given in experience. Every attempt to transcend personality leads to some form of abstractionism or agnosticism. A type of reality that is not revealed to us in experience is either entirely incapable of definition or is constituted by some general idea and is devoid of concrete content. It is in experience that all true reality is revealed. What reality might be apart from experience we cannot say. If there is a superempirical principle or reality in the objective world, it must be construed in personal terms or handed over to complete nescience, for it is in self-experience, and there only, that we have insight into the true inwardness of things. [15] We know the self as we know nothing else. This truth Augustine and Descartes made irrefutably clear, and in so doing not only established a permanent bulwark against thoroughgoing skepticism, but laid the foundation of a sound empirical metaphysics. In personality we have the only empirical key to ultimate reality; and that as a metaphysical principle it has a decided advantage [p. 310] over the abstract essences of all types of impersonal philosophy has been made increasingly clear by the course of modern thought.
The decided advantage consists not only in the fact that personality is a concrete and empirical reality, but also in the further fact that it contains in itself a solution of the fundamental problems of metaphysics such as no impersonal principle or essence does or can. This is the second consideration above referred to, that has militated to the advantage of personalism. Kant stated the underlying principle as follows: “One may therefore say of the thinking I (the soul), which represents itself as substance, simple, numerically identical in all time, and as the correlative of all existence, from which, in fact, all other existence must be concluded, that it does not know itself through the categories, but knows the categories only, and through them all objects, in the absolute unity of apperception, that is, through itself.” [16] Bowne put it more simply by saying that the categories do not explain intelligence, but are explained by it. If we wish to know what the categories of unity, identity and causality mean, we must go to our experience of free intelligence and find the answer there. If we wish to know how unity can be harmonized with plurality, and identity with change, we must seek the solution not in some transcendental and unknowable xyz, but in our own conscious and free agency. We know ourselves one and yet we do many things. We are constantly changing and yet we [p. 311] constitute ourselves one and the same with our past selves. How this is possible, we do not know. But the fact is sun-clear, and it is inherent in personality itself. Here, then, in our free intelligence, and there alone, we have the solution of the age-old problems of metaphysics. The solution is empirical, not theoretical, but that makes it none the less valuable.
Philosophical insight has thus combined with religious appreciation to make personality an all-important category in the conception of Deity. Personality, however, is itself complex. It implies unity, identity, self-consciousness and self-control: four attributes, the last three of which, when applied to the Supreme Person, may perhaps better be designated as immutability, omniscience, and freedom. These three attributes together with that of the divine unity we shall, therefore, consider here in connection with the personality of God, just as we considered his omnipotence, omnipresence, and eternity under the head of his absoluteness.
The unity of God has a double meaning. It means that he is indivisible and that he is only. Both of these ideas were developed in the Old Testament and became permanent elements in prophetic and Christian theism. [17] The indivisibility of God was emphasized by way of contrast with the polybaalism and polyyahwism current in ancient Israel, and the onliness of God was emphasized by way of contrast with ancient polytheism in general. Both ideas received [p. 312] their classical expression in the famous saying of Deut. 6. 4, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.” Over against the multiplicity of Baals it was here affirmed that there is but one Lord or Jehovah, and over against the many gods of heathenism it was affirmed that there is but one God. Jehovah was here declared to be, not a vague pantheistic sort of being that differentiated himself or itself into a number of local Jehovahs, but a unitary and indivisible being, a Person in essentially the modern sense of the term. He was also here declared to be the sole Deity. The latter idea was a later development than the former, but it was bound up with and organically related to it. Jehovah in his universality remained as unitary and individual a being as he was when regarded as merely the God of Israel. This rigid unity of the Old Testament God tended to keep him on a high moral plane. It saved him from, the degrading effects of sexual differentiation and from the almost equally degrading effects of differentiation into a number of local deities. It linked him up with the higher interests of the nation as a whole and with the universal interests of mankind. At the same time it established a bond of union with the intellectual demand for a fundamental monism and thus prepared the way for an alliance with Greek philosophy. It was the common need of a basal unity that brought Hebrew and Greek thought together. And to this day the need of such a unity is equally imperative in the field of religion and of philosophy.
But what we are here concerned with is not the history and the grounds of the belief in the divine [p. 313] unity, but the way in which this unity is to be conceived. A homogeneous substance or force pervading all space and extending through all time would perhaps be the form under which spontaneous thought would at first be inclined to think of the unitary ground of the world. But since unity excludes divisibility, this view is manifestly untenable. For both space and time are infinitely divisible. To matter how homogeneous a thing might be, it could have no unity if it were in metaphysical space or time; only a being that transcends space and time can be a true unit. This holds for both the finite and the infinite. The divine unity cannot, then, be found in any space-filling and permanently enduring substance or force. Such a substance or force would be divisible into an infinite number of parts each external to the other, and these parts would again be infinitely divisible, so that not only all unity, but all abiding reality would be dissolved away.
If unity is to be ascribed to the world-ground, it must be lifted to a superspatial and supertemporal level. This has been generally recognized by speculative thinkers. But how it is to be done, has not been always clear. A common method has been to identify the world-ground with the highest universal, with bare being, and then define its nature as pure simplicity. As such it transcends all the plurality and all the differences of finite existence. It is not mind, nor is it matter. It is something above them both. But what it is, aside from the fact that it is one and simple, we cannot say. We can, according to Schleiermacher, form no “real conception” of it. [p. 314] It lies beyond reason and will, and beyond nature and consciousness. So far as our articulate experience is concerned, it is a mere blank. We can assimilate it to nothing that we know; and as a concept it serves no function in a rational system, for an absolutely simple being cannot differentiate itself. Nothing can be deduced from it. It can explain nothing. In logic there is no way of passing from the simple to the complex or from bare unity to plurality; and if God be thought of as a unitary being in this sense of the term, he could not account for the world as we know it. He would be reduced to “a rigid and lifeless stare.”
It is only on the plane of free intelligence that true unity can be realized, and it is from this standpoint alone that the divine unity can be properly construed. In the case of an intelligent agent unity does not consist in any simplicity of being or of substance, but in consciousness itself, in the ability of the agent to originate activity, to posit plurality, and to maintain his own unity and identity over against the changing many. How this is possible we do not know, but it is a fact of our own experience; and what holds true of us in a limited degree we are warranted in ascribing to God in an unlimited degree. In any case this is the only intelligible and self-consistent form under which the divine unity can be conceived. God knows himself as one over against the changing world which he posits and maintains through his own free creative activity.
As unity denies divisibility, so immutability denies change. But change may be of various kinds. It [p. 315] may be either metaphysical or ethical, and it may be due either to internal or external causes. It is usually the latter one has in mind in thinking of change. Hence to ascribe immutability to Deity is often equivalent to asserting his independence and eternity. There is no external being or beings upon which he is dependent and which have the power to produce changes in him. The fact that he is unchangeable means, then, that he is self-existent and eternal. He is not a dependent and perishing being as are the things of the world. “They shall be changed; but thou art the same” (Psa. 102. 26f.). The sameness, however, does not simply look outward, and contrast the eternity of God with the transitoriness of the world. It also looks inward and affirms an identity of being within God himself. It is this that in the stricter sense of the term constitutes his metaphysical immutability. Neither internal nor external causes alter the inner essence of his being. “I, the Lord, change not” (Mal. 3. 6).
In Scripture it is chiefly the ethical unchangeability of God that is affirmed, though his metaphysical immutability in the twofold sense just indicated is everywhere assumed. This holds true of the words just quoted from Malachi, and also of the characterization of God in James 1. 17 as “the Father of lights, with whom can be no variation, neither shadow that is cast by turning.” The various passages that deny that God repents (for example, Num. 23. 19) and that declare that his counsel stands forever (for example, Psa. 33. 11; 19. 21; Isa. 46. 10) are also to be so construed. This stress on the ethical constancy [p. 316] of God is in keeping with the practical nature of biblical teaching, and has to do with his “goodness,” which is the subject of the next chapter.
We are here more particularly concerned with the way in which the metaphysical immutability of God should be conceived. As unity has been conceived as pure simplicity, so immutability has been conceived as rigid sameness of being. The fundamental difficulty in the two cases is the same. Just as there is no way of passing from simplicity to complexity or from unity to plurality, so there is no way of passing from identity to change or from immutability to motion. If God be thought of as changeless substance, there would be no way of accounting for the advancing cosmic movement. Changes in the world must be due to changes in its underlying cause. An unchanging cause could produce only an unchanging effect. And the changelessness of such a cause and such an effect would lie not in any rigid monotony of being, but, rather, in the constancy of the law that governed its activity or its states. A law, however, no matter how constant it may be, has no ontological existence. For a truly real and immutable principle we must, then, go beyond the idea of an unchanging substance and that of a constant law. We must ascend to the personal plane and find it in the unique power of self-consciousness by means of which the mind differentiates itself from its states and activities and constitutes itself one and the same. It is in this marvelous capacity of self-identity, characteristic of free intelligence, that we have the key, and only key, to the divine immutability. Such self-identity is entirely [p. 317] compatible with change. Indeed, it is only through changing activity that it is realized. Immutability is thus completely dissociated from immobility.
Personality is characterized by unity, self-identity, and the power to know. The last-named in the case of Deity is commonly supposed to take the form of omniscience. That the power to know is not incompatible with absoluteness, has already been made clear. Bather would the lack of this power be a limitation. But whether omniscience implies a knowledge of everything without any exception whatsoever is a question that has been much debated.
So far as faith itself is concerned, all that it requires is that God know all that he needs to know as moral Governor of the universe. He needs to know the hearts of all his free creatures that he may judge them aright. He needs to know all the forces of the universe, all his created beings good and evil, so that he may guide them toward the realization of his ultimate goal and so that he may direct the affairs of the world in such a way that men may place implicit confidence in him. He needs to know all that is involved in the task of caring for his creatures and in that of redeeming those who place their trust in him. Nothing can, therefore, be hidden from him which pertains to> the welfare of his children. Such are the motives that lie back of the scriptural assertions relative to the range of the divine knowledge. “The very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matt. 10. 30). All things are naked and laid open [p. 318] before the eyes of him with whom we have to do (Heb. 4. 13). “The eyes of the Lord are in every place, keeping watch upon the evil and the good” (Prov. 15. 3). “Sheol and Abaddon are before the Lord: How much more then the hearts of the children of men!” (Prov. 15.11). “O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. Thou knowest my down-sitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off” (Psa. 139. 1-2). “Great is our Lord, and mighty in power; his understanding is infinite” (Psa. 147. 5). “The darkness and the light are both alike” to him (Psa. 139. 11). He declareth “the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done” (Isa. 46. 10). “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom aud the knowledge of God!” (Rom. 11. 33.)
In all these passages the divine knowledge is viewed from the standpoint of its relation to the moral government of the world and to human redemption. It is from this point of view alone that faith is interested in the divine omniscience. But while it is only a practical omniscience that faith affirms, the difficulties involved in conceiving it are virtually the same as those involved in absolute omniscience. They have to do chiefly with two points r the divine knowledge of our finite experiences and the divine foreknowledge of free acts.
Faith would seem to require that God have a direct knowledge of our physical pain and suffering and. other experiences that we cannot ascribe to him as an infinite and purely spiritual Being. We understand these experiences in others, because we ourselves have [p. 319] had them. But apart from our own experience of them, we could not know them. The contents of the sense of sight would be entirely unknowable to us if we ourselves did not have organs of vision. And the same holds true of sense-experience in general. How, then, can we ascribe a knowledge of such experiences to God? The only way would seem to be to attribute to him modes of knowing that we cannot comprehend. To say that our experiences are also his and that he consequently knows them, would be to fall into a pantheistic confusion of the divine with the human that would befuddle rather than clarify thought. On the other hand, to deny to God a knowledge of our finite experiences and to say with Spinoza [18] that there is about as much correspondence between divine and human knowledge as there is between the constellation Dog and the barking animal by that name would be to establish a gulf between the human and the divine that would make God of very little religious value. Faith requires a Divine Being who is touched with a feeling of our infirmities; and that we do not understand how he comes to know these infirmities is no reason for rejecting the belief that he has such knowledge.
The divine foreknowledge of free acts does not stand so vitally related to faith as does the divine knowledge of our finite experiences. Foreknowledge of an evil act, for instance, would not be of much value unless it should lead to an effort to prevent it, and in that case it would not be foreknowledge. To deny to God foreknowledge of free acts, would not [p. 320] necessarily be inconsistent with, his omniscience. For as omnipotence does not imply the power to do the nondoable, so omniscience does not imply the power to know the unknowable. If foreknowledge of free acts is a self-contradictory conception, there is no reason why such knowledge should be ascribed to God. But that it is a contradiction cannot be proved. All that can be shown is that we do not know how such foreknowledge is possible. We can know the future only on the basis of its connection with the present. But a free act is a totally new beginning, and as such is not represented by anything before it occurs. Hence we have no way of foreknowing it. But that it is absolutely incapable of being foreknown would be an unwarranted assertion. God may have a way we do not understand of foreknowing free acts just as we believe he has a way of knowing our inner experiences although he has not experienced them.
Some Calvinistic writers have sought to relieve the difficulty connected with the divine foreknowledge by maintaining that “an act may be certain as to its occurrence and yet free as to the mode of its occurrence.” [19] In other words, contingency is not essential to free agency. An act may be rendered certain by a divine decree and yet may be voluntarily wrought by a free agent. But how God could render an act certain without necessitating it is as much of a metaphysical mystery, indeed, a greater one than that involved in the foreknowledge of free acts. If Calvin is right in saying that God “foresees future events [p. 321] only in consequence of his decree that they should happen,” [20] it would seem that the decree must carry with it a causal efficiency that excludes free agency in their production. Objective certainty cannot, so far as we can see, be combined with true freedom.
Still, in spite of the difficulties connected with the divine foreknowledge of free acts, it has been customary to affirm it. But the reasons for the affirmation are not altogether convincing. The one on which chief reliance was placed in the past was that drawn from the predictive element in Scripture. But this argument has been greatly weakened, if not completely undermined, by biblical criticism. There is hardly a specific prediction in the Bible that requires divine foreknowledge of free acts for its explanation. Another consideration urged in favor of such fore-knowledge is the greater security it gives the believer. If God foreknows everything, he will never be taken by surprise, not even by the acts of evil men. Hence we may trust him all the more securely. But while there may be some religious value in this line of thought, the margin within which human freedom moves is so limited that, even though its acts cannot he positively foreknown, to infinite insight it is hardly possible that they should contain much in the way of surprise, and certainly to one possessed of infinite resources of wisdom and power their unexpectedness would constitute no serious practical problem nor would there be in it any valid ground for appreciably lessening one’s confidence in him.
[p. 322]
A somewhat more substantial consideration in support of divine foreknowledge is found in the impressiveness of the conception and in the relativity of time. That all reality, future as well as present and past, is open to the divine gaze, that time is relative to the knowing mind, that it offers no barrier to the divine knowledge, but is itself dependent for its existence upon the divine consciousness and will this is a view that seems more unified and more acceptable to faith than one that withdraws a considerable tract of the future from the range of the divine vision. But how a knowledge of the contingent future is possible, we cannot say, no matter whether we hold to the ideality or reality of time. All that we can say is that God may have an intuitive grasp of the future that transcends our human ways of knowing. Future, past, and present may for him constitute a kind of “eternal now”; but, if he thus knows the future, he must nevertheless know it as future and not as present.
In addition to unity, self-identity, and the power to know, personality is characterized by freedom or self-determination. Freedom is sometimes identified with spontaneity, and in this sense it would necessarily be an attribute of the Absolute insofar as it is active, for the Absolute by its very nature is independent and acts from within itself. But personal freedom means something more than this. It means the power of contrary choice, it means conscious and purposive action. It means that God stands in no necessary relation to the present world, that its creation [p. 323] was a voluntary act, that he might have created some other kind of a world in its stead. Here it is that we have the dividing line between theism and pantheism. According to pantheism the world is a part of God or a necessary consequence of his nature. According to theism God is a free Being and might have willed not to create such a world as this. Freedom in this sense is involved in the idea of the divine personality.
A difficulty, however, arises when we attempt to conceive the relation of the divine will to the divine omniscience. Does not omniscience in a perfect being exclude the power of contrary choice? Would not such a being be determined in his every act by his knowledge of the outcome, since his character would require him to choose the line of action which would yield the greatest good? This difficulty, says John Miley, [21] “is far deeper than the usual question of consistency between foreknowledge and freedom, which concerns only the relation of foreknowledge in God to freedom in man, while the question in hand concerns the consistency of omniscience and freedom, both being in God himself.”
In meeting this difficulty it should be noted that omniscience is not a passive mirroring of an objective reality, that it is an achievement and as such implies free agency. Without the divine will there would be no divine knowledge. Fundamentally, omniscience and freedom involve each other rather than otherwise. Then, again, it should be noted that as a motive-power the outcome of a line of action is dependent [p. 324] not only upon knowledge, but also upon appreciation, and appreciation is dependent upon the will and affections rather than upon the intellect. The fact is that we cannot estimate the value of any particular thing apart from the co-operation of our entire nature. It is, then, a mistake to suppose that God has a pure foreknowledge of the future and its possible values, apart from the activity of his will, and that this foreknowledge necessarily determines his action. Appreciative foreknowledge is impossible without the co-operation of the will and the affections. In such a case, consequently, the intellect does not determine the will any more than the will the intellect. Furthermore, the eternity of the divine foreknowledge or omniscience does not condemn the divine will to rigidity. The content of an omniscient mind may in a sense perhaps remain the same. But such a mind must, distinguish between the future and the present; it must take account of the changing world order, and insofar as it does this it leaves the way open to such free, plastic, and living adjustments of the divine will to human need as are implied in the doctrine of the divine Fatherhood. Between freedom and omniscience we find, therefore, no antithesis. The two imply each other and are essential attributes of the one absolute Person.
Persona est naturae rationabilis individua substantia. Liber tie Persona et Duabus Naturis, chap. III. ↩︎
Cf . C. C. J. Webb, i&id., p. 65. ↩︎
h. Steinmann, Die Frage nach Gott, pp. 78-142. ↩︎
A Death in the Desert. ↩︎
The Idea of God, by C. A. Beckwith. ↩︎
B. P. Bowne, Theism, p. 162. ↩︎
Die Christliche Glaubenslehre, I, p. 504. ↩︎
Hegelianism and Personality, 1887, pp. 216f. ↩︎
Die Christliche Glaubenslehre, I, p. 504. ↩︎
The Life of Schleiermacher, as unfolded in his autobiography and letters. Translated by Frederica Rowan. Vol. II, p. 283. ↩︎
Cf. B. P. Bowne, Metaphysics (Rev. ed.), p. 117; Theism, pp. 164f. ↩︎
Cf. H. Lotze, Microcosmus, II, pp. 685ff.; B. P. Bowne, Theism, PP. 167f. ↩︎
Cf. H. H. Wendt, System der Christlichen Lehre, p. 102. ↩︎
On the Trinity, Bk. V, Chap. IX. English translation by A. W. Haddan, p. 156. ↩︎
For an excellent statement of this position in its relation to current philosophical theories see an article by Professor G. A. Wilson on “The Search for the Concrete” in the Monist, 1929, pp. 80-98. ↩︎
The Critique of the Pure Reason, 1st ed., p. 402; Max Miiller’s translation, p. 324. ↩︎
See my Religious Teaching of the Old Testament, pp. 68-92. ↩︎
Ethics, I, p. 17, Scholium. ↩︎
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, I, p. 401. ↩︎
Institutes, Bk. III, Chap. 23, Par. 6; English translation, Vol. II, pp. 169f. ↩︎
Systematic Theology, I, pp. 189f. ↩︎