Author: Charles Hartshorne
[p. 230]
Immobility is an imperfection . . . dramatic movement and tragedy are born of the fullness, not of the poverty of life. . . . Creation of the world implies movement in God, it is a dramatic event in the divine life.
Nicolas Berdyaev, in The Destiny of Man
A possible objection to the temporalistic view of God defended in this book is that it conflicts with the classical idea of creation as creation ex nihilo. One can no longer contrast God as purely eternal with his creation as temporal, and if God is to be viewed as essentially temporal, one can no more admit a beginning of the temporal as such than of God himself. Does not the world then become a second primordial and everlasting entity over against rather than created by God? The answer is that the question is full of ambiguities. “The world,” if that means the system of atoms and stars we see, or anything in any particular respect like it, is not everlasting but a created product. It is created, to be sure, not out of nothing — whatever that would mean — but out of an earlier world and its potentialities for transformation. This earlier world was similarly created. The world as preserving its identity through all these transformations is something infinitely protean and infinitely endowed with power to assimilate variety into unity. Indeed, the world in this sense is identical with God, not a second entity. God is the selfidentical individuality of the world somewhat as a man is the self-identical individuality of his ever changing system [p. 231] of atoms. The only everlasting (and primordial) entity upon which God acts in creation is himself; all individuals, other than himself, which are influenced by his action are less than everlasting, or at least less than primordial. To contrast the world as creation to God as creator is one of three things: it is to contrast the multitude of non-primordial individuals with the single primordial individual which alone makes of this multitude a single inclusive individual with self-identity throughout all time; or it is to contrast the concrete totality of God’s being — his “consequent nature” (Whitehead) — as at a given world moment with the abstract essence of God as purely the same at all times, all accidents being left out of account; or finally it is to contrast God at one moment with himself as in a preceding moment about to create for himself an appropriate subsequent state.
The term creator can perfectly well be used by one who denies creation ex nihilo. For to “make the world” out of a preceding world is not only no abuse of language but the very meaning that language supports. All making we ever encounter is transformation, enrichment of something already there. The word creation is standard usage for all the more exalted examples of such transformation, for instance, for composing music, writing poetry, imagining striking characters in a novel. Of course divine creation is intended to be a unique case, but the uniqueness of God is his maximality. He makes on a supreme, that is cosmic, scale; he makes the whole, not just certain parts; and he makes not for a limited time but during infinite time. These functions are strictly unique and unrivaled, not a whit the less so because the making is still transformation, enrichment. And it is not as if the given world which is utilized in creation were simply imposed upon God from without as something alien, for the given world too is his [p. 232] creation, though made from an earlier world which he created out of an earlier one, and soon. The highest authority in traditional theology, Thomas Aquinas, admitted that this conception is open to no objections except those derived from revelation. And since Protestant views of revelation render these objections thoroughly questionable, the issue reduces to the Roman Catholic issue, which is irrelevant to the subject of this chapter. Thus there is no reason why the “creator” need be supposed to have created out of nothing.
From another point of view theologians ought not to have been so averse to the notion of’transformative creation: For they were committed to this notion in another guise. Namely, creation was not really out of nothing, but out of the potentialities, essences, or natures of all things, as embraced eternally in the divine essence. These were transformed or transferred from their status of mere possibilities, in which some of them, the uncreated but possible creatures, remained, into the status of actualities, whatever the difference between the one status and the other may be. We are more inclined today to say that the natures of things which come into existence are really created de novo, utilizing only the natures of other things already in existence. Thus there is more genuine creation in this view than in the old. For there is hardly any meaning to the idea that God “made” what is (on the usual older account) part of his necessary essence, the eternal essences of things. Just in knowing himself he knew his possible effects. On the new view God chooses not only what is to be but even what is to be a definite possibility. Of course he could not have chosen to make definitely impossible what he has made definitely possible, but he could have left possibility indefinite in certain respects, so that there would have been ho truth about either the possibility or impossibility of the [p. 233] thing in question. Descartes’s famous view that God made possibilities as well as actualities by a free act of will may thus be given an acceptable interpretation. This is an example, out of many, of the power of second-type theism to reconcile age-old oppositions of doctrine.
The final defense of the idea of creation not ex nihilo but out of a pre-existing state of affairs is that the idea of a beginning of time is self-contradictory, as Aristotle pointed out. Even a beginning is a change, and all change requires something changing that does not come to exist through that same change. The beginning of the world would have to happen to something other than the world, something which as the subject of happening would be in a time that did not begin with the world. God as changing furnishes such a subject, since he is in one respect (in Whitehead’s terms, his primordial nature) ever identical, in another (his consequent nature) ever partly novel, and yet also— by the indestructibility of the past —containing all that he ever was as part of what he at any subsequent time becomes.
One might, of course, argue that a beginning or first state of the temporal process would not be a change from anything anterior, and so would require no subject of change. But at least it would realize a possibility, which however, as not separated from it in time, would, selfcontradictorily, have to coexist with the actuality. Also the first state would have nothing in common with later states, it would have no memory, achieve no antecedent purpose, etc. Would it be anything we could mean by a “state”? As Edmund Gosse’s father saw, God could not have created a first state of the world that looked like a first state, Each animal would have appeared as if it had come from parents (except in a few quasi-comic details, such as the absence of an umbilicus) , the hills as if formed by geological [p. 234] forces, etc. A first moment of time would be an ontological lie through and through, a joke of existence upon itself. True, the alternative is the—to us unimaginable— infinite regress of past events, but all attempts to show this idea to be self-contradictory seem to have failed. We cannot “ complete the synthesis,” starting from the present; but the universe did not start from the present, and, as Couturat, in his book on the mathematical infinite, seems to me to show, the mathematical idea of infinity is not a mere successive synthesis, in spite of Kant.
It is worth noting that the equivalent of the contrast between primordial and consequent natures is inevitable in any theology, the question being only whether it shall be a temporal distinction. For God is always to be considered in two aspects: (1) in himself, or apart from having created just this world as it now exists, or any other particular world that might be thought of (and both medieval and contemporary logic agree that the details of the world might have been otherwise than they are) ; and (2) as having in fact created the particular world in question. ‘Thus there is God in his essential, and God in his accidental, functions. The only way such distinctions can be made conceivable is in terms of time; the essential being the purely eternal, and the accidental being the temporal or changing, aspects of the divine. The unity of God is preserved in principle in the same way as that of a human person, but here, as always, the difference is between a partial anda maximum realization of the principle. God identifies himself as the same in basic purposes through all the details of the past and all the general traits of the future (the farther in the future the more general) ; whereas we finite creatures have only an extremely partial memory of even the limited time during which we have existed, and are densely ignorant of what is ordained for the future, Tie, Divine SeLr-Creation [p. 235] that is to say, of the partial limits set in advance to the freedom of the creatures. The accidental functions of God — without which he could be of no importance to the accidental being, man — were a scandal in traditional theology. The world embodies God’s glory, but according to Von Hiigel, quoting some Scholastic, it embodies his “accidental glory.” That creates a dilemma. If the glory is accidental and is God’s, then God has accidental properties. If it is not God’s (or is not accidental) , then how is it God’s glory (or the glory which he has in relation to the accidental)? Apparently, the glory belongs to the world, to the contingent, not to God!
Thomas Aquinas actually goes so far (some other Schoolmen do not) as to say that the relation of God to the contingent world is a relation with respect to the world but not with respect to God. How could one make clearer that Thomism, whatever it is, is not a religious doctrine? In it God says to man, “I love you, but so far as I am concerned I am not related to you in any way, my relation of love to you is literally nothing to me.”
Yet what Aquinas says here is in a sense true. There is such a thing as an external relation, a relation which “ does nothing ”’ to one of its terms, or even to both of them. The doctrine that relations are exclusively internal, that every object of thought involves every other, has been sufficiently criticized in the last half-century. It too is an oversimple extreme. But external relations are subject to two conditions, the neglect of which constitutes the opposite and equally oversimple extreme. First, every relation is internal to something, either to one at least of its terms or to some entity additional to these. Second, the entity to which the relation is internal is a concrete whole of which the externally related entities are abstract aspects.
[p. 236] Let us take the second point first. If I think of whiteness, whiteness is not made anything other than it was before by this relation to my consciousness, and this relation is thus external to whiteness, but my consciousness is altered to just the extent of the relation. It is clear in this instance that the externally related term, whiteness, is abstract and the concrete term, my consciousness of the whiteness, is inclusive of the relation, is an internally related term. Or, suppose we consider the relation between the whiteness and my personal identity as a certain human individual. I can enter into this relation without becoming a numeri cally different individual. But I cannot do so without alteration in the concrete state which I as such an individual enjoy. Had I thought of blueness instead of whiteness, I might have been the same individual, but this means that I might have enjoyed the same past (if one admits, as I hold we must, a contingent relation between past and present), and I might even in the present have had the same general, more or less abstract, characteristics, but my total concrete being would have been slightly different.
Thus external relations are possible only on condition that the terms to which the relations are external should be abstract and relatively unindividual. “This red object” is nothing to “redness” as such, which would be the same for thought without the object. The abstract is what is not meant to be wholly determinate in its relations, or indeed in its quality. Redness as such or in the abstract is a somewhat vague conception. If one substitutes for it “the red of all objects exactly the same in color as this one,” it then becomes a question whether any other objects with exactly the same color are so much as possible. After all, any other objects would be in different circumstances, How then could exactly the same color result? Can our memory and powers of comparison and imagination verify [p. 237] such absolute sameness? It is hard to see how they could do so, and hence, so far at least as is at all obvious, the abstract entities which we can detach from their relations must be regarded as unindividual, not wholly determinate, in nature.
Let us apply this to God. If there is a legitimate way of taking God abstractly, if there is an aspect of God objectively distinguished from God as a whole and hence abstract, then this aspect may be related to the remaining aspects, and to the world, by a relation which does not enter into the being of the abstract aspect. Now as we have seen, second-type theism distinguishes between the immutable abstract quality of being benevolent and the concrete state of experience constituted by this benevolence as particularized in relation to definite objects. Of the former what Thomas says is certainly true. Not merely that we conceive God in an abstract aspect, but that he himself must distinguish between (1) his eternal and unchanging aspect, his purpose as laid down before all the worlds, or rather before each and every world, and (2) the more and more particular purposes which mark the approach to, and (3) the achievements of purpose which mark arrival at, any given point of time. These distinctions are, for secondtype theism, what is objectively meant by ascribing purpose to God, not in the least merely our subjective way of conceiving purpose. And only by means of an abstract or indeterminate aspect, contrasted to a concrete, determinate one, can an individual be conceived as identical through changes.
It is, then, the meaning of the universal, the abstract, as such, that it is capable of external relations, that it can be identified without considering all the relational contexts, the concrete cases, in which it might be embodied. But on the other hand (to return to our other requirement for [p. 238] external relations) , the relations of abstractions are made possible by the fact that both universals and particulars are embraced in, or are internal to, concrete experiences, or individual events, as wholes. Otherwise, such external relations would be self-contradictory. For an individual relation is a single entity which is nothing without its terms, and hence its entire unitary actuality must include that of each of its terms and must qualify some whole of which the external terms are parts or aspects. This whole may be one of the terms, as inclusive of the other (my body as related to its height) , or a still more inclusive whole (as when my height and my weight are considered as related by both belonging to me), perhaps the entire universe. The point is that a relation between several things is not several things, but one thing, and yet it includes its terms in this unity. My-love-for-Rachel is not a mere aggregate of me and Rachel, nor is it a mere abstract general relation of “love” between us, but a single unique something of which both of us are internal essential constituents. The interaction between two molecules is slightly peculiar to those molecules, yet it is one thing even though they are two, or rather, it is one thing with various aspects. In this oneness is expressed the unity of the world, All relations, internal or external, involve a substantial unity embracing the relata. (Whitehead’s perception of this requirement is one of his points of superiority to most pluralists, with whose defense of external relations as such he heartily agrees.)
If the relation of the absolute to the world really fell wholly outside the absolute, then this relation would necessarily fall within some further and genuinely single entity which embraced both the absolute and the world and the relations between them — in other words, within an entity greater than the absolute. Or else the world itself would [p. 239] possess as its property the relation-to-God, and since this relation is nothing without God, the world, in possessing it, would possess God as integral part of its own property, and thus the world would itself be the entity inclusive of itself and the absolute. On any showing, something will be more than an immutable absolute which excludes its own relations to the mutable. It is therefore necessary to distinguish between the immutable and the absolute, if by absolute is meant the “most real,” inclusive, or concrete being. The immutable can only be an abstract aspect of God, who asa concrete whole must contain both this aspect and its relations to the novel and contingent. The tissue of relations between the world and the immutable aspect of God constitutes a sublime pattern inclusive of all that is, whether mutable or immutable, and therefore cannot possibly be less than the pattern of God himself in his total being or “consequent nature,” or as involving both a necessary essence and an infinity of accidents. This total pattern — here we must, I think, agree with Thomism and disagree with Spinoza and Bradley or Royce — cannot possibly be unchanging or internal to anything immutable.
Thus when Thomists say “God,” they really mean, we should suppose (though over their protest) , “God in one aspect,” and when they speak of the relations of God to the creatures they mean “as embraced in God in his total reality, though we prefer not to call this total reality God.” If this is understood, then nearly every difference between Thomistic theism and that, say, of Whitehead, disappears. For instance, the primordial or abstract aspect of God, as _ conceived by Whitehead, is “infinite . . . free, complete . . . eternal.” But even the “consequent” aspect of , God is in a sense “infinite.” For, since at all times God" enjoys an infinite past, the wealth of happiness which he possesses is never less than infinite. Though not completely [p. 240] beyond tragedy or the possibility of increase in happiness (nor the risk of falling short of the maximal possible increase) , yet is he superior to us in happiness, with a unique, incomparable superiority, as the gap between the finite and the infinite is unique. (How an infinite past can yet be added to will be considered in The Universal Orthodoxy.)
Thomists say that finite minds, in knowing, acquire a relation to the object, while the object acquires none to them. From this they conclude that external relations are possible, although the external relation they wish to represent by this analogy is the exact opposite of a relation of object to knower, but is that of the knower (God) to the known! But apart from the amazing (I had almost said brazen) paradox of this upside-down analogy, it is also to be objected that the external relation of the object to the human knower is possible only because the latter, as internally related, is the more inclusive or concrete entity. ‘This is seen in the clearest case of knowledge we have, that of knowledge of the past through immediate or true memory. This is the one case in which we have equally good knowledge of knower and known, and hence the best chance of grasping their relation. The past in immediate memory is not outside the knowing present, but is integral with it—if, that is, memory is really direct intuition at all; and, however much unconscious inference may be mixed with apparent memory, there are grave difficulties in the view that all memory is really inference, not direct apprehension. The present is here the absolute, the more concrete and inclusive, the past the partially abstract, exclusive — and immutable!
Of course Thomists say that it is the weakness of human knowledge that forces us to conform to the object instead of conforming the object to ourselves. God, in knowing, [p. 241] does the latter, the opposite of what we do. He does not adjust himself to contingent objects, but adjusts them to his own purposes. This is true — of the abstract or longrun purposes of God — except that what actually does the adjusting is not the mere abstract nature alone, but the whole concrete deity who, in molding objects which he knows and loves, also makes for himself a new state inclusive of the new states of the object. There is nothing whatsoever in all our experience to furnish the slightest basis for the idea of a knower who as a whole or in his concreteness would be unqualified by his relations to what he knows. Here the resort to experience which, in some respects, is well carried out in Thomism, simply disappears, and we are told that it is the relations of the object of human knowledge which are analogous to God’s relations as knower —a clear substantiation, it seems to me, of the accusation often made against Thomism that it treats God “as an object, not asa subject.”
Nevertheless, we should respect a doctrine which becomes profoundly defensible the moment a rather simple device of reinterpretation is applied to it. There may very well be a divine Something which is immutable, unaffected by its inclusion in ever more concrete relational contexts — the primordial abstract essence of the uniquely complete, and hence both necessary and accidental, being, God, the ever changing, and hence, as necessary aspect of this perpetual change, forever identical with itself.
Of course, inferential, symbolic, indirect knowledge, “knowledge about,” not “by acquaintance,” has as its object something relatively external to the knower; but (1) this knowledge is admittedly and in principle incapable of perfection, clearly not the model for omniscience; and (2) even this knowledge conforms the knower to the known, although in a limited, indirect way. To think [p. 242] adequately about six objects I must set up some representative of the number six in my own experience, such as an image of six dots. Mathematical symbols involve an essential element of abstract or structural similarity between the symbolic sets and the ideas thought about.
It seems almost self-evident that a wholly necessary and immutable being cannot know the contingent and chang. ing. Grosseteste wrestles with the problem, How can God know the future—which is contingent — though his knowledge, like all his being, is necessary?? (The usual Scholastic doctrine, if I am not mistaken, is that God, simply in knowing his own essence, knows all things, presumably the contingent as contingent, the necessary as necessary, the merely possible as possible, though in the essence there is nothing but sheer actuality!) Grosseteste tries to throw light on the paradox by distinguishing between conditional and absolute necessity. Thus if I saw Socrates Tun yesterday, this seeing followed from or was necessitated by the running, not vice versa. So God’s knowledge of the contingent is necessary in the sense that it is impossible God should be ignorant of it, granted that it occurs. (Yet God, being impassive, is not determined by what he knows!) But of course the presupposition is that Socrates might not have run, and that, if he had not, I should not have seen him run; and similarly, if an event known by God is contingent, then it might not occur (or might not have occurred), and should it not occur (or have occurred) , then God would not have known it as occurring. That is, he would have known otherwise than he actually does. If p (the contingent event) implies q (God’s knowledge), and not-p (the contradictory of the contingent event) implies not-q (God as not knowing the event as existent, since in this case it would not exist to be known) , then if not-p is possible, not-q is possible — by any known [p. 243] logic. But not-p must be possible, or p is not contingent. Grosseteste seems to admit this when he goes on to say that ordinary logical ideas, being based on temporal phenomena, do not apply to God, who knows all things in the simplicity of eternity, in which, apparently, contradictions may be realized. The only other course Grosseteste could have taken here is to deny, with the Thomists, that God’s knowledge is God’s knowledge, that is, that his cognitive relation to objects is anything at all to him, whether it be know] edge of the possible as possible or of the actual as actual, or possible knowledge of something as actual which is possibly actual. In short, God’s doing and knowing are nothing, bare downright nothing, in terms of his own reality. Believe in this as a solution who can!
It is all very simple, provided one gives up the notion that God as simple (and changeless) is the whole of deity, instead of merely the abstract side of a being greater than any one-sided conception can grasp, a being both changing and stable, both passive yet secure from all corruption, and in both respects infinitely more illustrative of the categories employed than any other being.
It may seem a troublesome paradox that the absolute as the “complete,” and therefore changeless, should be held less than the concrete, changing, and forever incomplete whole.t But this is because there is an ambiguity in the idea of completeness. It might mean to lack nothing that is possible. But of course God’s completeness was supposed to be more than the full realization of antecedent possibility; for God was above all possibility. Yet was it not overlooked that these properties are possessed by the realm of possibility itself, taken as a whole? This is not itself possible, it just is, And it is complete, since “ all that is possible” can lack no possibility. But the realm of possibility, for a theist, is the power of God, God as able to do, rather [p. 244] than as doing. In God, merely as able to do, no item of possible being is missing. But, in another sense, no item is present in God so conceived. For what is present is mere potency, without a single item of actuality, except the actuality of God’s ability, conceived in abstraction from its determinate exercise. Thus God as mere power is both everything and nothing. He is everything in the deficient form of potency, nothing in the form of actuality. Hence the “complete” realm of possibility is yet infinitely incomplete. And no other way of conceiving absolute completeness is possible, since it is the essence of actuality to be nonexhaustive of potency, even though the most trivial item of actuality is in some sense more than the most tremendous possibility which remains merely that. Other authors have pointed out the troubles Scholastics had over the distinction between essence and existence. That the distinction is really that between the determinate and the indeterminatebut-determinable, and that the primordial completeness of God consists in his containing the ultimate dimensions of determinateness (rather than all possible determinations) , could never be clearly indicated by a doctrine which attempted to transcend time. For time is the way in which essence and existence, possibility and actuality, are related, as space is the way actuality is related to actuality. In God’s primordial power is no determinate lack, but also no determinate possessions.[1]
God alone is “complete” in potency. But completeness in actuality (“pure actuality”) is meaningless, and the attempt to conceive it only results in a concept whose object must be less than the least of actualities because it is not actual at all. “The most inclusive actual whole” enjoys the only completeness that is conceivable beyond the mere completeness of the potential as such. On the one hand we have that to which nothing determinate or actual [p. 245] can be added because it must be conceived in abstraction from determination or actuality; on the other hand there is that to which infinite new determinations can forever be added, though none can ever be outside it. These are the only totalities of being we can conceive. A worthy conception of God regards both of them as unique properties of deity.
The notion that the immutable is also the determinate is the great error of the Greeks, and results partly from their not having seen that the peculiar definiteness of mathematical ideas is due to the fact that their indefiniteness, though infinite, is uniform and for certain purposes can be neglected. Two and two are definitely four, but two what, and four what? Nothing could be more indefinit two apples, two dots on paper, two children, two atoms, two ideas, two lines, two colors. Indefiniteness could scarcely be more extreme, but the point is that the other ideas involved are equally indefinite, and hence the interrelations of the ideas can be specified with complete definiteness, or completely uniform or homogeneous indefiniteness, as you wish to put it. The dimensions of the ultimate degree of indefiniteness might almost define the mathematical, and the immutable absolute arrived at in this way is nothing but the bare outline of possible actuality, the mere anatomy of God as able to do rather than as doing. Everything which is in the least particular, such as “light blue,” or “sour,” we have no reason for regarding as eternal, not because there was or could ever be a time when blue was not blue, or when blue was green, but because there may have been a time when blue was the subject of no truth whatever, since no such item was included in the whole of reality, or in the content of omniscience. Not that it was then true that “blue is not included in reality,” but that it is now true that the whole of what was [p. 246] then real failed to contain blue, since no color which then was real was what we now know as blue. (In the foregoing Lam departing somewhat from what appears to be Whitehead’s doctrine of eternal objects.)
I am aware of the axiom that a cause cannot impart what it lacks; but I know of no experiential basis for this axiom that will bear examination. It simply denies creative interaction, and experience exhibits nothing else than such interaction. No cause has precisely, in advance, what it imparts. And if it did, why impart it? Why the effect, if the whole form is already in the cause? The only answer must be that to the form as possible is added “ actuality,” which however is formally nothing, or that to the form as in one thing is added the same form asin another. But this duplication itself must add some form or quality not in the cause, or it is useless.
One may well hesitate to base a doctrine of divine creation upon an axiom that there is no creation, save as mechanical passing about of pre-existent predicates.
But if God creates new forms additional even to his own being, is he not potential and actual, “teacher and taught,” in the same respect at the same time? Not at all, for the potentiality of the form (a less determinate form) is temporally earlier, and its actuality (which includes the earlier indeed, but as such, as the immortal past, and so as constitutinga different moment of time) is temporally later. To ask for a further “cause ” of the actualization of a potency than the power to achieve such actualization is merely to suppose that being is prior to becoming, the very question at issue. Similarly question-begging is the notion that the final cause at which the actualization or change aims has to be “there” to be aimed at, and so actual already. A purpose, as we have seen, is indefinite by contrast with any of its realizations, and the ultimate purpose (to create [p. 247] beauty and the enjoyment of unity in contrast) can never be “reached ” in the sense of exhaustively actualized, for it is inexhaustible by any determinate multitude, even infinite. The Thomistic query, Is not actuality prior to potentiality rather than vice versa? suggests the retort, Why should either be the case? Is up prior to down or is down prior to up? Prior to both actuality and potentiality there may be “existence,” as having the two contrasting modes of achieved actuality and power to achieve further actuality. This power exists, it does not merely have power to exist as a power to exist. What may have misled some thinkers here is the truth that there is indeed such a thing as the potentiality of existing, as when we say that a man is the actualization of a prior potency, which potency must have existed, not just have been possible. But to say existence is prior to potentiality of existence may only mean that there must be some existent whose power to create further existence has never itself “ come into” existence, this ungenerated existent being indeed that into which things “come” in coming to exist (see chapter 8). Such a presupposed or necessary existent will not for all that be purely actual, to exist as an individual essentially involving an identity of selfhood which may be preserved through more than one course of possible experience and action. The actuality of a person is in essence impure, since it is a blend of the having actually done and experienced (something definite) and the about to do and experience something not yet wholly defined out of what is possible. To say that this is not the essence of individuality, since actuality is in principle prior to potency, is an assertion which, in my opinion, has yet to get beyond the assertion stage, and is so far from self-evident that its falsity is, I suggest, apparent upon careful inspection of the context of the problem, provided one [p. 248] is not under hypnotic control of what past thinkers have said. If it were impossible to conceive perfection, unsurpassability, of existent individuality defined as essentially a blend of actual existence and potential existence, then one would have to choose between atheism and first-type theory —a hard choice. But the conception is not impossible.
It is notable that though an externally related term is indeterminate and “ unindividual,” this is only so in the sense in which the maximally determinate or most individual thing is the enduring entity as at a given time, or as integrating past and (indeterminate) future in one state. Taking the enduring thing abstractly, as identical at different times, neglecting the increments of content coming to the thing at particular times, one still has something which is individual to the thing in the sense of not belonging to other enduring things. Now the abstract, externally related, aspect of God is individual to him in this sense, and furthermore it is unlike all other externally related yet individual entities in being identifiable by a definition. Itis the only “ perfect lovingness,” the only “ omniscience,” there is or can be, and any instance of it (taken as a universal) will simply be some state or other of the same enduring individual, God. The reason for this is that the perfect or maximal case of love is not a mere species under the genus of loving individuals, but the presupposed standard of what it means to love, love without negation of itself, sheer love; in short, not the genus plus a specific difference, but the genus without the limitations of the specific cases. Yet it is not the genus as a mere subsisting abstraction, for perfect love is by no means the common class character of loving individuals. As we shall see later (in chapter g) only a real perfectly loving individual can provide the concrete base for the abstraction [p. 249] of sheer lovingness. God is indeed “above genus and species,” and is the only individual distinguishable from other individuals by a definition. But the tradition was involved in the paradox of denying any distinction (in the “simple” nature of God) between the abstract property of perfect love, and the perfectly loving one as more than merely abstract. The paradox disappears if one recognizes two grades of individuality, in God as in all concrete realities: the abstract or outline individuality which the thing has indifferently at diverse times of its history, and the fullness of individuality which the thing has in a given present, as containing its history up to date and in outline foreshadowing its future. “Divinity” as a property is not identical with God (though only God has this property) , for it is by abstraction from determinate states of himself that one is aware simply of the common character of all his states, minus the infinite richness of detailed contents of his determinate enjoyments and sympathies. Thus one more paradox proves to be the result of the inadequacy, not of the human mind as such, but of the orthodox theological tradition.
Those who ask, Is God personal? might perhaps agree to. define a person as an individual conscious being. Now were it in every sense true that God is not in a genus, then in no sense could it be true that God is an individual. The first-type notion of pure actuality, a being which is actually all that it is possible for it to be, a being that comes, therefore, under no genus of alternative cases of which it is one, is not the idea of an individual. Between the actus purus, which is the colorless and formless pure and simple, and the individual God who made, and knows as having been made, individual human beings and other creatures, when he might have made something else, and might then have known that something else as having been made, as actual, [p. 250] there is a great gulf, For second-type doctrine God is truly individual and personal. He may indeed be said to come under no genus, but only because he is, as individual, his own genus or principle of alternative states, by which he is differentiated generically from other types of individuals and individually from himself as he —and only he — might have been.
For an extended discussion of the indeterminateness of possibility as such see my essay, “Santayana’s Doctrine of Essence,” in George Santayana, “Library of Living Philosophers,” edited by Paul A. Schilpp (North-western University, 1941) . ↩︎