It is well-known in philosophy & theology circles that, for thinkers such as Pseudo-Dionysius and his followers (such as Thomas Aquinas), we cannot know or say what God is; we can only know or say what God is not. This approach to thinking about God is known as negative, or apophatic, theology.
For example:
- God is not embodied.
- God is not material (or materially constituted).
- God is not spatially extended.
- God is not subject to change.
- God is not subject to temporality.
But what I learned by teaching Intro to Philosophy to undergrads for a number of years (especially when teaching Parmenides, the first metaphysician in the West) is that each of those negated predicates (“embodied,” “subject to change,” etc.) is itself a version of finite being, that is to say, a reality that is already negated.
In fact everything we see around us is finite. If it were not finite, we’d not be able to see it … or (more precisely) there’d be no “it” to see. The infinite reality would not be recognizable as a chair, a tree, an iphone, a mitochondria, a human being, or anything else. It would not be recognizable at all, for there would be nothing to recognize. In order to recognize anything at all, the object in question must have limits. For example, a pencil does not extend to infinity in any direction. The matter that constitutes it is bounded. Bounded at the point, bounded at the end of the eraser, bounded all along the sides. It is (in part) by virtue of these boundaries that we can recognize the pencil as a pencil.
Everything in the world that we can sense by way of vision, hearing, etc., is like the pencil. Every thing in the world is an instance of finite being. Every thing in the world is always already “negated.”
But not God. God is infinite, in-finite, not finite, not bounded or limited.
God is doubly negated.
God is no thing in the world; God is being itself.
For almost five years now, I’ve been teaching intro to philosophy classes at UT Tyler. Lots of fun; I love it: working hard to try to get nineteen year olds (by now not living with mom & dad & thus “out there in the real world”) to question their assumptions. (Of course before you can question your assumptions you first must be aware of them, and also to identify them.) I call it “corrupting the youth.”
For the last couple of semesters, I’ve been introducing the class with a discussion of Heraclitus (or, really, Cratylus: “all is flux”) and Parmenides (“Being is all there is, period.”), with a view to putting their two views in dialectic, a concept we then discuss in earnest.
Early on in the semester, while trying to articulate what Parmenides means by “being,” I introduce the distinction between contingent being (I usually hold up my wrist watch, and talk about how it exists contingently, in that it depends on all sorts of things for its existence: factories, laws, workers, various kinds of metal, etc.) and necessary being.
This leads to a discussion of divine simplicity, or how (for a great swath of thinkers from Parmenides to Aristotle to Augustine to Aquinas to CS Lewis) being, which is ultimately described only negatively (or apophatically), is actually, it turns out, God (the protestations of the anti-ontotheologians notwithstanding).
Where did I learn all this? Two sources: David Bentley Hart’s book Being, Consciousness, and Bliss, but also my study regimen for my comprehensive examinations, part of my PhD work at the University of Dallas. When studying Avicenna, I became conscious that he is the one, historically, to state the doctrine of necessary being (in terms of simplicity) clearly.
For years now, I’ve been wanting to “drill down on this,” to make sure I have it all straight, and to be able to cite some sources in support of my understanding. To wit, this article by Olga Lizzini, in which she states the following:
… Avicenna deduces the properties of what is in itself necessarily existent. The first is being uncaused. It is in fact “evident” … that the necessary has no cause: to have a cause means literally to exist by virtue of something else, and what exists by virtue of itself cannot exist by virtue of another…. Other properties [of necessary being] are are attributable to a being necessary in itself: unity, simplicity, and then non-relativity, immutability, non-multiplicity and non-association with anything other than itself.
Notice how all the terms are negations: uncaused, non-relativity, immutable, etc.
Is Avicenna, also, the one who makes it clear that, if contingent things exist, then there must be (a) necessary being that exists? I don’t know, but I assume that he is, and I want to find out soon.
Geek alert: only theology & philosophy nerds should read this post. (It is a distillation of one swath of my study project for comprehensive exams.)
In Question 11 of the Prima Pars of Thomas’ Summa Theologiae, he treats the question of the unity of God.
In this particular section of his “Treatise on God” (usually considered to be questions 2 – 26 of the Prima Pars), he makes statements which, “by good and necessary inference” allow the reader to conclude that God is not numerically one.
But to see this, one must first take a quick plunge into the way that the ancients thought about number, for upon this way of thinking, Thomas is wholly dependent.
Two quick points to make here: 1. that “one” is convertible with being; 2. that “the numerical one” is different from “the one that is convertible with being.”
First, that oneness is convertible with being. Thomas, in question 3 of the Summa, adumbrates the simplicity of God: that God’s existence is his essence, and that God has no (non-metaphorical) predicate that is not also his essence. If we can say “God is good,” for example, then it is necessarily true that God is goodness. So also for “one,” “beautiful,” “real,” etc. [By the way, an interesting corollary of this doctrine is that we can be sure that, in a meaningful sense, God is not angry. See this post.]
Because God is simple in this way, it is impossible that he exists “through another,” which is the medieval (and ancient) way of saying that he is uncaused. But if he is uncaused, then must be necessary. Right: God does not exist contingently, like material beings, but rather necessarily. (Note: Averroes believed that a) material beings, i.e., the celestial bodies, exist necessarily; b) that effects, like Plotinus’ Nous and the heavenly bodies, can exist necessarily. Thomas disagrees with him, agreeing with Avicenna that spatial extension is convertible with contingency.)
All of this means that God is what you might call “full being.” Or “Being itself.” Or “Being as Such” (as long as, by that last denomination, you don’t mean “Being in General:” shame on you, Francisco Suarez).
Now, if you like Thomas Aquinas then you also have to like Parmenides (at least in a qualified way). Thomas, like Plato & Aristotle before him, gives Parmenides a qualified “high five” for his insight that being must be one. If two things exist (Aristotle & Thomas would say, “… exist in the full and proper sense”), that is, then this necessarily implies “privation,” or what Parmenides calls “non-being” (if for no other reason than that “A” is not “B.”).
But … what do we (or does Parmenides) mean here by “one?” Thomas think, in Article 1 of Question 11, that he means “undividability.” That is, the one thing that exists cannot be “sliced and diced” such that you can chop A in half and get two A’s, two of the same thing. This is how being must needs be for Parmenides: undividible.
One more point. In this article Thomas also teaches (following Avicenna) that this kind of oneness is different from numerical oneness. The latter, he thinks, would imply an actual numeric infinity (off limits for him), and would “add something” to God in the same way that white “adds something” to the substance of Socrates.
Hence, for Thomas (and for me) God is one, but God is not numerically one.
If time travel were possible then a conversation like this, between my 40-year old self and my 30-year old self, would also be possible.
40-yr-old Matt: “I like Hegel. He rescued metaphysics from horrid Kant.”
30-yr-old Matt: “I don’t believe in metaphysics.”
40-yr-old Matt: “Then you don’t believe in God.”
30-yr-old Matt: “I don’t believe in ‘the god of the philosophers.'”
40-yr-old Matt: “Then you don’t believe in the “god” of, say, the Cappadocian Fathers, and so you don’t believe in the Trinity.”
30-year-old Matt: “Well … hmmm … let me think about that.”
