The God of the Philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob

Keith Ward Oxford University

On 23 November 1654, the French theologian and mathematician Pascal had an experience so vivid and intense that he carried a writ- ten record of it sewn into his clothing until he died. The core of that experience he encapsulates in these words: "Fire. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and not of philosophers and men of science."l In one sense, the dichotomy suggested here is a clear and obvi- ous one. Philosophers speculate about the existence of a first cause of the universe, whereas Abraham was confronted with a direct vision of a God who commanded obedience, assuming absolute authority and power. Philosophers speculate about a possibility. The patriarch bows before an overwhelming reality. This is a dichotomy of sophisticated speculation and direct experience, and it is tempting to equate it with a dichotomy between the sophisticated theology of a Maimonides or an Aquinas and the simple beliefs of the mass of the faithful. In that case, the bite of Pascal's comment is the implicit claim that it is the God of the ordinary believer that is the true God, whereas that of the philosophers is a pale abstraction. This reverses the academics' perception that the God of ordinary belief is at least partly an anthropomorphic and superstitious projection, whereas only the initiate in theology may discern the truths hidden behind such metaphorical language. The God of the philosophers is primarily the God of Plato and Aristotle, whose embryonic concepts of a supreme being were

1 B. Pascal, Pensees (Baltimore: Penguin, 1966) 309( 157 158 Keith Ward developed and systematized first by Muslim philosophers and then by Maimonides and Aquinas. Since I am surrounded by a host of Maimonidean scholars, I shall attend primarily to Thomas Aquinas, the great thirteenth-century theologian of Christendom. In fact, he formulated his idea of God in dialogue with Maimonides, to whom he often refers by name as "Rabbi Moyses," sometimes disagreeing but always within an underlying basis of agreement. This concept of God is systematically set out in Summa Theologiae, part one, questions 3-11, in an elegant and economical way. First of all, God is simple. That is, God is not composed of simpler elements. That means, argues Aquinas, that we cannot distinguish any parts in God. We cannot, for instance, distinguish God's nature from God's existence as though the divine nature was some- thing that might or might not exist. God's nature is God's existence so that God is, one might say, more like an existing Form or Nature in a rather Platonic sense than like an individual thing. One of Aquinas' expressions for God is esse suum subsistens, which one might translate as "Being-itself" - Paul Tillich, often thought to be a very radical theologian, at least in this respect, had a very orthodox view of God, after all. God is not an object that possesses a number of properties - these would be "parts." God is one great big indivisible property, which in some ineffable way contains all other properties in itself in a higher manner. Of course, it is inade- quate to say that God is an existent property, since God is beyond the duality of substance and property. God's form of being is wholly unique, beyond all the divisions and dualities of finite being. God is Actus Purus, pure unrestricted Actuality or Being; not "a being" but "the power of being itself, without any limitation or restriction." God is the infinite ocean of actuality, from which all finite beings take their existence as relatively restricted images, scattered in divided multiplicity, of what in God is perfectly and indivisibly one. An important consequence of the divine simple unity is that God must be timeless and, consequently, wholly immutable. For time by its very nature contains parts, past, present and future, which are distinct and divided from one another. In the divine being there is no time, but all that to us is past, present or future is held together, perfectly possessed, in undivided consciousness.