The Case for God (26 page)

Even revelation could not tell us anything about God; indeed, its task was to make us realize that God was unknowable. “Man’s utmost knowledge is to know that we do not know him,” Thomas explained.

Even Christ had transcended our conceptual grasp and become unknowable. At his ascension, he was hidden in the cloud that received him, and taken into a realm that is beyond the reach of our intellect. As Saint Paul said, he is “far above … any name that can be named.”
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The ascension, therefore, revealed the limits of our knowledge; when Christ left the world, the Word was concealed from us again and would always remain unknowable and unnameable.

Thomas’s huge output can be seen as a campaign to counter the tendency to domesticate the divine transcendence. In this he is absolutely true to Denys. But where Denys’s theology was based on liturgy, Thomas’s apophaticism was rooted in the new metaphysical rationalism. His long and, to a modern sensibility, tortuous analyses should be seen as an intellectual ritual that leads the mind through a labyrinth of thought until it culminates in the final
musterion
. Thomas’s influence on Roman Catholic thought has been immense, but he has recently become a laughingstock to atheists (as well as an embarrassment to some theologians) because of the apparent inadequacy of his five “proofs” for the existence of God.

These five “ways” (viae), as Thomas preferred to call them, are to be found at the very beginning of the
Summa Theologiae
, his most famous work. This was a teaching manual designed “to introduce beginners to what God taught us as concisely and clearly as the subject
matter allows,”
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and it begins with the most fundamental question of all: Is there a God? This, Thomas believed, needs demonstration, because even though he thought that knowledge of God was innate, it was often vague and even crude. Thomas explicitly dissociated himself from Anselm’s “ontological proof”: the proposition that “God exists” was not at all self-evident but “needs to be made evident by means of things that are more evident to us, namely, God’s effects.” Paul had argued that “ever since God created the world his everlasting power and deity—however invisible—have been there for the mind to see in the things that he has made.”
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It was, therefore, possible to argue “from visible effects to hidden causes,” because, as Aristotle had made clear, every effect must have a cause, so “God’s effects then are enough to prove that God exists.” But the doctrine of creation ex nihilo meant that the creatures “are not enough to help us comprehend
what
he is.”
³³
So before he sets out his “proofs,” Thomas tells his students that because of God’s absolute unknowability we cannot define what it is that we are trying to prove.

We cannot speak about God itself; we can speak only about the contingency of his creatures, which came from nothing.

Having made this crucial apophatic proviso, Thomas briefly— indeed, somewhat perfunctorily—sets forth his five “ways” of arguing from creatures to “what people call God.”
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These five arguments are not original. The first is based on Aristotle’s proof of the Prime Mover: all around us, we see things changing, and because every change is caused by something else, the chain of cause and effect must stop somewhere. We thus arrive at the First Cause, itself unchanged by anything. The second proof, closely allied to the first, is based on the nature of causation: we never observe anything causing itself, so there must be an initial Cause, “to which everyone gives the name
God.”
The third “way” is based on Ibn Sina’s argument for a Necessary
Being, which must of itself exist, owes its being “to nothing outside itself,” and is “the cause that other things must be.” The fourth
via
is a moral argument derived from Aristotle: some things are better, truer, and more exalted than others, and this hierarchy of excellence presupposes an unseen perfection that is best of all. The fifth proof is drawn from Aristotle’s belief that everything in the universe has a “Final Cause” that is the “form” of its being. Everything obeys natural laws to attain its proper end and purpose, and the regularity of these laws cannot be accidental. They must be directed “by someone with awareness and understanding,” just as the flight of an arrow presupposes an archer—and that “someone is what we call God.”

Thomas was not trying to convince a skeptic of God’s existence. He was simply trying to find a rational answer to the primordial question: Why does something exist rather than nothing? All the five “ways” argue in one way or another that nothing can come from nothing.
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At the conclusion of each proof, Thomas rounds the argument off with a variant on the phrase
quod omnes dicunt Deum:
the Prime Mover, the Efficient Cause, the Necessary Being, the Highest Excellence, and the Intelligent Overseer are “what all people call God.” It sounds as though everything is done and dusted, but no sooner has Thomas apparently settled the matter than he pulls the rug from under our feet.

He immediately goes on to show that even though we can prove that “what we call God” (a reality that we cannot define) must “exist,” we have no idea what the word “exists” can signify in this context. We can talk about God as Necessary Being and so forth, but we do not know what this really means.
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The same goes for God’s attributes. God is Simplicity itself; that means that, unlike all the beings of our experience, “God is not made up of parts.” A man, for example, is a composite being: he has a body and soul, flesh, bones, and skin. He has qualities: he is good, kind, fat, and tall. But because God’s attributes are identical with his essence, he has no qualities. He is not “good,” he
is
goodness. We simply cannot imagine an “existence” like this, so “we cannot know the ‘existence’ of God any more than we can define him,” Thomas explains, because “God cannot be classified as this or that sort of thing.” We can get to know mere beings because we can categorize them into species—as stars, elephants, or mountains. God is not a substance, the “sort of thing that can exist independently”
of an individual instance of it. We cannot ask whether there is
a
God, as if God were simply one example of a species. God is not and cannot be a “sort of thing.”
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All the “proofs” have achieved is to show us that there is nothing in our experience that can tell us what “God” means. Because of something that we cannot define, there is a universe where there could have been nothing, but we do not know what we have proved the existence of. We have simply demonstrated the existence of a mystery.
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But that, for Thomas, is precisely what makes the “five ways” good theology. The question “Why something rather than nothing?” is a good one; human beings keep asking it, because it is in our nature to push our minds to an extreme in this way. But the answer—”what everybody calls ‘God’ “—is something that we do not, indeed cannot, know. Thomas shared Augustine’s view of
intellectus
. In these proofs, we see reason at the end of its tether, asking unanswerable questions and straining toward its “cutting edge,” its divine “spark.” Pushed to the limit, reason turns itself inside out, words no longer make sense, and we are reduced to silence. Even today, when they contemplate the universe, physicists pit their minds against the dark world of uncreated reality that we cannot fathom. This is the unknowable reality that Thomas is asking his readers to confront by pushing their intellects to a point beyond which they cannot go.

Thomas would say that we know that we are speaking about “God” when our language stumbles and fails in this way. As a modern theologian has pointed out, “This reduction of talk to silence is what is called ‘theology.’ “
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Unknowing was not a source of frustration. As Thomas indicates, people can find joy in this subversion of their reasoning powers. Thomas did not expect his students to “believe” in God; he still uses
credere
to mean trust or commitment and defines faith as “the capacity of the intellect to recognize
(assentire
) the genuineness of the transcendent,”
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to look beneath the surface of life and apprehend a sacred dimension that is as real as—indeed more real than—anything else in our experience. This “assent” did not mean intellectual submission: the verb
assentire
also meant “to rejoice in” and was related to
assensio
(“applause”).
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Faith was the ability to appreciate and take delight in the nonempirical realities that we glimpse in the world.

Like any good premodern theologian, Thomas made it clear that
all our language about God can only be analogical, because our words refer to limited, finite categories. We can speak of a good dog, a good book, or a good person and have some idea of what we mean; but when we say that God is not only good but Goodness itself, we lose any purchase on the meaning of what we are saying. Thomas knew that our doctrines about God are simply human constructs.
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When we say that “God is good” or “God exists,” these are not factual statements. They are approximate, because they apply language that is appropriate in one field to something quite different.
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The statement that “God is the Creator of the world” is also analogical, because we are using the word “creator” outside its normal human context. It is impossible to prove either that the universe was created ex nihilo or that it was uncreated: “there is no proving that men and skies and rocks did not always exist,” Thomas insisted, so “it is well to remember this so that one does not try to prove what cannot be proved and give non-believers grounds for mockery, and for thinking the reasons we give are our reasons for believing
(credens).”
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By the thirteenth century, Denys’s apophatic method had become central to the Western understanding of God. Theologians and spiritual directors would express it differently, but the essential dynamic would remain the same. Bonaventure (1221–74), an Italian Franciscan who taught in Paris at the same time as Thomas before becoming superior general of his order, seems at first sight to have an entirely different theology.
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Instead of focusing on the new metaphysics, Franciscan spirituality was based on the life of Christ, with special emphasis on his passion. Its living embodiment was Francis of Assisi, who had tried to reproduce Christ’s poverty, humility, and suffering in every detail of his life. Bonaventure saw Francis as an epiphany of the divine, an incarnation of Anselm’s ontological proof. Francis had achieved such holiness that it was possible for his disciples, even in this life, “to see and understand that the ‘best’ is … that than which nothing better can be imagined.”
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Bonaventure’s theology would be firmly based on this religious experience.

One might expect such an approach to be wholly affirmative. Like most of his contemporaries, Bonaventure saw the entire world as a living symbol of its creator. Like scripture, the “book of Nature” had
a spiritual as well as a literal meaning, the latter pointing beyond itself to the former. In his greatest work,
The Journey of the Mind to God
, Bonaventure showed how the disciplines of the university curriculum—the natural sciences, the practical and aesthetic arts, logic, ethics, and natural philosophy—must all contribute to this ascent of mind and heart. But like Augustine, Bonaventure knew that we could not remain focused on the external world. Ultimately we had to “enter into our mind, the image of God—an image which is spiritual and everlasting within us.”
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In that way, we would discover a vision of the divine that shattered our preconceptions and overturned our usual ways of thinking and seeing.

Thomas tended to make negation and affirmation consecutive stages in an argument. He would say something positive about God—and then move on to deny it. But for Bonaventure, negation and affirmation were simultaneous. In the last two chapters of the
Journey
, he invited his readers to meditate on the two highest attributes of God, his existence and his goodness, neither of which we could hope to comprehend. Like Denys and Thomas, Bonaventure made it absolutely clear that it was inaccurate to say that “God exists” because God does not “exist” in the same way as any mere being. But being itself is an attribute that can apply
only
to God.
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We have no idea what being is: it is not—indeed, it cannot be—an object of thought. We experience being merely as the medium through which we know individual beings, and this makes it very difficult for us to understand how God can be real:

To counter this, we have to say contradictory things about God in order to break through this conceptual barrier. For Being is “both the first and the last; it is eternal and yet most present; it is most simple and yet the greatest,” Bonaventure explained; “it is supremely one and yet omnifarious.”
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At first, each of these attributes appears to cancel out the last, yet on closer examination we see that the apparent
contradictions are mutually dependent: God is present in everything
because
being is eternal; multifarious
because
One. In this way, ordinary categories of thought and language break down in a
coincidentia oppositorum
.