Archives: Book Chapters

A Critical Survey of Responses to Anselm's Proof

1. Anticipations of the Proof
2. A Strange Story
3. Guanlio
4. The Scholastics: St. Thomas
5. Descartes, Gassendi, and Hobbes
6. Spinoza
7. Ralph Cudworth
8. Leibniz
9. Hume
10. Kant
11. Hegel
12. Ludwig Feuerbach
13. Robert Flint
14. W. E. Hocking, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana
15. R. G. Collingwood
16. Hans Reichenbach
17. J. N. Findlay
18. Robert S. Hartman
19. Jan Berg
20. Jerome Shaffer
21. Heinrich Scholz and Frederic Fitch
22. Conclusions

1. Anticipations of the Proof

In a remarkable article, Prescott Johnson (see Bibliography) seems to succeed in showing that Plato’s dialectic (in The Republic) as means to knowledge of the Good amounts to an ontological argument for the necessary existence of the Good. The lesser ideas are incapable of expressing the principle of order among themselves; in conceiving this order we are conceiving a supreme idea which therefore cannot be lacking in content for our thought. This is—says Johnson—the a posteriori element in Plato’s reasoning. In effect, it is his refutation of positivism. The supreme reality is not inconceivable. (I would here depart somewhat from Johnson by remarking that the conceivability of something is a necessary, not a merely contingent or factual, truth and that it cannot, properly speaking, be known a posteriori. But I shall not attempt to relate this consideration to Plato’s procedure.) The supreme reality is not to be treated as a mere hypothesis. Knowledge of it “requires no assumption,” and “makes no use of images, relying on ideas only.” In short this knowledge is strictly a priori. And no merely contingent existence could be thus known.

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(Nor, I add, would it make sense to say of a contingent reality that it was “superior to existence,” as Plato says of the Good. Only a reality existing in an underived and necessary fashion could be to all things as the sun is to life on the earth.)

Johnson correctly defends Plato’s procedure against the Kantian criticism that the merely possible and the existent cannot differ qualitatively. In regard to the supreme conception, the merely possible is indistinguishable from the impossible. We have not to compare two states of the Good, one as nonexistent and the other as existent; for this is to treat the “beginning” or “principle” of all meaning, value, and reality as a mere possibility which might or might not be actualized. But if it can be so treated it is not the absolute principle at all, and the knowledge of it must be precisely the hypothetical knowledge which Plato contrasts with the highest knowledge.

Johnson does not discuss the relation of the Good to God. This is a difficule topic in Platonic scholarship. Perhaps one is fairly safe in saying that there are grave difficulties in either denying or asserting the identity of the Good with God. Moreover, when in the Timaeus deity is plainly under discussion, we again have ambiguity, for there we seem to confront two Gods, the ‘eternal God and the God that was to be’, or the Demiurge and the World Soul. I wish merely to suggest that Plato is wavering between classical and neoclassical theism, or between the view that deity is pure absoluteness or necessary existence and the view that deity is indeed absoluteness necessarily actualized somehow, but with the particular concrete how or actuality contingent and relative. What in Plato was an unresolved ambiguity, a wise restraint

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in the claim to settle basic issues, in his followers tended to become a premature and unwise resolution of the ambiguity. This unwise resolution, which oversimplifies the religious idea and gives it a fatal one-sidedness, has exacted severe penalties all through the history of thought. One of the penalties has been the failure to clarify the Anselmian problem in a permanently satisfactory manner.

It was a rather close anticipation of Anselm when Aristotle declared, “To be possible and to exist do not differ in eternal things.”¹ But Aristotle came even closer:

For what is ‘of necessity’ coincides with what is ‘always’ since that which ‘must be’ cannot possibly ‘not-be’. Hence a thing is eternal if its *being’ is necessary: and if it is eternal, its being is necessary.²

No ecternal thing exists potentially. The reason is this. Every potency is at one and the same time a potency of the opposite; for, while that which is not capable of being present in a subject cannot be present, everything that is capable of being may possibly not be actual . And that which may possxbly not be is perishable, either in the full sense or in the precise sense in which it is said that it possibly may not be. . . Nothing, then, which is in the full sense imperishable is in the full sense [‘in respect of substance’] potentially existent (though there is nothing to prevent its being so in some respect, e.g., potentially of a certain quality or in a certain place); all imperishable things, then, exist actually.³

Some things owe their necessity to something other than themselves; others do not, but are themselves the source of necessity in other things. Therefore the necessary in the primary and strict sense is the

¹ Physics, 111, 4. 203, 30. I owe this reference and the literal transladon to my colleague A. P. Brogan. Oxford translation, “In the case of eternal things, what may be must be.”

² De Generations, 11, 12, 338, 14.

³ Mataphysics, IX, 8. 1050". 8-18. Trans. W. D. Ross.

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simple; for this does not admit of more states than one, so that it cannot even be in one state and also in another; for . . . it would already be in more than one [if it were in all respects necessary]. If, then, there are any things that are eternal and immovable, nothing compuisory or against their nature attaches to them.⁴

Nothing is by accident perishable. For what is accidental is capable of not being present, but perishableness is one of the attributes that belong of necessity to the things to which they belong; or else one and the same thing may be perishable and imperishable, if perishableness is capable of not belonging to it. Perishableness then must either be the essence or be present in the essence of each perishable thing. The same account holds for imperishableness also; for both are attributes which are present of necessity.⁵

Certainly Anselm did reason partly as follows: To exist eternally is better than to exist with a temporal beginning or ending; hence God cannot be conceived in the latter fashion; but only that which could not not exist is intrinsically, or for an intelligible reason, without beginning or ending, secure in its eternity. As a Socinian theologian later put it, “that is eternal which cannot not exist.” There is no other criterion for eternal existence, since one cannot wait forever to observe that a thing always goes on existing. Not even God Himself could know it in that way.

Actually Aristotle is superior to Anselm in some respects in this matter (save only that he did not turn his insight into a proof). For one thing, he makes a clear, and virtually neoclassical, distinction between eternity or necessity of mere existence (‘'in respect to substance’), and eternity or necessity with respect to all properties whatever. The former, he

⁴ Op. cit, V, 5, 1015^b, 9-16.

⁵ Ibid., X, 10, 1059^a, 0-7.

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says, does not entail the latter. Precisely, and the neglect or underestimation of the former was the great error of classical theism, an error into which Aristotle himself fell, as is indicated in the next to last of the above quotations. The blunder was natural enough. There are: (a) things contingent or ephemeral both substantially, or as the individuals which they are, and also in the qualities not essential to their individual identity; (b) things (a thing?) existing eternally, necessarily, as the individuals which they are, but not eternal or necessary in all their properties or states; (c) as the extreme or pure case of necessity, things or a thing which could neither fail to exist nor ever in any way be other than it is. The superiority of (b) to (a) seemed clear to Aristotle (as it does to me); he apparently inferred that, by the same principle, (c) must be superior to (b). However, it is not the same principle at all. That it is better to be both contingent and necessary than to be contingent alone does not entail that it is best of all to be necessary alone. It is better for a saw to be both sharp and not sharp, the one in the blade, the other in the handle, than to be not sharp all over; but it is by no means best of all that it be sharp all over and have no handle. To lack necessity even of existence and be therefore wholly contingent is indeed a defect; but this is entirely compatible with its being also a defect to lack all contingent qualities and be wholly necessary. For, if the necessary as such is, as has been shown in this book, extremely abstract, a mere universal common factor, then to be purely necessary is to be purely abstract, totally lacking in concreteness, that is, richness of definite detail and variety.

True, Aristotle seems also to have reasoned: since ‘actuality is prior to potency’, the supremacy and ultimate priority

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must belong to a purely actual being devoid of potentiality for further actualization. But we saw in Part One, Secs. 4, 5, that this assumes an irrelevance of quantity to quality and also of incompossible values to the supreme value, which are anything but noncontroversial. I pass over Aristotle’s suggestion that the supreme reality must be immune to influence by others, a typical piece of Neoplatonic scorn (is not Aristotle the first Neoplatonist?) for passivity, responsiveness, sensitivity to what passes in others.

In the above quotations the Stagirite not only makes an important distinction between two ways of conceiving necessary existence, but he also (1) gives reasons for idendfying modal status with temporally limited and temporally unlimited ways of existing, the contingent having being at most for some time, the necessary always, and (2) with lucid, subtle reasoning shows that such temporal-modal status is itself in all cases necessary, so that the contingent and perishable could not have been necessary or imperishable, and the necessary and imperishable could not have been perishable. This is a form of the modal reduction principle; modal status, including that of nonnecessity, is itself always necessary. And here, two thousand years in advance, is the answer to Kant's charge that the ontological argument must assume that existence is, in general, a predicate, whereas in general it is not. Rather, either contingency (perishableness) or its negative, necessity, (imperishableness) is inherent in any predicate whatsoever: modal status is always a deducible predicate. (See the last of the quotations on page 142.) Kant’s cultural lag on this point is two millennia. Surely Aristotle would have known what Anselm was talking about at least better than even the greatest of Gaunilo’s countless disciples.

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Since neglect of the temporal aspect of modality, or the modal aspect of temporality, is a major defect of the European tradition, it is an interesting question, which I hope to pursue elsewhere, why Aristotle failed so signally to communicate his insights at this point.

Of the long and shameful story of the underestimation of Jews by Christians (in our day by communists as well), one of the least shameful but still interesting chapters is the underestimation of Philo. It is easy to say that Wolfson has exaggerated Philo’s importance; it is harder to find in medieval scholasticism a single statement about God—apart from the Incarnation and some points about the Trinity—which cannot be matched in Philo’s own words. Practically the entire religious metaphysics of fourteen centuries (including both best and worst features) is definitely Philonian. That the divine existence is necessary is repeatedly stated, as follows:

“The virtues of God are founded in truth, existing according to his essence: since God alone exists in essence, on account of which fact, he speaks of necessity about himself, saying, ‘I am that I am".⁶

“. . . the God who exists in essence, and who is duly thought of in respect of his existence . .."⁷

“. . .God who exists only in essence . ..”⁸

“. .. He is full of himself, and He is sufficient for himself . . ."⁹

Here we have the idea of existence as an identity, therefore

⁶ Works of Philo Judaeus, trans. C. D. Yonge (London, 1890), I, 282.

⁷ Op. ois.,, IV, 283.

⁸ Ibid., 11, 28-29,

9 Ibid., p. 243.

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necessary. Recognition of existence in this superior form of sheer self-existence is not indeed new with Philo, for—besides being in Aristotle—it seems to be as old as monotheism itself, since Ikhnaton expressed it nicely, “Thou of thyself art length of life, men live through thee.” (And not of course men alone, as the grand old hymns make clear enough.) Thus the idea that God’s existence could be just another case of existence in general has always been a failure to comprehend theism. It is three millennia out of date.

The unsurpassability or perfection of God is indicated by Philo as follows:

It is impious to conceive that anything can be better than the cause of all things, since there is nothing equal to him, nothing that is even a little inferior to him; but everything which exists in the world is found to be in its whole genus inferior to God.¹⁰

. . . the living God . . . is superior to the good, and more simple than the one, and more ancient than the unity . . .¹¹

His nature is entirely perfect, or rather God is himself the perfection, and completion, and boundary for happiness.¹²

I submit that these passages are at least as close to the Proslogium as anything in Augustine, who is usually cited in this connection. And they are about four centuries earlier! True, Philo apparently did not see that he had in such considerations the basis for a proof for the divine existence, but then neither did anyone else before Anselm. Augustine’s proof from the superiority of reason to all but Truth, and the identity of

10 Ibid., 1, 196f.

11 Ibid., p. 229.

12 Ibid., IV, 1-2.

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God with Truth, is a version of what I call the epistemic or logical proof, not of the ‘ontological’, which must (if the label is to be of any use) be from the idea of God itself as intrinsically connoting necessity. Nor are proofs, such as Aristotle’s, from ‘degrees of perfection’ to perfection itself ontological. To use the term so widely makes virtually any proof ontological. The essential idea is not of kinds of things, one kind implying another, but of ways of existing, and of one way as selfrealizing and self-certifying, and as such alone appropriate to the all-worshipful being, hence either assertible or deniable on grounds of meaning alone.

A third (vague) aaticipation, though not in our Western tradition, is found in the Taoist principle that the supreme reality (the Tao) is like water, completely without exclusive form of its own, but able to assume the form of any vessel. This makes deity a correlate of being as such, rather than one form of being instead of another. Such absolute nonexclusive flexibility or absence of competitiveness is, I have argued (in this book and elsewhere), identical with noncontingency. The principle is also suggested in the analogy employed by the ancient monists of India that space can take the forms of all the objects in space, and hence is not itself limited by any of these forms. The important thing is to see that the perfection of cognitive capacity, infallibility, is even more clearly without exclusive form, since by definition it must be able to express any form whatsoever (in knowing it). Anselm failed to achieve clarity at this point, and his Greek cast of mind made this inevitable. He was typically Western in exalting ‘masculine’ mastery, power, stability, control, being, absoluteness, while depreciating the feminine, yielding, passive, fluid—that is, becoming and relativity.

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Taoism and Buddhism are closer to the truth here. But Jesus was perhaps closer still. God’s sensitivity registers the fall of the sparrow. This occurrence is a modification of his sympathetic awareness. The absolute responsiveness of universal love is purely noncompetitive, hence in its bare existence wholly noncontingent.

All genuine thought about deity must, indeed, be close to the ontological proof. For it is blasphemous to think of God as merely an additional fact, however great, merely one side of a significant alternative, rather than as the soul of factuality itself and the very basis of all alternativeness, the potential registrant of whatever value or importance ether side of any disjunction can have, hence not subject to intelligible denial.

Ikhnaton (in spite of associating deity peculiarly with sun and sunlight) clearly thought of God as the strictly universal principle of meaning and value, measuring by His love all the forms of existence. He was the God of absolutely all creatures, not just of some. It is only a clarification of this to see that possibility itself must be expressive of the divine, and hence that the ‘possibility of there being no divinity’ formulates an absurdity.

The very notion of creator, introduced into philosophy in the Timaeus, implies the principle of modal equivalence just referred to. For if the reality of the Demiurge actualized a possibility capable of being unactualized then He must be Himself as much in need of a creator as anything else. Thus the Platonic, which is the oldest, formal proof for God breaks down if Anselm’s discovery is a mere sophistry.

And yet no one formulated his Proof or anything much like it before he did. Esser, in his monograph on alleged antici-

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pations of the Proof (see Bibliography), considers a number of pre-Anselmian proofs and rightly dismisses them as not proofs from the mere idea of God. Esser ignores Philo and the most relevant passages in Plato and Aristotle; but I incline to agree with him that before Anselm there was no Ontological Proof.

Anselm’s formula for deity is perhaps less novel. Collingwood mentions some precedents in Boéthius, and he should have mentioned Philo and Augustine. (See Sec. 15, p. 250.) Nevertheless, here, too, Anselm remains distinctive. He alone puts sufficient emphasis upon the difference between greatest, or unsurpassed, in fact and not conceivably surpassable.

No one before Anselm gave so neat a formula for the divine excellence. Correctly interpreted, as to be sure he did not interpret it, it remains without a flaw, precisely as he stated it. I hold that this definition, and the deduction of noncontingency therefrom, constitutes the greatest single step forward in constructive metaphysics taken after Philo and prior to Leibniz. It is also the least understood, the most carelessly treated, by scholars,

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2. A Strange Story

The history of discussions concerning the ontological argument might have been that of a collective inquiry into the validity of the reasoning of Prosl. II-IV, with reasonable account taken of later passages. This inquiry might also, after a few centuries perhaps, have led to the discovery of the abstract-concrete paradox as inherent, not in the Argument as such, but in classical theism, yet made more apparent by the Argument. All this might conceivably have happened.

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What we find in fact is rather different: a story of prolonged debate largely, often exclusively, over the thinking of the fictitious Anselm of the Gaunilo tradition, that conveniently naive fellow who made his whole point in Prosl. II and added nothing relevant thereafter, in contrast to the historically demonstrable, keen-witted philosopher whose main point ficst appeared in Prosl. IlI, and was considerably amplified and carefully defended in still later discussions. And the last thing anyone saw clearly was the abstractconcrete paradox, the heart of the whole problem; the problem, however, not alone of the Proof, but of theism itself.

Such is the tale—'stranger than fiction’, though in a sense about a fiction—which we shall now tell, partly in the words of some of the chief participants. The story has at least a bappy ending, for it seems to show that the long-stretchedout farce is nearing its probable dénouement, and that the unconscious falsehoods about the magnificent doctor can scarcely retain their innocence, which has been their strength, much longer.

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3. Gaunilo

Whatever the first commentator upon a philosopher may say, be it intelligent or otherwise, he will of course have been the first to say it. Moreover, as human nature is, the chances are that he will be praised for having said it (all the more if there is no other commentator for a hundred years). For his view will probably be a natural interpretation, or misinterpretation, of his subject, and for this reason, and also by the power of suggestion, others will, even more probably, say it after him. But he will always remain the ‘discoverer’.

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Such are the reasons for the fame of Gaunilo. Any very much better reasons the specialists in Anselm, so far as I know, have not detected.

The many signs of limited perspicacity in Gaunilo have been painstakingly detailed by Barth. I shall mention only some of the most important.

Was it smart, or was it not a little stupid, to ‘point out’ to Anselm—what the latter had not only admitted but insisted upon as integral to his theory—that all sorts of things can be conceived as nonexistent? Anselm not only accepted the empirical fact that we often think about nonexistent things, he had a theory, which is more than we know Gaunilo had, about why all things other than God are thus thinkable, or what constitutes the ground of their contingency. Should one then offer the bare truth of general contingency as basis for rejecting the Proof? This is common ground, and is quite compatible with viewing God as the great exception. By definition God is exceptional. Yet to this day, as in the pages of Gaunilo and Kant, reminders of the universal contingency of existence, apart from God, are supposed somehow—it is never quite explained how—to give the Anselmian pause! True, they might well give him pause had Anselm stopped his exposition of the Proof at the end of Chapter II. For only in III is the uniqueness of necessary existence made explicit.

Gaunilo is the originator of the logically bizarre idea, also still widespread, that the admission of God's existence as a fact must be the premise for any proof that He also exists necessarily. There is, unfortunately, some suggestion of this way of looking at the matter in the opening of Prosl. III (following, as it does, upon the alleged proof that God exists in Prosl. II): “thou dost exist so truly that thou canst

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not be conceived not to exist.” But later passages, long before the Reply, and above all in the Reply, make manifest the principle (evident in itself to reflection): facts cannot determine what is logically conceivable; hence it is absurd to talk as though an inconceivability of nonexistence could depend upon a thing’s existing in fact. Necessarily existing in fact? Then the thing could not but exist in fact, and there is no possible nonexistence to disprove by factual inquiry. Contingently? Then we have a contradiction.

What it comes to is that the idea of unconditional or strict logical necessity of existence never makes its appearance at all in Gaunilo’s discourse. Only the words, ‘cannot be conceived not to exist’, are there, not what the words mean. (Those who have accepted the monk’s refutation often fail to include either the idea or the words.) Gaunilo also betrays himself by talking as though the nonexistence even of ordinary things, or especially of oneself, may be inconceivable. This merely confirms, from the other end, his blindness to the modal concepts which are Anselm’s preferred intellectual instruments. Of course, if there is no contingency, there cannot in any distinctive sense be necessity either—and vice versa. Over and over Anselm talks in modal terms, while Gaunilo never clearly does so. Where Anselm says, none greater can be conceived, Gaunilo speaks repeatedly about none greater, or greatest, simpliciter. He allows God hypothetical preeminence in the realm of actual existence, but not in that of possibility or conceivability. Accordingly, to ask, Does God exist? must be to ask whether or not some possibility logically prior to God happens to be actualized. But the Unsurpassably great, hence all-inclusive of actuality and possibility, self-existing no matter what else does or does not

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exist, can have nothing logically prior to it. It is that not to think which is to think nothing, and so not to think. This is Anselm’s world of ideas. Gaunilo has not entered it, even for a trial run. Nor has he, Samson-like, pulled its pillars down from inside. He has not been inside, but only in a fragile and readily detachable antechamber.

The strongest objection to Anselm’s procedure, never clearly seen by Gaunilo, concerns the apparent transition from abstract to concrete, from a brief verbal definition to the incomparable richness and beauty of the divine actuality. The pertinent question is whether or not existence and full actuality are in general coincident and equally concrete; and if not, whether they might not in God be exceptionally distinct and far apart (all aspects of God are somehow exceptional ), so that the existence to be established by the Proof would be as abstract as the unprovable divine actuality is concrete. Had Gaunilo the faintest glimpse of this possibility? Have Gaunilo’s admirers glimpsed it either? Yet is it not relevant, if our question is not merely, was Anselm justified in using his Proof to support his teligious beliefs, but rather, could it justifiably be used to support some religious belief or other, and if so what? This is the more general question; intellectual progress takes its greatest leap forward when higher generality is attained. The fate of classical theism may in the long run be a picayune detail compared to the fate of theism as such.

Gaunilo is abundantly justified, and it is his most relevant point, in asking, Do we really have “the idea of that than which none greater can be conceived” (rather than merely the words)? We have seen (Part One, Sec. 4) the ambiguities and possible contradictions which must be looked to in trying to adjudicate this question. But these are logical

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questions and have nothing to do with particular perceptual facts, to the lack of which Gaunilo refers. If God’s very existence were relative to particular perceptual facts, then He would not be God but an idol. The problem is one of meaning: is worship self-consistent, or is it either contradictory or too indefinite an attitude even to contradict itself?

Considering the reception which Gaunilo has had to this very day, one is moved to ask: has ever a commentator upon a philosopher so long and so much misled so many?

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4. The Scholastics: St. Thomas

The reception of the Argument in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was almost as odd as what happened in its inventor’s own lifetime, or in the modern period. (In this section I am heavily indebted—and deeply grateful—to P. A. Daniels. See Bibliography 1.) In the twelfth century the Proof was simply ignored, so far as our records go. Three conclusions have been drawn from this: all accepted the Proof, all rejected it, they were unacquainted with it. Daniels shows that the last is the most reasonable. In the next three centuries things were dramatically different. Fifteen authors refer to the Proof, of whom the following ten accept it: William of Auxerre, Richard Fischacre, Alexander of Hales, Bonaventura, Matthew of Aquasparta, Johannes Peckham, Nicolaus of Cusa, Aegidius of Rome, William of Ware, and Duns Scotus. Of these at least four, Alexander, Bonaventura, Nicolaus, and Scotus seem to have some appreciation of Prosl. IIl and of the true Anselmian Principle; the rest seem to be thinking largely or exclusively of Prosl. II. Albertus Magnus, Peter of Tarentaise, and Henry

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of Ghent take no position on the Proof; of these, only the first scems to have read past Prosl. II. St. Thomas and his disciple Richard of Middleton reject the Proof; Richard cites only Prosl. II, while Thomas refers (in five different writings) sometimes to this and sometimes to the following chapter; however, where he is explicitly rejecting the Proof (in the two Summas) he mentions only Prosl. II; and where he does mention the other chapter he, in my opinion, misconceives the relationship of the two.

We have then fifteen medieval judges, of whom at most five show that they have the Principle clearly and centrally in mind; one or two others exhibit some conception of it, and the rest, little or none. Of the five having the Principle (as Anselm did) clearly and centrally in mind, four accept the Proof, and the fifth takes no stand. Of the other ten, those who seem not to grasp the centrality of Prosl. III, six accept, two reject, and two give no verdict. Thus even where the Proof was taken at its weakest, still six found it convincing and but two rejected it; and where it was taken at its strongest, four out of five accepted and none rejected it. This seems to show the power of the Proof even when incompletely grasped, and its much greater power when fully grasped. It also shows the blighting influence of Gaunilo’s inability to read beyond Chapter II.

Unfortunately, the example of Thomas has in the end outweighed in prestige all the others put together. Bonaventura's cogent rebuttal of Gaunilo’s ‘island’ analogy has been passed over as though it had never happened, while the objections of Thomas have been treasured. Bonaventura may have been somewhat to blame for this. After grasping the true Principle, he attempted to improve upon it and,

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by a series of steps, reduced it to ‘God is God; therefore He exists’, thus, as Gilson says, “Simplifying the dialectic to the vanishing point.”

How well did Thomas understand the Proof? He seems scarcely to have seen at all how the essential step of the reasoning is back from Prosl. Il to Prosl. 1I, rather than, as admittedly Anselm seemed for a moment to think, in the reverse order. The key to the whole proof is the connection between perfection and the unique kind of existence which is essential, necessary, or self-existence. Thomas knows this connection in his own philosophy, but he denies Anselm’s right to make use of it for an ontological inference. His reasons we shall consider presently; meanwhile, the point is that to assume that this must not be the reasoning is to beg the question. And Thomas in effect makes this assumption. He implies that we must first, as in Chapter II, prove that God exists, and then, as in III, infer that His existence is of the necessary type. But since the first step is not cogent, the whole Proof must be invalid. Accordingly, in refuting Prosl. II in the Summa Theologica (see below), he thinks he has disposed of Anselm’s proposal. But this is not very perceptive, is it? Like contingency, necessity must be a property knowable a priori, the difference being that whereas from the modality ‘necessity of existence’ existence is deducible, from the modality ‘contingency’ it is not. How does this depend upon Prosl. II? By implying that it does, this most influential writer put—or seemed to put—the stamp of his approval upon Gaunilo’s worst mistake, his failure to see that unless one can disprove the deducibility of ‘imperfect’ from ‘contingent’, [and hence (modus tollens) of ‘noncontingent’ from ‘petfect’], he has not dealt the Proof any mortal blow.

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An important feature of Thomas’s atdtude, which distinguishes him to advantage from Kant, is that he does not go to the unwise extreme of denying outright that God is immanent in our thought of Him. For, as he says, all creatures tend toward their good, and God is the Good of all goods. So all creatures are directly related to God and may even, if sentient, be said directly to grasp or experience God. Only, thinks Thomas, this is not a clear or cognitive grasp, as (in the case of the lower animals at least) seems obvious. Hence, runs the reasoning, we cannot use this immanence of deity in our experience as basis of a proof. We have to turn to features of created things, such as change or degrees of value. But if we cannot elevate our direct sense of the supreme Good into a premise for a theistic proof, what reason is there for thinking we can do better with other aspects of experience as means toward so exalted an objective? By scorning the nonsensory awareness of deity in favor of mere sense perception, Thomas is preparing the way for the débacle which theistic proof-making met at the hands of Hume and Kant. He is the greatest single preparer of this misfortune, and Anselm is the man who (properly read) could have prevented it.

Thomas goes part way with Anselm in admitting that of course ‘the nonexistence of God’, adequately understood, is contradictory. By means of other proofs we know that God exists in such a way that there is in Him no separability between essence and existence. So we do know this much about the essence of God, that ‘existence pertains to it’ (Spinoza), but we know this not immediately and directly (through faith) as Anselm seems to imply, but in a slightly roundabout way via knowledge of the creatures. Is this really so wise as many have held? Science has been probing ever more deeply into the

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creatures, and in some ways they seem more mysterious than ever. And if it be said that for a theistic argument we need only understand the creatures as such, the bare idea of a creature, then that almost comes around to the Anselmian position, that one goes a priori from an idea to the divine existence. For what does it add to say, ‘the idea of a creature known to exist’? Would a merely possible creature, or the concept of creature, be independent of deity? The creator is necessary if creatures are to be so much as possible! Why should not the self-understanding of faith be at least as reliable and pertinent here as our ability to see into the meaning of ‘change’, for instance? If change does, in principle, involve deity, then to understand change as such (existent or not) is to understand deity to that extent.

There is, however, another way of interpreting Thomas'’s attitude. Perhaps what he obscurely felt was that Anselm had no right to presume that he did understand his faith. And here, I believe, Thomas would have been correct, for no classical theist as such can understand himself, since his identification of God with the absolute, or with ‘pure actuality’ and selfsufficiency, is a confusion. But if this is Thomas's ground for rejection, then he is himself in the same fix as Anselm. For he too was a classical theist, guilty of the confusion in question.

In the light of the foregoing, the Thomistic objection that we do not know the essence of God, and hence cannot make use of its oneness with His existence, is both relevant and not relevant. It is relevant in that Anselm (like Thomas) was committed by implication to a notion of the divine essence (the total absence in it of relativity or becoming) which could not be right. The objection, however, is not relevant, in that Anselm’s definition, when its ambiguities are left open rather

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than resolved classically, is merely the religious truism that it must be impossible for God to have a conceivable superior. It is here faith which defines the religious question; and this question turns out to be self-answering. To tell us to turn away from faith to the mere existence of the world is to forbid us to take as our problem the rational testing of faith. It is to allow unfaith to set the question. But in metaphysics he who sets the question largely determines what answers can be given.

[Refutation of Proslogium II]

It seems that . . . as soon as the significance of the name God is understood, it is at once seen that God exists. For by this name is signified that thing than which nothing greater can be conceived. But that which exists actually and mentally is greater than that which exists only mentally . . . Thetefore the proposition God exists is selfevident.

On the contrary, no one can mentally admit the opposite of what is self-evident. . . . But the opposite of the proposition God s can be mentally admitted: The fool said in his heart, There is no God. . . .

I answer that a thing can be self-evident in either of two ways: on the one hand, self-evident in itself, though not to us; on the other, selfevident in itself and to us. . . . Therefore I say that this proposition,

God exists, of itself is self-evident, for the predicate is the same as the subject, because God is His own existence, as will be hereafter shown. Now because we do not know the essence of God, the proposition is not self-evident to us, but needs to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us. . . . namely, by His effects . . .

Perhaps not everyone who hears this name God understands it to signify something than which nothing greater can be conceived. Yet, granted that everyone understands this name . . . nevertheless, it does not therefore follow that he understands that what the name signifies exists actually, but only that it exists mentally. Nor can it be argued that it actually exists, unless it be admitted that there actually exists

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something than which nothing greater can be thought; and this precisely is not admitted by those who hold that God does not exist.¹³

That what the fool says in his heart cannot be self-evidently wrong is correct only if ‘self-evident to us’ means, selfevident to any human being able to say the words with a feeling of understanding them. But this is a rather crude view; Anselm’s discussion of the point in the Reply is subtler. A mere feeling of understanding what we say is not a guarantee that we do understand. Logical relations need not be obvious at first glance to everyone. I fail to see that Anselm had anything to learn from Thomas in this respect. Similarly crude is the disjunction, knowing the essence of God (which in classical theism meant knowing all that God is) and knowing nothing at all about His essential nature, not even that it excludes a conceivable superior. No more is needed for the proof!

The last two of the quoted sentences obviously have relevance at most to the nonmodal form of ontological proof. Even in that reference we seem to be given little but a dogmatic denial that the proof is valid.

A writer who admits that the Thomistic distinction between the two ways of being self-evident does not furnish a good premise for refuting Anselm offers a different passage as turning the trick: No difhculty befalls anyone who posits that God does not exist. For that, for any given thing, either in reality or in the understanding, something greater can be conceived, is 2 difficulty only to him who concedes

¹³ Symma Theologica, Qu. 2, Art. 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Second and revised edition. (London: Oates & Washburn, 1920), Part I, p. 20.

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that there is in reality something than which a greater cannot be conceived. (Summa contra gentiles. L 11.) ¹⁴

The significance of this is explained as follows: atheism may be put in a disjunction: either (a) there is nothing than which a greater cannot be conceived, or (b) there is such a thing, but ‘in the understanding only’. Even if we grant to Anselm that (b) is contradictory, still—it is urged—(a) is certainly free from contradiction. But let us see. (a) may be offered (a¹) as a contingent, or (a²) as a necessary truth, If contingent, there must be no logical impossibility in the existence of a not conceivably surpassable being. But since, according to (a), there is in fact no such being, its nonexistence is also taken as possible. It would follow that the not impossible existence of an unsurpassable being could only be contingent existence. But, as we have seen, a contingent being could not be unsurpassable. Thus (a¹) is contradictory. Atheism is no contingent truth. There remains (a²). A necessity that, given any being, a greater can be conceived implies the logical impossibility of an unsurpassable being. This, however, is the positivistic not the atheistic tenet. Moreover, if a concept is logically impossible, this can be no mere truth of fact. Modal statements themselves, as Aristotle saw, have the mode of necessity, not of contingency. We conclude that atheism (the merely factual denial of God’s existence) is not saved from contradiction by Thomas. Neither the divine existence nor the divine nonexistence could be a mere fact, i.e., a contingent truth. The question is conceptual not observational. Anselm correctly located the theistic

¹⁴ G. B. Matthews, “"Aquinas on Saying that God Doesn’t Exist,” The Monist, 47 (1963), pp. 472-477.

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issue in the logical landscape. Did Aquinas? If indeed the tenability (or at least initial plausibility) of positiviim was his objection, this never becomes very clear in his discussion. (And Gaunilo had already made the point quite as definitely.)

In Thomist circles one often encounters some such formulation as the following:

The idea of God, the infinitely perfect being, does include existence, but only ideal, not real, existence. Therefore, it would be a contradiction if I were to think the infinitely perfect being without thinking it as existent, because I would be affirming and denying existence in the same order (Ordnung); however, a contradiction is not present if I attribute ideal existence to the most perfect being, while leaving the question open whether it exists in ontological reality. (Lehmen, Lebrbuch der Philosophie, Freiburg, 1901, BIL, p. 547, quoted in Esser— see Bibliography.)

This way of talking makes me wonder how stupid I perhaps am, for I can make no clear sense at all out of what is said. What is ‘ideal existence’? Merely that something is thought to exist? (For a legitimate distinction between conceptual and real existence in terms of the contrast between the that and the how of actualization, see Part One, Sec. 18.) But then a necessity to think infinite perfection as (ideally) existing is the necessity to think that it is thought to be thought to exist—and so on. And besides, the defect with which Anselm’s second Argument (against which Esser quotes the above passage) shows that Greatness cannot be combined is the conceivability of failing to have real existence. A being whose not really existing is conceivable is inferior to one whose not really existing is inconceivable. Therefore it is precisely real existence which must be taken as

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inseparable from Greatness. What special merit would there be in ideally existing necessarily while really existing contingently? And if one can only think divinity as really existing then atheism is not thinkable, and only a positivist can reject the conclusion of the Argument. Is that what Lehmen and Esser are trying to say? Then let them for pity’s sake say it. For it is painful to be unable to find sense in what must seem sensible to the many who write in this way.

When it is suggested, as by Esser (p. 36), that while we must think God as existent, still we may also think that he perhaps does not exist ‘in the real order’, I derive from such formulations only this: we must think divinity as existent, but we may also think the proposition, ‘divinity may not exist’. Once more my intelligence fails to arrive at a coherent meaning. Is it our old friend, ‘God exists necessarily if he exists at all’? This seems implied by Esser (p. 35). As I have argued in various places, this expression also means nothing clear and consistent. If it only means, God either fails to exist or else exists eternally and without dependence upon any other existent, then I think (a) it misuses ‘necessarily’, and (b) it implies a radically unintelligibile form of contingency, ie., that something is but might not have been, yet no cause enabled it to be or furnished its real possibility. To be able not to exist yet to owe one’s existence to no actual condition is a combination of ideas that gives me for one ‘logical seasickness’. In addition I have given many reasons for denying that the ‘nonexistence’ of something is conceivable unless the something is competitive, partly exclusive, in its essential nature, so that another thing could exist in its place. But there is no ‘place’ of God which another thing could occupy instead of Him. I deny that an argument can

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be refuted by formulations so full of paradoxes as those just considered.

On the whole, Thomism sheds not much light and some darkness on our topic.

[Return to Part Two Contents]

5. Descartes, Gassends, and Hobbes

According to Gilson, it is not provable that Descartes had read Anselm. He may have taken the Argument from Thomas, which would explain why he put it in the weaker form of Prosl. II until, under Gassendi’s prodding, he came to his own version of the second and stronger argument. In any case, there can be no doubt that he knew some of the usual objections —this being the least that everyone has known who ever discussed the subject! On the whole, Descartes did not reach Anselm’s level in this matter. He did, however, furnish an interesting reason for taking the idea of God to be logically admissible. If we doubt, and hence realize our cognitive imperfection, it must mean something to talk about a degree of clarity and distinctness which excludes all doubt, that is, the divine clarity, infallible or omniscient awareness. But Descartes weakened his argument here by claiming—or seeming to claim—absolute clarity and distinctness for us human beings in certain cases.

[Echo of Prosl. I]

Being accustomed in all other things to distinguish between existence and essence, I readily believe that existence can also be disjoined from the essence of God, and that God can therefore be conceived as not actually existing. Buc on closer study, it becomes manifest to me that it is no more possible to separate existence from the essence of God than . . . the idea of 2 mountain from that of a valley. ... Nor may it be objected that though it is indeed necessary to grant that God exists, provided the supposition has antecedently been made

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that God possesses all perfections and that existence is itself one of these perfections, the supposition is not . . . itself necessary . . . It is not indeed necessary that I should at any time be dwelling on the idea of God. None the less, as often as I may be concerned to entertain the thought of first and sovereign being, . . . I must necessarily actribute all perfections to Him . . . And as soon as I take notice that existence is a perfection, I am thereby constrained to conclude that this sovereign being truly exists . . .¹⁵

[Echo of Prosl. III?]

In the idea or concept of a thing existence is contained, because we are unable to conceive anything except under the form of an existent; that is, possible or contingent existence is contained in the concept of a limited thing, but necessary and perfect existence in the concept of a supremely perfect thing . . . Necessary existence is contained in the nature or concept of God.

Hence it is true to say of God that necessary existence is in Him, or that God exists.¹⁶

Descartes’s critic, Pierre Gassendi, in the following ‘objection’, gives a lucid anticipation of Kant’s principle that existence is not a predicate (or, as Gassendi puts it, a ‘perfection’).

[Refutation of Prosl. II]

You (Descartes) place existence among the Divine perfections, without, however, putting it among the perfections of a triangle or of a mountain, though in exactly similar fashion, and in its own way, it may be said to be a perfection of each. But, sooth to say, existence is a perfection neither in God nor in anything else; it is rather that in the absence of which there is no perfection.

¹⁵ Descartes’s Philosophical Writings, seiected and translated by N. K. Smith (London: Macmillan & Co., 1952), pp. 243, 244. [The stronger form of Cartesian ontological argument is omitted from this edition.]

¹⁶ From Second Replies to Objections, trans. T. V. Smith and Marjorie Grene. In From Descarses to Kant (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1933), pp. 161-62.

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. that which does not exist has neither perfection nor imperfect:lon, md that which exists and has various perfections, does not have its existence as one of the number of its pcrfecuons, but as that by means of which the thing itself equally with its perfections is in existence . . . Hence neither is existence held to exist in a thing in the way that perfections do, nor if the thing lacks existence is it said to be imperfect (or deprived of a perfection), so much as to be nothing. ¹⁷

Here we have one more refutation of the ‘First Ontological Argument’ (to speak with Malcolm). Nonexistence may be no defect in a thing (for there is no thing in the case). However, Anselm had argued, contingency in an existing thing is certainly a defect; and where it could not be, neither could contingent nonexistence, but only sheer impossibility or necessity of existence.

Descartes in his Replies brings this out, though not so fully as Anselm had done:

Nay, necessary existence in the case of God is a true property in the strictest sense of the word, because it belongs to Him and forms part of His essence alone. Hence the existence of a triangle cannot be compared with the existence of God, because existence manifestly has a different relation to essence in the case of God and in the case of a triangle. ¹⁸

Did Kant know this exchange between Gassendi and Descartes? It certainly would have been relevant. That existence

¹⁷ Philosopbical Works of Descartes, trans. E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (New York: Dover Publiations, 1955), 1, 186. My colleague Douglas Morgan has pointed out to me that Aristotle had explicidy denied that ‘existence’ is a predicate. Thus it is as clear that Aristotle would have rejected Anselm's first argument as it is that he could scarcely have rejected the second. See Metaphysics 1003 b 264.

¹⁸ Op, cit., p. 228. [The Everyman edition of 1922 also contmins this stronger or “second” version of the Proof.]

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is not, in ordinary or contingent cases, a (deducible) property is without prejudice to the status of necessary existence, which is different in kind and inapplicable except to God.

The only advantage Descartes has over Anselm is in the phrases, ‘necessary’ and ‘possible [i.., contingent] existence’. The ideas are certainly Anselmian. And, as we saw in Part One, Sec. 23 (1), Anselm’s language has its merits.

Not only did Descartes encounter a lucid anticipation of Kant’s chief criticism (and rebut it), he also dealt with a clear formulation of the favorite twenteth-century (Wittgensteinian) contention that rational necessity derives from language, and asserts nothing about extralinguistic reality. In other words, modality is purely de dictu and not de re!

Consider the following:

Hobbes: “Reason gives us no conclusions about the nature of things, but only about the terms which designate them, whether, indeed, or not there is a convention (arbitrarily made about their meanings) according to which we join names together.”

Descartes: . . in reasoning we unite not names but things signified by names; and I marvel that the opposite can occur to anyone . . . For, if he [Hobbes] admits that words signify anything, why will he not allow our reasoning to refer to this something that is signified, rather than to words?”'¹⁹

It is true that the ontological proof was not the topic which Hobbes had introduced here; but it is clear, I think, what Descartes would have said had that been the topic. I submit

¹⁹ Op. cit., Vol 11, pp. 64f. For this reference I am indebted to Dr. Bowman Clarke.

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that it is time for historians to tell us the facts in this case, which are that, down to Wittgenstein, the Anselmian problem had been left nearly where it was in Descartes’s time. Real novelty came with Barth, Koyré, Hartshorne, Findlay, and Malcolm. Most of the others have been treading old trails, often with the airs of pathfinders.

If I overstate, please remember that the contrary overstatements are in a thousand textbooks and works of reference!

What Hobbes actually said (in his Fifth and Seventh Objections) about Descartes’s proof for God, without specifying whether it was the ontological or the proof from the axiom that there must be a cause for the content of every idea, was that in fact we have no idea of God. In short his view on the issue was the positivistic one—an intelligent position.

The logical possibility and consistency of ‘infinite perfection’ follows—Descartes argues—from the fact that he has a clear and distinct idea of it. In short, he has an absolute intuition at this point. Leibniz rightly rejected this claim, as Hobbes had done. And indeed, since Descartes holds to the sheer unity of the divine reality, an absolute intuition of the divine nature should endow us with omniscience at one blow. Moreover, even if, with neoclassical theism, one admits real distinctions between elements and aspects of the divine life, one still is not entitled to put absolute trust in our intuitive grasp of even the most abstract aspect of deity. One cannot oscillate between the appeal to logical inference as against intuition and the appeal to intuition as against inference, in this arbitrary way. The possibility of inferring inconsistency must remain open, and so must that of having a genuine though not infallible intuition of consistency. Leibniz is more penetrating on this issue, though as we shall see, not much more.

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Descartes, however, also argues (condescending to his opponents’ lack of intuition) that perfection is the positive idea, and imperfection derivative from it by negation. One cannot, he thinks, impugn the positive case and leave meaning for the negative. True, he must then defend himself against the observation that ‘infinite’ is negative, and so derivative from the positive idea of finitude or limitation. He reacts by denying the trustworthiness of the linguistic indication in this particular case. By the divine infinity we do not intend a numerical or quantitative unlimitedness, but a reality wholly positive, lacking nothing. There is some plausibility in this, but yet the reasoning is unsound. Limitaton implies a negative element; but it is no mere negation. For, since there are mutually incompatible yet positive values, as we shall see more particularly in discussing Leibniz, to reject all limitation (being this and not that, or that and not this) is to lose all concrete definiteness and become indistinguishable from mere indeterminate potentality for positive value. The linguistic indication which Descartes spurns here might have led him to a great discovery, had he taken it seriously. ‘Perfect’ can be given a wholly positive meaning, but this proves it to be irreducible to sheer infinity. These terms are not synonyms. Perfect in the appropriate religious meaning implies the impossibility of being surpassed by another. This is, insofar, negative. But one can equivalently say it implies the necessity that the X defined as perfect should surpass any being other than itself. Or: In any possible state of reality, X surpasses y, whatever y may be. Sheer infinity is not deducible from this definition. For such a deduction one must assume that a wholly infinite being could also be all-surpassing in richness of actual value, and against this is the argument that to be wholly

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infinite is to be wholly indefinite or indeterminate (as Thomas put it, a wholly ‘indeterminate sea of being’); and it is just not self-evident that this can be distinguished from the totality of the logically possible, in entire abstraction from any actualization. One may verbally stipulate that it is wholly actual, but then one has two absolute infinities, pure possibility as such and ‘pure actuality’ as such. (For some such reason David of Dinant and still others argued that God and prime matter were indistinguishable.) If this is not a paradox, what would be? Self-evident consistency cannot be claimed for any such idea.

Descartes’s weakness, as user of the Argument, was his uncritical acceptance of Classical or Neoplatonic theism. In this he was like countless others, Anselm included.

Descartes, like Bonaventura, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz, indeed probably all the defenders of the Argument, assigned a different origin to the idea of God than to ideas of sensory things. This nonsensory origin was the point of ‘innate ideas’. Locke's criticisms, as Peirce said, implied a meaning for the phrase which ‘nobody’ had intended. (It may also be fair to say that the intended meaning was not as clear as it ought to have been.) It was of course primarily his sensory theory of knowledge which barred the way to Thomas's acceptance of Anselm’s proposal. According to all the Ontologists, the idea of God comes from God, not merely from creatures to us as creatures, but direct from God to us as His creatures. We do not exclusively infer God, we experience Him spiritually and intellectually. Inferences in this field are, in part at least, reductio ad absurdum arguments against the denial that we know or have God all along, and cannot simply not know or have Him. Bonaventura and Malebranche even

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emphasize the direct awareness of God to such an extent that the Argument is no longer an inference at all, but merely the recognition of the divine givenness as self-existent. (On this point, Jalabert is very illuminating—see Bibliography.) The error consists in not seeing the value of the intellectual experiment by which we test the assertion that God is given with this character of necessary existence. Human intuitions are not so clear, or so easy to put into words without danger of confusion, that we can rest content with their mere assertion. We must also investigate logical relations among our other nonsensory ideas. It turns out that to deny the givenness of God is to deny His existence (for, being conceived as universally immanent, He could not be conceived as nevertheless not given), and that this in turn is to deny even His logical possibility. The positivist is willing to make this denial. But this question, too, is further arguable, and there are reductio ad absurdum arguments concerning it.

What, however, does ‘nonsensory’ amount to? One way to put it would be this. To understand arithmetic or logic one needs no special sense organs, or special physical environment perceived through such organs. One may, if one is not God, require some sense organs or other and some external environment capable of supporting one as a thinking animal. But it makes no difference what the organs or the environment are like, provided thinking (presumably with something like language) can develop freely on a sufficiently conscious level. Given this, arithmetic and logic can arise and be understood. So can the idea and knowledge of God! But the ideas of ‘oxygen’ or of ‘vertebrate’, with the meanings that these terms actually have, are in a different class. Certain special perceptions are required. The geometrical shape of a back-

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bone is not enough to fulfill the requirements of ‘vertebrate’, and it is impossible to put all the requirements into an a priori definition. For we mean something historical by the term, as also by ‘oxygen’, something which has actually arisen in our cosmos in our cosmic epoch, something whose nature is permapently more or less hidden from us, and must be referred to by denotation, by pointing, not by pure description. On the contrary, to grasp what number is, or what God (in His purely necessary aspect) is, one needs no special historical reference or special perceptual experience whatsoever, but only the intelligence to grasp the most universal aspects of absolutely any kind of experience or history. If this is what ‘innate’ (or not sensorily produced) means, then I hold that Locke was mistaken: there are such ideas, and very important they are. No one ever held that we are always conscious of them, or even that all men can be infallibly led to the consciousness of them by any course of argument or instruction. Some men resist arithmetic, or have scarcely had need to consider it beyond the uttermost extreme of simple cases, and there are strong forces opposing the careful consideration of God. But it remains true that no special sensory (including emotional) experiences are logically required, any more for the idea of God than for the ideas of arithmetic.

True, one must have some emotion or other, because the idea of value is involved. God is unsurpasssably great, and great here means having or being ‘whatever it is better to have or be than not to have or be’. But the purely general idea of value, or of better, is all that is required, and it is absurd to suppose that anyone would bother to think if nothing seemed better to him than anything else. Indeed the notion of a value-free experiencing or thinking is nonsensical or contradic-

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tory. To have some emotion or other, and some sensory experience or other, is presupposed by any thinking at all (in spite of so-called thinking machines). Even God, in Neoclassical Theism, has something analogous to sensation. An innate idea is not one which could arise with no sensations or feelings, but one which logically could arise no matter what the sensations or feelings, provided they favored conscious thinking, including thinking about thinking, on sufficiently complex levels, and with sufficient freedom from inhibitions.

How far this is what the rationalists meant I shall not further inquire. It is, I suggest, at least as close to what they meant as anything which Locke set up to attack.

[Return to Part Two Contents]

6. Spinoza

Spinoza seems to have been the first, though he was not the last, to employ the Proof in support of another doctrine than classical theism; in his case, a more rigorously formulated version of classical pantheism or Stoicism. In one sense this was logical. If God is a superconcrete yet wholly necessary being, then all concreteness must be within Him—otherwise He is but an abstraction from the total reality—and since, on classical assumptions, nothing contingent can be in Him, all things must be necessary. But then the distinctive meaning of ‘necessary’ is lost!

About the Proof itself Spinoza had no misgivings, and he is well beyond the mere notion that existence is better than nonexistence. His proof of Proposition VII rests on the idea (which had been indicated by Anselm, and developed by Scotus and Thomas Bradwardinus) that what cannot be caused by another cannot exist contingently, which is a version

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of the true Anselmian Principle. Also the first auxiliary proof for Proposition XI is a way of stating still another version, apparently not clearly seen by the magnificent doctor, that contingent existence is competitive, the things which exist preventing (‘annulling’) the existence of many otherwise possible things. Here Spinoza seems to have made a genuine advance. However, he could not do justice to this approach, since if all things are necessary, ‘otherwise possible things’ has no clear meaning.

Spinoza blithely assumes as a matter of faith (he says, ‘intuitive knowledge’) the logical possibility of divinity as he defines it, not noticing how paradoxical it is that he has ostensibly deduced the ‘necessity’ of the entire concrete totality of things from an abstract definition. The inconsistency in the notion of a necessary yet concrete reality is left out of the reckoning.

[Echoes of Proslogium III?]

Prop. VIL It pertains to the nature of substance so exist.

Demonst. There is nothing by which substance can be produced (Corol. Prop. 6). It will therefore be the cause of itself, that is to say (Def. 1), its essence necessarily involves existence, or in other words it pertains to its nature to exist.

Prop. XI. God, or substance consisting of infinite atsributes, each one of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists.

Demonst. If this be denied, conceive, if it be possible, that God does pot exist. Then it follows (Ax.7) that His essence does not involve existence. But this (Prop. 7) is absurd. Therefore God necessarily exists.

Another proof. For the existence or nonexistence of everything there must be a reason or cause. . . . and if it does not exist, there must be a reason or cause which hinders its existence. . . . If, therefore,

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there be no reason nor cause which hinders God from existing, or which negates His existence, we must conclude absolutely that He necessarily exists. But if there be such a reason or cause, it must be either in the nature itself of God or must lie outside it, that is to say, in another substance or another nature. For if the reason lay in a substance of the same nature, the existence of God would be by this very fact admitted. But substance possessing another nature could bave nothing in common with God (Prop. 2), and, therefore, could not give Him existence nor negate it. Since, therefore, the reason or cause which could negate the divine existence cannot be outside the divine nature, it will necessarily, supposing that the divine nature does not exist, be in His Nature itself, which would therefore involve a contradiction. But to affirm this of the Being absolutely infinite and consummately perfect is absurd. Therefore, neither in God nor outside God is thete any reason or cause which can negate His existence, and therefore God necessarily exists.

Another proof. Inability to exist is impotence, and, on the other hand, ability to exist is power, as is self-evident. If, therefore, there is nothing which necessarily exists excepting things finite, it follows that things finite are more powerful than the absolutely infinite Being, and this (as is self-evident) is absurd. . . .²⁰

Spinoza’s view is that all things, granted their causes, are necessary; though in ordinary things, the causes are outside their own natures. But then there is no contrasting term to necessity, no true contingency. The totality of things is as necessary as God. To retain the contrast upon which the meaning of ‘necessary’ depends, we need to admit that things other than God are ultimately contingent. And God transcends their contingency only by taking it wholly into Himself so that it becomes the infinite tolerance of the divine life for alternative states. To this divinely flexible alternativeness there can, therefore, be no alternative. The absolute ‘patience’ of

20 Ethic Demonstrated in Geometrical Order, trans. W. H. White (London: Triibner & Co., 1883), Pt I.

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God for the variety of existence constitutes His immunity to nonexistence. .

However, Spinoza is right in saying that a thing can only fail to exist if something ‘prevents’ it from existing; in other words, all facts are partly positive. But he misconstrues this to mean that effects are necessitated by their causes. They are necessarily prevented from existing if the causes are sufficiently unfavorable, but even favorable causes cannot reduce to zero the creativity—involving contingency—which is becoming itself. One must also take temporal aspects into account in considering how one thing may prevent another from existing. Granted that creativity could, at a certain point, have taken another course than it has, the course actually taken henceforth excludes this other possibility. It was, but no longer is, an ‘open possibility’. But no possibility is closed unless the realization of some incompatible possibility has closed it. Only the future is still an open possibility, and an eternal being, which can never be merely future, can never be an open possibility. Whatever made its nonexistence a fact would also make its existence impossible.

God's absolute “power to exist” is His ability to assimilate any and every causal condition, to make it ‘favorable’ to some appropriate responsive state of His own awareness. This is the opposite of being influenced by nothing other than Himself. Nothing can be merely other or alien to God; all have something ‘in common’ with Him. This neoclassical view is about equally far from that of Spinoza and that of Anselm.

[Return to Part Two Contents]

7. Ralph Cudworth

Here is one of the few writers who have arrived at a good

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understanding of the essentially modal structure of the Argument. What is still more rare, he has apparently done this without deriving his understanding from Prosl. III and the Reply. His source seems to have been Descartes (or perhaps Henry More, whose ideas were similar), but Cudworth makes the modal considerations more explicit than Descartes did. He sees that something which could not exist contingently also could not contingently fail to exist; so that to deny its existence is to assert its impossibility.

If God, or a perfect Being, in whose essence is contained necessary existence, be possible or in no way impossible to have been, then He is: . .. for if God were possible, and yet He be not, then is He not pecessary but contingent Being, which is contrary to the hypothesis.²¹

[This necessity of God's existence] must not be taken hypothetically only . . . that if there be anything absolutely perfect, then its existence was and will be necessary; but also absolutely, that though contradictious things cannot possibly be, and though imperfect things may possibly either be or not be; yet a perfect Being cannot but be; or it is impossible that it should not be.²²

How melancholy to reflect that so clear and firm a grasp of the subject (buried, alas, in the third volume of a diffuse and rather formless work dealing with many topics, some of little present-day interest) was published a century before Kant's Critique, and that now, nearly three centuries later, so much of the philosophical world is still (as Barth puts it) “stuck in the dialectic of Prosl. II,” that is, in the nonmodal or false version of the Proof.

²¹ The True Intellectual System (London, 1895), vol. iii, p. 49. [This edition contains long notes by J. L. Mosheim, which seem to exhibit most of the misunderstandings to which an ontological argument is open.]

²² Op. cit, p. 40.

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Of course Cudworth lacks any realization of the abstract-concrete paradox, and he asserts rather than explicates the incompatibility of perfection with contingency. On this second point, Anselm is more helpful.

[Return to Part Two Contents]

8. Leibniz

No more than with Descartes, Spinoza, Cudworth, or most of those we shall have to deal with is there evidence that Leibniz knew the contents of the Proslogium (after the by themselves scarcely intelligible first two chapters). My guess is that he did not. He was, however, too much a metaphysician to be wholly victimized by the Gaunilo tradition. Like Scotus, but first among the moderns, he sees the need of establishing the logical possibility of the theistic concept, and he attempts to meet this need, partly by connecting the problem of logical possibility with the principles which he believes underlie logic generally, an intelligent procedure, if it can be carried through successfully. Like Thomas (and all the great theists) he is clear that if we know anything at all about God we know that He could not exist contingently. Unlike Thomas, but like all the Ontologists, he disbelieves in the sensory origin of the most universal conceptions. God is a direct datum of the soul, always given but not always attended to.

One of the best-known passages of Leibniz concerning the Argument betrays the persistent influence of Anselm’s initial blunder (see Part One, Secs. 6, 19, 20).

To exist is something more than not to exist, or rather, existence adds a degree to grandeur and perfection, and as Descartes states it, existence is itself a perfection. Therefore this

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degree of grandeur and perfection . . . which consists in existence, is in this supreme all-great, all-perfect Being. . . . The Scholastics, not excepting even their Doctor Angelicus, have misunderstood this argument. . . . It is not a paralogism, but it is an imperfect demonstration, which assumes something that must be proved . . . that is, it is tacitly assumed that this idea of the all-great or all-perfect being is possible, and implies no contradiction. And it is already something . . . [to have] proved that, assuming that God is possible, He exists, which is the privilege of divinity alone. We have the right to presume the possiblity of every being, and especially that of God, until someone proves the contrary. So that this argument gives a morally demonstrative conclusion, which declares that, according to the present state of our knowledge, we must judge that God exists.²³

In the opening sentences Leibniz seems to be repeating the Prosl. II confusion between saying that the fact of not existing would be a defect in deity and saying that even the bare possibility of not existing would be a defect. Of course the fact entails the possibility, hence whatever excludes the latter excludes the former; but this complex relationship, not the direct and simple exclusion of nonexistence, is the point of the Argument. Only necessary existence can enter into the notion of a kind or essence. In another passage Leibniz does somewhat better.

En disant seulement que Dieu est un étre de soi ou primitif, ems & se c'est-d-dire qui existe par son essence, il est aisé de conclure de cette definition qu'un tel étre, 8'il est possible, existe; ou plutét cette conclusion est un corollaire que se tire immédiatement de la définition et n'en différe presque point. Car I'essence de la chose n'étant que ce qui fait

²³ New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, trans, A. G. Langley (New York, 1896), pp. 502f. Reprinted, LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Co., 1949.

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sa possibilité, il est bien manifeste qu'exister par son essence, C'est exister par so possibilité Et si I'étre de soi émit défini en termes encore plus approchants, en disant que c'est I'taxe qui doit exister, parce qu'il est possible, il est manifeste que tout ce quon pourra dire contre I'existence d'un tel étre serait de nier sa possibilité.²⁴

Here we have something a little like Prosl. III. Essential or self-existence is the unique existence of deity. But Anselm retains the advantage of having made it clear that one does not ‘define’ God as the necessarily existing being (which leads to the objection that one must then show what necessary existence has to do with divinity), but rather, having defined deity as the worshipful, hence Unsurpassable, one then from this definition derives the trait of necessary existence. Thus it is the Unsurpassable which necessarily exists, not merely the necessarily existent which necessarily exists. Surely the former procedure is superior!

That Leibniz is not very sensitive to the difference between mere existence and necessity of existence as a ‘perfection’ is partly due to certain features of his theory of existence which are well elucidated by Jalabert (see Bibliography). Every essence ‘tends toward’ existence, and insofar includes existence in its concept; but ordinary essences are partly in conflict; they compete with one another for existence, and only Sufficient Reason, or the divine affirmation of the Best compossible set of essences, resolves the conflict. The divine essence, however, is not in competition with the others,

²⁴ Untitled essay on Father Lami's proof for the existence of God. Die philosophische Schriften von Gottfried Wilbelm Leibniz, ed. Gerharde (Berlin: 1887), vol 4, pp. 405-406. [In this and the following quotations I have followed the spelling and punctuation given by Jalabert (p. 82— see Bibliography).]

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being quite independent of them. And its tendency to exist is infinite, and hence could not fail to be fulfilled. ‘Tending to’ means, ‘will if nothing prevents’. With the divine essence, and only with it, nothing could prevent. Hence, a priori, God exists.

This is a much subtler theory than Spinoza’s. Indeed it is the supreme effort of a classical metaphysician to employ the Argument. To say that an essence exists if no competing one does is to say that no fact can be merely negative, that the nonexistence of X is the existence of a world incompatible with X. This, I hold, is quite correct. Spinoza, too, takes nonexistence to imply that the thing is ‘prevented’ from existing; but he spoils this by also saying that all possible things exist, hence there are no such things as competing possibilities. Leibniz wants to preserve the contrasts (with the collapse of which the Argument loses all point) between: that which is necessarily existent, that which is possible but not existent, and that which is possible and also (contingently) existent. Any theist who does not recognize these distinctions is cutting off the limb upon which he would perch.

Had Leibniz been willing to qualify Sufficient Reason, so that truly arbitrary decisions, both divine and otherwise, could be admitted, and to follow through by admitting contingent divine decisions as real qualities of deity, that is to say, had he been willing to break with two thousand years of adamantine resistance to the idea of divine accidents (contingent predicates in God), the distinction between competing world possibilities and the noncompetitive essence of deity might have enabled him to solve the Findlay paradox and legitimately employ the Argument. But what monstrous proposals he would have thought these! Nevertheless, the question remains, can he

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meet the conditions of the Argument on his own more traditional foundations?

Does it really have a coherent meaning to say: (a) there is no impossibility in any of the various incompossible essences, taken one by one, and they are therefore severally really possible; (b) no essence could exist without a divine decree favoring it; (c) only one decree is compatible with the divine wisdom and goodness; (d) that God and His wisdom and goodness exist is logically necessary? Russell holds that this adds up to a miserable self-contradiction or quibble; I think it is a magnificent attempt to find a difference where no room has been left for one. Leibniz is clear that a possible world is correlative to a possible divine decree favoring it; but in what sense is a decree ‘possible’ to a being whose character strictly forbids his making it? If the divine character as eternally necessary uniquely designates one world as best, and therefore alone worthy of existence, is not God by His very essence in competition with the remaining possible worlds? But clearly, in such a competition with absolute necessity, a possibility is simply no possibility! Thus I hold with Russell, and in spite of Jalabert’s skillful pleading on Leibniz’s behalf, that the great attempt is a flat failure. It was, however, a truly great actempt. Consider the problem: there are unrealized possibilities, not all could be realized together, yet severally all are genuinely possible, so that there is no ‘metaphysical’ necessity in the world's detailed character; however, there must be adequate reason for that character; how can this be? A happy thought: suppose one possibility is supreme over all others. God would then—and only then—have a reason for its selection. And God, at least, could not act irrationally or without adequate reason!

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The grandeur of Spinoza was that he made no pretences about saving contingency, but sternly stuck to his denial of it. This, however, was moral even more than intellectual grandeur. For the untenability of such a one-sided modal theory is only too manifest. Leibniz saw that one must at least do better than that. But, alas, Leibniz was not the man to pay the immense price of challenging tradition as rudely as Spinoza had done, though in another and more appropriate place, in its denial of contingent divine properties. Nor was he the man to be so out of tune with the confident science of his age as to resist the attraction of the Phantom of Sufficient Reason of which Spinoza also, in his own way, was a victim. Some things may perhaps be contingent, but this must not mean that they are without ultimate reason. Yet is not that what ‘contingency’ does mean, if anything?

An ultimate reason for the entire world, just as it is, must be exactly as definite and complex as the world. It cannot be the mere abstract notion, ‘best of all’. By a stroke of genius, the dilemma seems to yield to solution: as possible this world is just as definite and complex as the same world as actual; it also, in this definite complexity, surpasses every other possible world. Hence, by what appears almost as magic, a definite world in all its details does deduce itself, so to speak, from the mere abstraction ‘better than any other possible world’. The feat that Spinoza could not quite manage appears to have been accomplished. Spinoza had had to admit that his ‘modes’ do not follow directly from God's essence but rather from antecedent modes; only the totality of modes follows from the essence. But how? What connects the concrete particulars with the bare abstraction, ‘absolutely infinite substance’? Only the verbal bridge: ‘absolutely infi-

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nite reality must consist of all possibilities exhaustively actualized, hence there can be no unrealized possibilities’. But how empty or circular this proof is. If it shows anything it is only this: the intelligibility of Spinoza’s definition of deity (suspiciously like that of other Classical Theists) stands or falls with the intelligibility of ‘all things are necessary’, or ‘what is possible also is’. However, what reason does Spinoza have for assuring us that both stand, rather than both fall? Only his alleged intuitive understanding, which is his secret, or at most that of Classical Metaphysicians generally. Thus the doctrine is a rather transparent though unconscious bluff. In Leibniz the bluff is harder to see through. But is it anything beyond a more complicated bluff?

To allow the theory to pass is to agree not to attack the logical admissibility of ‘one among possible worlds is best’. Yet why should it be any more admissible to suppose this than that one number is greatest, or one possible velocity the swiftest—formulae which, as Leibniz rightly points out repeatedly, one may employ with a feeling of understanding, though when examined they turn out to be logical absurdities. He will not allow Descartes to assume the internal coherence of his definition of God, but asks that this be proved. He makes the same demand of Spinoza. But ‘best possible world’, this he will not undertake to prove consistent (if so, where?) but rather he wants us not to notice the problem of consistency at this point. And how does he know that the demand for an ultimate reason for the nonnecessary is anything more than the demand that the supposedly nonnecessary should be shown necessary after all?

Leibniz argues that if we renounce Sufficient Reason we give up all hope of proofs for God, or indeed of rational knowledge.

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However, he here overlooks some important distinctions. On the one hand, if there is genuine contingency there cannot be an ultimate reason specifying which possibles are actualized. Actualization is brute fact, capricious, undeducible. It is not a concealed syllogism of any kind. On the other hand, for possibilities themselves there must be a reason. Possibilities are not capricious or arbitrary, but rational. Deductive reason is concerned with the rationale of possibilities, not of actualities. We must, however, distinguish between ‘pure’ or eternal possibilities, and spatio-temporally localized possibilities: what is possible in a given time and place. The pure possibilities are wholly rational, and there is no caprice in them. If something is eternally possible, then this is a necessary not a contingent truth. No choice, decision, or selection is presupposed. But what is possible here and now depends upon what has previously happened, including the arbitrary decisions previously made. We can always ask, what events, what brute facts, put the world in a situation in which what could happen had to fall within such and such limits? Real spatiotemporally localized possibilities are narrowly limited, as compared to the realm of pure possibility; this difference, these limitations, constitute causality and make science possible. But the entire difference between pure and real possibility is ultimately arbitrary, brute fact and nothing else. Not that a chaos of innumerable arbitrary decisions could miraculously add up to a world-order. This would indeed be unintelligible, and Leibniz would be right to reject this. What saves the world from being such a chaos, however, is not that there is an ultimate reason for the particular limits of real possibility, ie., for the particular causal laws, but rather, first there is indeed an ultimate reason and necessity that there should

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be orderly limits or laws of some kind, and, second, the preeminence of certain arbitrary decisions, those of God (called in the Bible ‘fiats’), means that all other decisions are swayed and kept within appropriate limits by the influence of these supreme decisions. Like traffic laws, ‘natural laws’ have arbitrary features; but it is not arbitrary that there are laws, and that there is a power to make them. For this, the Reason is indeed sufficient. Mere chaos is not among the possible worlds. Nor is any possible world a godless world, which would be an unordered order, and nonsense. (This is the form the ‘argument from design’ ought to take, but the subject transcends the scope of this book.) So I think there is no need to admit that the principle of rationality which connects the world to God must be the ultrarationalistic one implicitly destructive of contingency itself. And certainly the ontological argument depends upon no such ultrarationalism; quite the contrary, it cannot be well defended without abandoning that doctrine.

Before asking whether the supreme axiom of rational understanding, taken to be that of Sufficient Reason, is absolutely true, or must be renounced or weakened, we should ask the prior question, Is Sufficient Reason itself a sufficiently reasonable formulation of the supreme axiom of rational understanding? I hold that it is a quite unreasonable one. By requiring the principle of rational derivability to apply to everything in every aspect, one prevents it from applying distinctively or effectively to anything. This is the usual penalty for one-sided simplifications in metaphysics. (The contrary one-sidedness of Humian empiricism, which is still very much with us, has its penalties also. It just happens that our age is not so sensitive to them.)

We may be grateful to Leibniz for having put his superb in-

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tellect into the effort to do the impossible, to justify the unjustifiable. For this helps us in our search for the truly justifiable. By making clear the best that could be said for ultrarationalism, Leibniz put us in an excellent position to evaluate that way of thinking. The verdict seems clear enough; the doctrine is mistaken.

The sane principle of sufficient reason implies as corollary that pure possibility consists only of possible kinds and degrees of causal order: a causeless chaos is eternally impossible. Hence, when it was said above that the entitre difference between pure and real possibility is arbitrary, this was not in conflict with what was subsequently said about the element of rationality in the form of divinely-imposed laws. For God could not fail to exist, nor could He fail to impose some order. He does not arbitrarily decide that there shall be order, but only what order. This last, however, is, from an ultimate point of view, simply arbitrary. It has to be so, for the notion of an ulterior reason leads to an idle regress, or to the denial of contingency and therewith any intelligible necessity also. ‘From an ultimate point of view’ means this: in a given situation only certain kinds of decision would be appropriate, and for rejecting inappropriate kinds, there is a sufficient reason. But the situation itself grew out of prior decisions (not those of God alone) and to ask, ‘What is the reason for the entire series of decisions?”’ is to ask a nonsensical question. The design argument so put is, I hold, fallacious. No wonder Hume and Kant could make little or nothing out of it. To imagine God before all creation deciding upon the whole once for all is to slide into the eternalistic dream in which nothing really makes sense. Creation is not a one-step process. Merely possible worlds set no soluble problem, even to the

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All-wise; for where no conditions are fixed, there is no definite problem to solve. Only a world already in being gives God anything to decide about. Not that the world was there before He decided anything, but that His prior decisions and their results were there before any given decision of His, or of anyone else’s. The old doctrine, which Leibniz professes, that God's initial creation and His preservation of the world are but a single act, is a confused one, and it assumes the dubious idea of a beginning of the creative process itself. But all beginnings presuppose the process, not the other way. There is then no one act of creation and no one act of preservation; creation consists of definite steps one after another. Just so did the Myth present the matter. Theologians (with some exceptions) thought themselves wiser. But in truth they had their own intellectualized myth, worse not better than the popular one in not a few respects. Leibniz is the last great philosopher who was really confident about the intellectual myth in question. Our mandate is to do better, by looking in another direction.

Leibniz’s procedure was cleatly not to survey the possible worlds and see that one was best. How could he do this? He had a notion of what makes one world better than another, namely that it integrates more diversity. But ‘best’ would then have to imply an unsurpassable diversity unsurpassably well unified. And what can be meant by unsurpassable diversity, whether or not ideally unified? A greatest possible number of kinds of thing? But since Leibniz himself denies a greatest number, number must be left out of it. If quantity cannot be maximized, then it must be totally abstracted from in conceiving the best world. Also, since there are incompossibles, oot all possible diversity could be integrated. It seems safe

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to conclude that the notion of ‘best possible’ was not independently established, but was deduced from another notion whose consistency was held beyond challenge. This was, of course, Sufficient Reason. Unless one possibility is best, actuality cannot have a reason. But this is hardly a proof that one possibility is best. Since the Principle of Sufficient Reason, applied to the contingent, leads to the reduction of Leibniz’s optimism to the paradox of Spinoza’s necessitarianism, Leibniz has no right to assume the Principle and thence deduce the intelligibility of his theory that one possibility is best. If the latter is to be questioned, the former certainly cannot be secure, and both are dubious, if not clearly false.

Our search for explanations rightly rests upon a hope of finding them, but explaining things by deriving them from premises or conditions is not the absolute end or principle of existence, which is rather happiness (inclusively the divine happiness). Deriving happiness from causes or reasons is something else again. Doing so may increase happiness, but is not its whole content. The interest of logicians in derivations, and of scientists in causal predictions and postdictions, is legitimate; but there are other values, and the simple absolutizing of this one interest (or cluster of interests) in an alleged principle having unlimited right of way is at best a huge risk, and at worst a vast folly. It is not a harmless axiom to be put beyond question.

There is another notion that one must agree not to challenge if Leibniz’s bluff is to remain uncalled. One must admit that a possible world is as definite and complex as the corresponding actual one. This, I hold, reduces the distinction between possible and actual to nullity. Value is in definiteness, and definiteness is ‘the soul of actuality’. Were pos-

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sibility equally definite it would be redundant to actualize it. There is no definite set of sets of ‘possible things’, and therefore it cannot be asked which set of possible things is best. Only properties, not particulars or instances, are possibilities (see below, Sec. 21). Moreover, only the most abstract properties are eternally distinct possibilities among which God might eternally choose. And even then, it is not really a question of choice, since all abstractly possible world forms have a claim to be realized, ‘each in its due season’. But the infinity of these possibilities is such that no actual world process could ever exhaust them. In addition it is a dubious assumption indeed that God can simply choose a world order without leaving anything open for the lesser creative powers of the creatures to further determine.

It is time to turn to Leibniz’s admitted problem of establishing the consistency of his idea of deity.

He has two devices. One is to refer to his Universal Characteristic as showing that simple notions or their objects, ‘simple perfections’, cannot conflict. But this Characteristic never quite came into being, and so far as I know it has not been found possible to construct anything like it on the required basis of simples. The idea of ‘simple perfections’ can only refer to empty abstractions like ‘knowing everything in all its aspects’, or ‘loving all things for all they are worth’. These indeed are mutually compatible, but what about knowing the various possible kinds of worlds (not possible worlds, for there are none) as actual? Here one confronts the exclusive or: this and then not that, or that and then not this. Not all possible sorts of worlds can be actual, hence not all can be known as actual.

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The other device is the following:

Si l'éae nécessaire émit impossible, tous les étres contingents le seraient aussi, et ainsi il n'y aurait rien de possible. Car les étres contingents n'ayant point en eux la raison suffisante de leur existence, il faut recourir a I'Etre nécessaire qui est wltima ratio rerum, la dernidre raison des choses.²⁵

Suppose we grant that there must be something existing necessarily, it does not follow that this something is consistently conceivable as Classical Theists (and Leibniz) conceived God. Therefore, the right of theists of this kind to employ the Argument is not established. I hold that they have no such right. And I think the sole advance Leibniz has made here is to have pointed his finger over and over again at the weakest point in the Anselmian reasoning, the failure to establish the logical possibility of the religious idea as defined. But it never occurred to Leibniz that the price of making good this failure might be to start over again with an untraditional way of defining God, or an untraditional way of construing the traditional definition of God as uniquely perfect.

That the Findlay paradox was not apparent to this philosopher is no cause for surprise. The rationalistic dream of Sufficient Reason implies, so far as it has a clear meaning at all, that there is no paradox, that the eternal and necessary is really completely concrete, and that abstractness is only a human illusion. But if abstractness is an illusion, so is concreteness; for, like necessity and contingency, these concepts stand or fall together. There is a paradox, but unqualified rationalism makes it insoluble. (So does unqualified empiricism.)

²⁵ Jetter to Jaquelot, Nov. 20, 1702. Ibid., p. 44.

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To have the right to employ the Argument, one must make sun-clear that one is not playing fast and loose with the contrast between necessary and contingent. The necessity of God is distinctively and uniquely His, which means that nothing else (except the widest class of individuals as such) has any ultimate necessity, whether one calls it metaphysical, logical, or moral necessity. The existence of God, alone among individual existences, is an eternal or a priori truth, which means that other truths of individual existence (and specific kinds of existence) are not eternal and not a priori. But we find Leibniz holding that for God (who sees things as they are, nota bene) all truth is eternal and a priori. Therewith the game is up, the initial standpoint abandoned, and all clarity lost. To favor the distinctively a priori truth of theism is precisely not to favor the a priori truth of things in general. It is to insist upon the general absence of such truth. Spinoza and Leibniz both quite missed the point here. And of course Anselm had preceded them in the error, since he too believed that in God all truth is timelessly contained in the a priori self-vision of the divine essence.

I feel I must emphasize and insist upon this, since even Boyce Gibson, generally sympathetic as he is to neoclassical theism, seems to feel that the Argument belongs with an eternalistic point of view.²⁶ I say, just the contrary, it belongs with the view that only the bare essence and existence of God, taken as an extreme empty abstraction, is ‘timeless’ or a priori. All else is empirical and in some fashion temporal—even for God,

²⁶ Gibson, A. Boyce, “The Two Strands in Natural Theology.” The Moniss, 47 (1963), pp. 335-364. [In this excellent introduction to what I all neoclassical theism the ontological argument is rejected, though without discussion.]

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indeed especially for God, who does not share the illusions of ultrarationalists! God is not concerned to give ultimate ‘reasons’, whether to us or Himself, for His decisions. He makes decisions such that no other could be better, that is, such that the decisions are unsurpassable for the given situation (concerning all situations at once there is no decision, but only an eternal abstract ideal). But that there is just one best possible decision is a groundless, confused notion. Possible entities, including decisions, are not so definite as to be relatable in any such fashion. Only actual decisions are fully definite. All that is required for divine reasonableness is the negative, it would not have been possible to do better. (This does not mean that a better state of the world at that point in its development was impossible; for the creatures’ decisions also enter into the result, and there is no metaphysical necessity that they should always obey the maxim, never do less well than possible. For their goodness or rationality is not to be defined as perfect.)

Only a concretely temporalistic theology can rightfully employ the Argument. The others will always compromise the uniqueness of the divine eternity and necessity, and the genuineness of its contrast with all else. It is only creative, selfenriching process which can unite harmoniously within itself an abstract, necessary eternal aspect with concrete, contingent, ever partly-new actual states. The contrast with the contingent which is essential to necessity must be within the divine life, not merely between it and something else. Everything must be within that life, without prejudice to the vast and genuine contrasts involved.

Here we may revert to the problem, common to Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, of the ‘simplicity’ and wholly ‘positive’

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character of the divine perfection. Descartes argues that the religious idea cannot be self-inconsistent, since it is simple and without negative elements. Spinoza, pointing out that determination is always (partly) negative, seems to think that, nevertheless, although God must include all the complexity of things, somehow this need not mean that He is limited by any negations. Leibniz has his way of trying to turn the same trick. But since God knows all things, the complexity of the content of His knowledge can only be the greatest complexity there is; moreover, since kinds of worlds are possible which are not actual (if ‘possible’, ‘actual’, ‘necessary’—any of our basic categories—have meaning) and since obviously God knows as actual only the world which is actual, and does not know as actual any of the kinds of world which are merely possible, determination and negation must be admitted as constitutive elements in His reality.

Apart from the ultra-optimism of the Best Possible World, what most discredited Leibniz’s system for his contemporaries and successors was surely his denial of interaction between monads. Even this, I submit, is incongruent with the proper understanding of the Argument. For it put Leibniz in the following position. God’s existence is that upon which all monads utterly, and by strict logical necessity, depend in their every aspect; this absolute dependence, however, is not the supreme example of a principle generally operative in the system; it is rather the sole example. A sole example is not a supreme example. How often this is forgotten! We do not exalt God by giving Him a unique category, like creative power, for His very own. For if A is simply incomparable to B, then it is not inferior or superior to B but simply—incomparable. This is the real objection to a ‘deus ex machina’, where

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no general principle of the system can mediate the comparison between God and other things. The unsurpassable power of God should be the supreme form of ‘power’ in the general sense, exhibited elsewhere in inferior degrees or ‘resemblances’. But Leibniz wants to say, not that there is a weak dependence of one monad upon another and a strong dependence upon God but that there is a zero dependence of one monad upon another (in the logical sense of dependence, and that is what is in question), but infinite dependence of all upon God. True enough, the whole issue is subtly befogged by the doctrine of ‘ideal’ influence via the divine choice of the most harmonious and richly varied whole. But this is like the befogging of the contingency issue by the distinction between direct logical necessity and indirect logical necessity via the necessary goodness of God and its logically predesignated result in the best possible world. These are not solutions but subtle and brilliant evasions. Thus it is stll true that one jumps from monads absolutely independent logically among themselves (or, if you want to insist upon the interdependence, via the divine goodness, monads absolutely interdependent to monads absolutely dependent upon God. There is either no difference or no real comparability at all. How is all this related to the Argument? I hold that the independence or necessity (it is the same) of the bare divine existence (not actuality) from the creatures, its sheer neutrality as between one world and another, implies a supreme dependence of the creatures upon the divine existence (for mutual independence here would be purely absurd) and that this in turn implies nonsupreme forms of dependence, which could only obtain between one creature and another. So Leib

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niz's ‘denial of windows’ was really antitheistic (like every other metaphysical mistake!).

It is notable that our principle, the supreme must not be the sole form of a category, is implicitly Leibnizian. In some ways he adhered to it better than any man before him. Thus he treated the divine freedom as the supreme form of something found also in every creature, namely being moved by the apparent good. Determination by the apparent good is his theory of the will, and it applies even to God. (Of course, with God the apparent good is simply the good, but then even with us there is more or less conformity between appearance and reality.) And Leibniz, to his lasting glory, will not have any weak dualistic compromise, according to which some creatures are moved by the apparent good, and others, mere bits of matter, are not. For though resemblance to God can have all degrees, and the total gamut of these degrees is the same as the range of possible diversity among creatures, the zero degree coincides with nonentity, since being a creature at all means having some positive relation to deity. Here I salute Leibniz for being the first great philosopher (some minor figures in the Renaissance had said it, but not with power) to have really grasped a basic metaphysical truth. There is no room for caprice in considering the mere possibility of creatures; if to be a creature means (speaking loosely) to express something of the nature of God (and what else? ), then anything supreme in God’s essence may be as near to zero, to total absence, in a creature as you please, but present in some positive degree it must be.

What spoiled the picture was that Leibniz denied to both God and creatures any genuine creativity. Giving the nod to the completely defined possible world which most of all

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‘requires’ actualization is not creation and is not freedom. God puts the penny in the right slot, and the right thing comes out. Rather, possible worlds are vague directions for further determination, and the process (to which each creature contributes) of determining the antecedently indeterminate but determinable can never end, since each new creature opens up new real possibilities for advance, and in this way the potentialities are inexhaustible. God has the supreme form of creativity, creatures have lesser forms. One cannot ascend to the divine form of a category one simply lacks. Leibniz (he was in good company here) managed never to intuit creativity at all. His appetition or force which made the monad a ‘spiritual automaton’ is the exact denial of creativity. The dream of explaining and justifying particular things by some ultimate reason or necessity, a superstition if ever there was one, condemned Leibniz to this blindness.

The denial of ‘windows’, though unique to Leibniz, is connected with another implicitly antitheistic tendency of Rationalism, and indeed of most modern philosophy, untl recently at least, which is the calamitous notion that an experience can have simply itself as datum. The monads experience —what? Their own ideas and sentiments, that is, their own mental states, plus—God. God is actually given, not merely an idea of Him, but God Himself. And this must be said, for otherwise the whole system falls to pieces. Sorething besides one’s own experiences must be experienced, or solipsism is not only irrefutable, it is unintelligible how it could even be an issue. And if God is that upon which all absolutely depend, if He is constitutive of the very possibility of things, not to experience God would be to experience nothing at all. But if God is our sole datum, in that sense in which a datum is not

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the experience itself but the thing it is the experience ‘of’, then once more we have a ‘supreme’ which is also ‘sole’. There is but one genuine datum, God. But then nothing mundane can mediate the transition from no datum to the supreme datum. Leibniz would doubtless say, one’s experience of oneself is the mundane datum. But this, in the system, is something absolutely different. For Leibniz, a monad is a single subject of predicates and its self-relations are then identities. But the relation to God is no identity. Here there are two subjects. There is still no mediation.

Like other Classical Theists Leibniz must hold that God’s awareness of the creatures is sheer self-awareness. He intuits His own essence, which includes His choice of the best possible world. But either-or: God could have refrained from selecting that world, so that His selection itself is a contingent reality (meaning, its nonbeing was possible), or He could not have refrained, and then we have Spinozism: all is strictly necessary. If the selection is contingent (and otherwise the world is not contingent) then God must know something contingent in Himself, and this cannot be His mere necessary essence. So God must know something other than Himself taken as necessary, and yet something literally in Himself (can an act of selection be outside the acting agent?). It appears that the divine knowledge and will are far indeed from the reach of this type of Rationalism. Had the abstract-concrete paradox inherent in the recognition of the divine necessity been attended to, the need for a very different approach might have become apparent.

And after all, it is not even enough that God should know what world He selects. He must also know the actualization resulting from the selection. For actuality, we are told, is more

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than mere possibility. Can what is added be a mere additional essence of actuality as such? Surely not. This is just the wrong way to take actuality as a predicate. For ‘possible actuality’ will then already include any essence that might be meant. No, God must know the resulting actual world, not just the possible one, including His selection of it. God, the ancient myth says, beheld the world he had made and *saw that it was good’. He did not merely look at it as possible and see that it wowld be good. Classical Theists have to claim a superior wisdom to Scripture at this point. I should have no objection, if I could see the superiority. But in this case I cannot, and I think I have read a reasonable number of explanations of the doctrine.

Yet the great rationalists had their deep insights. They were perfectly sound in their convicion (and the present age is deluded in going to the contrary extreme) that not all knowledge of existence can be empirical, and that, above all, the bare knowledge that God exists must be of a logically different type from genuinely empirical knowledge. They were correct in holding that there is a proper idea of God which implies a certain simplicity and absence of negation or possible contradiction. They only overlooked the little qualification: what the simple, purely positive idea refers to is not God in all His reality, but only—to use their term but not in their meaning—the divine essence, i.e., what God essentially is, an expression which implies, by contrast, what God is inessentially or accidentally. (*Accidentally’ does not at all—and here many have been misled—imply not really or genuinely. The next time a harshly painful accident occurs to the reader, let him ask himself if it makes sense to say, “This accident has not really happened to me, since it is inessential to my

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nature.” Reality is one thing, the essential or necessary, another, and the latter is but an abstract aspect of the former.) The mere essence of God is simple and wholly positive in certain senses. It has no definite parts and contains nothing of the actual complexity of the world, nor does it even know that complexity. God knows the complexity, but in His accidental not His essential aspect. (Not that He might have failed to know what existed, but that what existed to be known and hence the knowing, might have been indefinitely other than it is.) The divine essence, qualified by necessary existence, as God in His full reality is not, is wholly positive in just the sense that it is strictly noncompetitive, its mere being somehow actualized not contradicting the actualization of any positive possibility you please. Nor is God required by His essence to combine incompossible things, for the essence does not say that He creates or knows all possible things, each actualized, but only that He infallibly knows all actual things (and they at least must be compossible) and that He could and would know any set of compossible things, should it be actualized. In this way the rationalists’ groping search for an idea of perfection which could not be contradictory may, it seems to me, come to its goal. For consistency seems built into the idea, so constructed, just as inconsistency seemed (and I believe was) built into it constructed in the classical way.

Is there not also a good case for Leibniz’s suggestion that the burden of proof is primarily upon those who deny the logical possibility of deity? But Leibniz fails to note that the logical paradoxes in the classical idea of God were clearly pointed to as far back as Carneades, and never genuinely disposed of. Arnauld mentioned one to Leibniz, who virtually admitted

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that it was not to be evaded.²⁷ However, our present situation is that we have an alternative form of theism which also, and with better right, can employ the ontological argument. So I incline to the view that the next move is up to the skeptics,

[Return to Part Two Contents]

9. Hume

Hume makes a remarkable concession concerning the possible importance of the ontological argument: he grants that its validity would dispose of the argument against theism based on the evils in the world. And of course, no empirical facts can testify against a logical necessity. Indeed, the argument from evil itself rests on the supposed analytic truth that Greatness must result in a2 world without evil. This, in turn, means that Greatness in God implies an absolute absence of independence or initiative of action in the creatures. For, if they have any such independence, evil may be their doing, for all we could know, not God’s. ('They’ here means creatures generally, not just human beings!) And to say that God should, and as Great logically would, grant no freedom in this sense is to say that a being who can and must deny all genuine independence of action to others is better than one who could and would foster suitable degrees of independence in them. So far from finding this analytically true, some of us find it analytically false. Perhaps ‘omnipotence’, in the sense of a monopoly of power, an infinitely stingy denial of real power to others, is even a mere absurdity. In any case, it

²⁷ Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and Correspondence with Arnauld (LaSalle, Illinois. Open Court Publishing Co., 1924), pp. 96-114 (letters vi, viii).

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has not been validly deduced from Greatness. ‘Greatness’ means having whatever properties it is better to have than not to have, as compared to other conceivable individuals. Perhaps monopolizing freedom is not such a property—is not at all a good thing. One of the beauties of Anselm’s formula is that it frees us (far more than he realized!) from automatic commitment to traditional views about God. It may very well not be ‘best’ to be ‘omnipotent’, in the sense which generates the problem of evil in its classic form.

Hume found this problem crucially important, not so much because of his ‘empiricism’ as because of his quite unempirical espousal of determinism. From the presumed, not observed, petfect regularity of nature he inferred the absolute control of all things by the hypothetical regulator. If God does anything, He must do everything, since the laws leave no indeterminacy. The problem in this form springs from a false a priori, incompatible with the theistic a priori.

The following is Hume’s conception of the ontological proof:

Nothing is demonstrable, unless the contrary implies a contradiction. . . . Whatever we conceive as existent we can also conceive as nonexistent. There is no being, therefore, whose nonexistence implies a contradiction.

It is pretended that the Deity is a necessarily existent being; . . . and that if we knew His whole essence or nature, we should perceive it to be as impossible for Him not to exist as for twice two not to be four. But it is evident that this can never happen, while our faculties remain the same as at present. It will still be possible for us, at any time, to conceive the nonexistence of what we formerly conceived to exist; nor can the mind lie under a necessity of supposing any object to remain always in being; .

But further, why may not the material universe be the necessarily existent Being, according to this pretended explication of necessity. . . . ‘'Any particle of matter, it is said, 'may be com-

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ceived to be annihilated; and any form may be comceived to be altered’ . .. But it secems a great partiality not to perceive that the same argument extends equally to the Deity. . . . It must be some unknown, inconceivable qualities which can make His nonexistence appear impossible, or His attributes unalterable: And no reason can be assigned, why these qualities may not belong to matter. As they are altogether unknown and inconceivable, they can never be proved incompatible with it.²⁸

Here is a blunt challenge. We shall meet it. As Anselm knew, the fool can ‘think’ that God is not, but he cannot genuinely conceive it, understanding what he is saying. Just so Hume. He is here not genuinely asking, in a more than verbal sense, what it is to ‘conceive something to exist’, or not to exist. Is it, perhaps, to imagine experiencing its presence or absence? But how does one experience an absence? As Popper says, by experiencing something positive incompatible with its presence. It has been shown above (Part One, Sec. 15) to be a contradiction that anything positive could contradict the existence and ubiquity of deity. Hence there is no way genuinely to conceive the nonexistence of God. Hume is only showing that we can say in words, “God (perhaps) doesn’t exist.” This disposes of the first two paragraphs of the quotation. They are mere question-begging dogmas.

The ‘quality’ which makes deity necessarily existent is Greatness. The notion of a ‘material universe’ which is Greatest has no clear meaning unless it be supposed equivalent to God, endowed with all the attributes which follow from Greatness, for instance, infinite flexibility in relating itself to possible worlds, while yet remaining genetically identical as an

²⁸ Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part IX. Philosophical Works (London, 1827), vol. ii, p. 496.

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individual. If the material universe is conceived in such fashion it is simply being conceived as God, and ‘material’ loses all its sting.

That the properties of matter can be conceived to alter is not what makes matter contingent; for the very necessity of deity (according to the neoclassical resolution of the ‘nonegreater’ ambiguity) consists precisely in unique alterability, not in unique fixity. The trouble with ‘matter’, however, is that its identity through alterations has no positive meaning. Abstract from all particular forms, and ‘matter’ is but a word; abstract from all particular forms, and mind as Great is still the infinitely flexible correlate of all possible forms, yet able to recognize itself as genetically identical in knowing them, regardless of which ones are actual.

Put in another way: unless mind is the sole ultimate determinable, we have two such determinables, only verbally distinguishable: mind and matter. But one of these must be superfluous; which shall we keep? That we have experience, that we love and know, cannot be denied; the notion of necessary being we need, therefore, is that of Greatness as infinite spiritual capacity for knowing and feeling diverse things. Only because Greatness takes account of particular forms do they have any importance in final perspective; whereas, matter as such, as other than mind, could appreciate or register no value. The necessary being is the ultimate determinable without which determinates would determine nothing. And religious experience tells us how to conceive it. Physics as such cannot do so, and never—"so long as our faculties remain the same as at present””—can it do so.

It scarcely needs saying that Hume shows no sign of having read Anselm—after all, who does?

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Hume makes one positive though unintended contribution to the Anselmian problem. His analysis of the self, often regarded as wholly destructive, is a somewhat crude version of the Buddhist-Whiteheadian view which, as we have seen (Part One, Sec. 11), is of assistance in escaping the abstractconcrete paradox in the employment of the argument. And here, Hume’s empiricism is methodologically in the right. For, in contrast to God, man is a merely empirical reality. His ‘soul’ is nothing but a contingent entity, and the attribution to it of transcendent properties, like absolute self-identity throughout its history (or even indestructibility and eternity! ) belongs in neither a sound rationalism nor a sound empiricism. Only Greatness enjoys perfect genetic self-identity, and the attribution of this perfection to man was one of the sources of the notion that God’s identity must be simply nongenetic, must be sheer immutability. Either there is no perfect case, or anything like it, of genetic identity, or else God is the sole unqualifiedly genidentical being. And if He does not necessarily exist, then perfect genidentity is not even logically possible. To the realization of this point in neoclassicism Hume unknowingly made a valuable contribution by his honest adherence to the empirical method where it was entirely appropriate.

We must be careful, however. Man, as having the idea of God, contains a transcendent element. But this element, as transcendent, has nothing peculiarly human about it. Purified of all contingent and anthropomorphic eccentricities, it coincides with something in God's knowledge of Himself. There is here nothing to support the soul-substance which Hume rejects.

Looking over Hume’s procedure as a whole, from the

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Anselmian point of view, we see the following. (1) Anselm showed that Greatness is inconceivable except as necessarily existing; from which it was a corollary that to deny the conceivability of ‘necessarily existent’ is to affirm, ‘God is inconceivable’. Hence the universal contingency of existence, affirmed by Hume as beyond all exception, is the downright denial even of the thinkability of deity. The stark contradiction between such absolute empiricism and theism does not necessarily refute theism; perhaps it rather refutes absolute empiricism! Moreover, the unqualified validity of empiricism cannot itself be an empirical truth. So Hume is simply appealing to his own a priori, against the religious a priori. It is his say so against that of (theistically) religious mankind.

It can easily be shown that Hume makes such a dogmatic antitheistic decision in more than one additional respect. (2) He posits as an a priori truth that “what is distinguishable is separable,” i.e., there are no internal relationships of any kind among existing things. Yet, among the implications of Greatness is this: at least one sort of internal relationship between existing things must obtain, the relation of dependence of all other existents upon Greatness. Relation to God must be intrinsic to things. Therefore, since to deny Greatness is to declare it absolutely impossible, Hume’s doctrine of universal separability cannot be empirical; for no fact can show something to be absolutely impossible. So here again he is appealing, not to experience but (if anything) to a priori self-evidence; he is again attempting to show, in effect, that theism is logically impossible. Finally, when (3) Hume asserts the truth of absolute determinism, he is contradicting another implication of theism, that free creativity (not simply free in the sense of voluntary and without impediment, but

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rather of determining the otherwise indeterminate, or of adding to the antecedent or presupposed definiteness of reality) is the universal principle of actuality. For, if supreme reality consists in supreme creativity (and the abstract-concrete paradox cannot, I hold, otherwise be resolved), then lesser realities must be lesser—but not zero—forms of such creativity. The step from great to Greatest, inherent in the logic of Anselm’s definition, cannot be from nothing to something; it must be from something to the supreme something. Hence all creatures must have some creative power. Unqualified determinism, therefore, is contradictory of Greatness. If so, then, in this third way too, Hume assumes the logical invalidity of theism (not its simple falsity, for there can be no such thing).

Is it then surprising that the outcome of the Dialogues, resting as the whole discussion does on this triply dogmatic mechanistic and pluralistic positivism, should be ‘skeptical’? The result is built into the method. Absolute empiricism, absolute pluralism, absolute determinism, contradict the existential necessity, the unifying function, and the actual freedom, bountifully overflowing into lesser forms of freedom, which are the very meaning of ‘God’. One must choose, and Hume'’s arguments for his choice merely reiterate the choice as already unwittingly made.

On such an argument in a circle so much modern antimetaphysical and skeptical philosophy is founded! The reckoning with Anselm lies in the future: it has not taken place in the past. Has Hume refuted Anselm? Or has Anselm (not as classical theist, but as theist) refuted Hume? This question has not even been discussed. How could it be, when Anselm was virtually unknown? So a little error in scholarship, collectively compounded through centuries, becomes a great error,

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not of mere detail, but of methodological principle. The central philosophical question, that is, the rationally accessible content, if any, of the central religious question, is not an empirical matter, and empiricism, persisted in to the end, merely makes the muddling of this question the guaranteed outcome of all our philosophical efforts.

Will the great Kant cure the muddle, where the brilliantly lucid Hume could not? Or will he complicate and compound it by adding an alleged class of problems which are neither empirical nor a priori, and concern neither the intelligibly necessary nor the intelligibly contingent, but “something we know not what,” the noumenon? Will he return to the Anselmian problem on at least the level of profundity to which Anselm penetrated, or will he deal with it only in the loose pseudo-Anselmian form current in modern rationalism? The reader perhaps foresees the answers.

[Return to Part Two Contents]

10. Kant

Apparently Kant knew nothing of the Proslogium. Even the Cartesian argument he probably thought of chiefly in the forms given to it by Leibniz and, above all, Baumgarten. These forms were, at best, no improvement upon the Anselmian original. Moreover, they employed definitions of God which were less rich in possibilities than Anselm’s own, being more hopelessly committed to ‘platonism’. And indeed Kant, after more than seven centuries, was no freer than Anselm had been to investigate the possibility that the Greek way of construing the idea of God as an absolute and immutable maximum of reality or perfection might be a mistranslation of the religious idea, and that a better translation might

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remove some of the difficulties which philosophy had encountered in dealing with this idea or in attempting to find evidence of its truth. Kant is the last really great representative of classical theism, differing essentially from his predecessors not in his theoretical idea of God, but in his restricting of the grounds for faith to the argument from ethics.

One has only to read the relevant passages in Baumgarten's Metaphysics (see the Bibliography) to realize that from him, as from Leibniz or Wolff, Kant could only learn what I have argued is the wrong version of the Anselmian proof. God’s existence is held to be necessary simply because all His properties or qualifications are necessary. He must have or be everything possible, except such things as—since they connote imperfection—He could not possibly have or be. Thus His entire reality is wholly ‘determined’ by the requirements of His eternal essence. This, I submit, is precisely not the principle of the divine necessity. On the contrary, it is necessary that God be capable of contingent qualifications, and that His capacity for such qualifications be unsurpassable. (For all contingent things are contingent items of the divine knowledge.) The divine existence indeed cannot be contingent, but not because existence in general is a property and God can have no contingent properties, rather, because even the capacity for existing contingently, or for contingently failing to exist, is a defect and only the unique kind of existence, eternal, inevitable, self-existence, is compatible with divinity. The modal distinction between kinds of existence, which Prosl. III brought into the literature, is the only proper basis for the Anselmian proof.

Baumgarten simply follows Leibniz in his proof of the consistency of Classical Theism: all perfections or admirable

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qualities are as such purely positive, and hence no contradiction can arise from attributing them all in maximal degree to God. As Kant saw, this is invalid. To take an example which he did not—but I am tempted to say should have—suggested: God can know a universe of which proposition p is true, or he can know one of which p is false; God cannot do both. Yet either is a possible positive qualification of God. (The negative character of ‘p false’ is not significant here. Suppose ‘p’ stands for ‘there is an oak tree just here’. Then there might have been something else, say an ash tree, just here. Call the assertion that this latter possibility is realized ‘q’. Then God might have known that p, or he might have known that q, but he could not have known that p and also have known that q. Yet, knowing that p and knowing that q are both possible positive qualifications of God. Kant’s own example of incompatible positives was that of velocities in diverse directions. We shall presently consider an objection he might have had to our example.)

Kant saw that Baumgarten’s case cannot be made out; he did not see that the opposed case can be made out, and that Neoclassical Theism may well be the residuary legatee of the inquiry if carried through without fear or favor.

The Argument of Prosl. IIl and subsequent passages was not what Kant refuted; he relied upon authors who had no knowledge of this argument. The Anselm of Prosl. III, also the Descartes of the Replies, as well as Spinoza, are refuted by Kant only in the sense that, as he showed, they had failed to establish a consistent meaning for their view of God. They did not fail, however, because their proof must stand or fall with the predicate-status of existence in general, Existential modality (necessity versus contingency) is

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the predicate required. And that this is not a predicate not only Kant, but the entire philosophical world, has yet to show.

In spite of his negative attitude toward theoretical theism, Kant, in the essay Der Esnzig-Mogliche Bewessgrund des Daseins Gottes, makes a contribution to theism which should never again be lost and which is not invalidated by anything he himself later said. This is the proposition that there is no point in adducing the facts of worldly existence in arguing to a necessary Being. Since the necessary must furnish the ground of the very possibility of things, it is irrelevant to inquire which possibilities are actualized, or whether any are. For the point is that without God as ground of possibility (and this ground the necessary cannpot fail to be) not only would no world be actual, but none would even be possible. This being inconceivable, God as at least potential creator is required, whether or not there are creatures. All theists should feel indebted for this clarification. It was near the surface in the neglected work of Anselm. It was Thomas, as much as anyone, it seems to me, who, with his sensory empiricism, covered up the insight so deeply that only a great disturbance like Kantianism could bring us back to it, in spite of Kant’s later ‘critical’ views.

In his early essay Nova Dilucidatio (1755 ), Kant proposed a quasi-ontological proof, which he later—in the essay above referred to—revised, and still later, in the Critigue, quietly abandoned. Throughout this development, Kant adhered essentially to the same idea of God, though his confidence in our ability to justify it theoretically suffered a complete reversal. God, as absolutely perfect, must be free from all negation

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of being, He must have all predicates so far as positive or expressive of reality. Thus in the Critigue we read:

All negative concepts are . . . derivative, and it is the realities which contain the data and, so to speak, the material, of the transcendental content, by which a complete determination of all chings becomes possible.

If, therefore, our reason postulates a transcendental substratum for all determinations . . . such a substratum is nothing but the idea of the sum total of reality (omnisudo realstasis).

. . . the concept of an ems realisssmum is the concept of an individual being, because of all possible opposite predicates, one, namely, that which absolutely belongs to being, is found in its determination. It is therefore a transcendental sdeal which forms the foundations of the complete determination which is necessary for all that exists, and which constitutes at the same time the highest and complete condition of its possibility, to which all thought of objects, with regard to their contents, must be traced back. It is at the same time the only true ideal of which human reason is capable, because it is in this case alone that a concept of a thing, which in itself is general, is completely determined by itself, and recognized as the representation of an individual.²⁹

What a wonderful account—of certain assumptions of classical theology! All that anything can positively be (all that ‘absolutely belongs to being’) God must be actually and without restriction. This apparently (a) guarantees that He deserves to be worshiped as without flaw; (b) makes Him conform by definition or a priori to the law of excluded middle as the criterion of an individual or wholly determinate reality; (c) makes it possible to argue (in the next paragraph) that “the complete determination of everything [else] depends

²⁹ Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Max Milller (New York and London: The Macmillan Company, 1920), pp. 465-66. This and subsequent citations from this work are by permission of the publisher.

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on the limitation of this total of reality, of which some part is ascribed to the thing, while the rest is excluded from it”; hence (d) shows that the content of the idea of God is the presupposition of possibility as such, so that if it were not real, nothing would be so much as possible. And so, Kant at first thought, he can infer that God exists as the necessary being. For the nonbeing of the ground of all possibility cannot itself be a possibility.

Compared to the usual Prosl. II version of Anselm or Descartes, this proof is not unimpressive. Yet, compared to Prosl. 111, it has no decisive superiority, though it is valuable for the way in which it focuses on some aspects of the problem; and it does have certain defects, above all because it argues, not from the Unsurpassability of deity, which in some sense inheres in the very idea of worship (See Part One, Secs. 4-5), but from a nonreligious and philosophically dubious notion of absolutely complete reality or a priori determinateness. Kant never explicitly repudiates just this proof, but clearly he found it wanting in the end.

What was wrong? According to Kant, a number of things. (1) The needs of our thinking are not legislative for reality: we may need the idea of God, but only as regulative, not as constitutive of nature or supernature. (2) We cannot know that the sum of all predicates as positive is really possible. Positive predicates, as Kant argued in his Versuch den Begriff der negativen Grissen in die Welt-Weisheit einzufiibren, may be “really repugnant” to one another. (3) We cannot know that an unlimited being is the only sort that could exist by absolute necessity. True, we could not deduce such necessity from the concept of a limited being; but then Kant denies that we can really do this from that of the un-

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limited being. We cannot validly deduce anything from so problematic a concept as that of unlimited being, and since a limited being cannot even be defined a priori, as an individual, its necessity can certainly not be deduced. However, neither—he argues—can its contingency. Kaant is really saying lictle more, in all this, than that such contrasts as necessarycontingent, limited-unlimited, transcend our experience and therefore our knowledge. Essentially his attack on the Argument is on positivistic grounds (in the agnostic form: for all we know, ‘God’ has no genuinely possible content).

In seeing that negative concepts presuppose positive ones Kant was close to discovering the competitiveness of contingent existence. For just as one cannot know that x is not white without knowing white, and indeed, without knowing that x has some positive character exclusive of white, so one cannot know that such and such is nonexistent except by knowing that there is something else whose existence excludes the such and such. But then, if an idea is such that its being actualized is omnitolerant of all other forms of positive actualization, its object could not significantly be said to exist unless necessarily.

There is an ambiguity in the assumption, characteristic of classical metaphysics, that to be determinate a thing must relate itself positively or negatively to every possible predicate. Sophocles was non-Shakespearean, but does this mean that the entire quality of Shakespeare must have been available for Sophocles to negate? If qualities can be created, as neoclassical views hold, then so can negative relations to those qualities. Sophocles did not need, for his own definiteness, any relation to the emergent qualities which subsequently appeared in Shakespeare. It is Shakespeare who had to define

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himself relative to Sophocles, not vice versa. This is the asymmetry of time, according to creationist metaphysics. Kant seems not to have had any such idea. But he was right, on this ground too, in his suspicion of the reasoning which led to his ‘transcendental ideal’.

Moreover, the insight that positive qualities can conflict implies more than that we cannot know the possibility of God as an absolute maximum of reality. It implies the impossibility of such a maximum. God could not possibly know as actual all possible worlds, for they are not mutually compatible. Yet the knowledge of an actual world as such is surely something positive. Hence some values must be possible for God but not actual. In addition, if all God’s properties were fixed as actual by a priori necessity, He would have no freedom whatever. And freedom too is positive.

Kant would have interposed here: God does not really ‘know’ or ‘act freely’ in any sense which we could understand. Just as Anselm had said that in God there is not really ‘compassion’, but only its appropriate effects in us, so the redoubtable Konigsberger argues (in the Prolegomena, for instance) that God is not really an intelligence—this he says would be anthropomorphism. However, the world is to be viewed as if made by an intelligent cause. What God may be ‘in Himself’ we can have no idea whatever. Thus, like his medieval predecessors, Kant has his doctrine of theological ‘analogy’.

Certainly knowledge in God is, in its concrete quality, very different from anything we can clearly conceive. But it does not follow and, as we argued in Sections 16 and 17 of Part One, it is not tenable that there are no abstract principles or rules of meaning which apply to all thought, and hence to thought about God. Among such rules are

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these: that actuality differs from possibility by its arbitrary determinateness and that possibilities for concrete values are competitive. Also, that what a thing is in itself, independently of relations, is an abstraction from the full concreteness of the reality containing the thing and its relations. (Thus God merely ‘in Himself’ would be less than God relative to us.) Like other classical theists, Kant appears to reject the evidence we have concerning the most universal aspects of ‘value’ and ‘existence’, and to suppose that the Object of Faith must violate or transcend every rule of concept-formation which experience illustrates. This overlooks the truth that the most general or abstract principles cannot be unknowable, for they are somehow embodied in any concrete thing. One has only to abstract from the specific restrictions; the universal is what remains.

Of course, if we can in principle know nothing about possibility, actuality, incompatibility, abstractness, and concreteness, then we can know nothing about what God is or might be. The indecisive result here is built into the method. The trouble, however, is not with the Argument, as such, rather, with certain features of Kant’s subjectivistic philosophy, together with that traditional (and idolatrous?) identification of God with the absolute or the infinite which Anselm, Descartes, and Leibniz sought to support by the Argument.

Surely Kant did well to drop the search for a proof which would be valid when so used. But had he been a freer mind, he might have drastically reconsidered the question: have we properly conceived God, or is there a better way? Instead he dismissed rational (theoretical) evidence, and fell back upon moral and religious faith alone.

Suppose, however, he had reconsidered his problem: to

[217] define an individual a priori, as essential to the possibility of all other things. One way, the only one he saw, is to posit an absolute maximum of actuality. This failed. What is left? Obviously, to posit an absolute maximum not of actuality but of potentiality. God, simply as necessary, can have neither limited nor unlimited actuality (for no actuality, no particular how of concretization, can be necessary) but only unlimited potentiality. Divine potentiality—thus conceived—is as free from arbitrary limitation as you please, indeed it is absolutely free. Moreover, it is more plausible to relate all possible particular determinations to an infinite potentiality than to an infinite actuality (which indeed, as Kant suspected, is an absurdity). The particular is a determinate under a determinable; the ultimate determinable is the divine creativity. A possible creature is a possible state of the creator-as-having-creatures. But the mere existence of the creator in some state or other is wholly without arbitrary, competitive restriction. It is the disjunction of all restrictions, itself unrestricted. If the necessary is defined in this way, there is no Findlay paradox; for the ultimate determinable, as such, has no arbitrary determinations, and its assertion is logically weak to an infinite degree. Like all necessary statements it is factually ‘empty’, cuts off no genuine possibility.

But how, Kant might have asked at this point, could the ultimate determinable, the least determinate thing, define an individual? In the first place, even an ordinary individual need not and should not be defined as wholly determinate, unless all freedom and chance are to be denied. An individual’s life is of course determined retrospectively, but then there is a new individual (as determinate) each moment.

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The Buddhists alone, before Whitechead, seem to have adequately—or almost adequately—realized this.

Taking this schema of individuality seriously (a course precluded to be sure by Kant's phenomenalistic theory of time), we can still define one individual a priori. To do this we must distinguish between its individual essence and its mere accidents. Only the essence needs to be defined; for its existence merely means that the essence is actualized somehow, in some suitable accidents—any you please so long as they embody the essence. And here the essence is unlimited capacity, e.g., cognitive capacity. Only one individual can have such capacity. In this way we escape the difficulty by which Kant was rightly appalled, the difficulty that positive predicates may conflict. God’s uniqueness is not that He exhaustively actualizes possible value (this is impossible), but that there is no consistent set of possible values He could not enjoy.

Unfortunately, no such view was conceivable for Kant, since he thought as a platonist—with the difference that he is full of skepticism, without a glimmering of hope that the view could either be justified or improved upon theoretically. On the contrary, with his usual eagerness to claim finality, he solemnly pronounces the platonic concept to be ‘the only true ideal’ that human reason can attain to. But there is an ideal he dreamt not of, that of the self-surpassable, otherwise unsurpassable Creativity.

Though Kant's ‘critical’ objections to the Argument take no account of the reasoning of Prosl. III, and though some of them are irrelevant to that reasoning, yet others might be used against it. Thus, e.g., Kant argues: if the reality of God can be inferred from our idea, God must be identical with

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the idea. By this reasoning, as no one seems to have noticed, Kant proves rather too much. For, by its principle, if God can be inferred at all, He must be simply identical with that from which He is inferred; but then not only is no nonquestion-begging proof for God possible, more than that, either God must be identical with the creatures, or else they cannot logically require His existence as cause of their own! Accordingly, it is theism itself which Kant has refuted here, if anything at all! He is really saying that God can in no fashion be ‘immanent’ in the creatures. For if He can be, then He can be in our idea, as a creature! And if in it, then knowable from it.

In addition, if our neoclassical analysis is right, the mere necessary existence of God (His being actualized somehow, no matter how) is not the concrete actuality which realizes this existence, but is an extreme abstraction, such as might well be within our conceptual grasp. And in any case, a universally immanent being cannot but be somehow constitutive of everything, including every thought. So of course God is somehow in our thought of Him, and also in the animal which cannot think Him. According to Wolfson, a central point of the ontological argument is precisely that God is immediately given.³⁰ Moreover, it is deducible from the idea of God that this must be so. Hence, if God is not given, He does not exist, and if He does not exist, then He is either logically impossible or logically contingent—which are here the same since, as Anselm discovered, ‘contingent perfection’ is contradictory.

³⁰ Wolfson, H. A., The Philosophy of Spinoza (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), vol i, pp. 170f.

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In the same paragraph Kant asks, is the judgment of the divine existence analytic or synthetic? And if the former, does it not beg the question? This is in part a merely technical question, What “follows from the rules of our language” depends upon how we set up those rules. What Anselm discovered was that rules allowing one to treat a proposition as contingent merely because it asserts existence are rules which decide a priori against even the logical possibility of God's existence! Is this a legitimate decision to leave to linguistic rules? Only if such rules have decisive advantages other than that of invalidating the ontological argument—and what other advantages do the rules have? If there are none, it is their adoption, and not the argument, which “begs the question.” Our analysis has suggested that the rules in question have, in truth, grave disadvantages, since they make not only deity but also contingency unintelligible and require us to admit merely negative facts, for example, and other monstrosities.

Like Hume, Kant has put his skeptical results into his initial assumptions. He knows all along that God must either be given as a sensorily perceivable object or be inaccessible. And he knows that God cannot be given as such an object, ergo. . . . No elaborate reasoning is required to draw the conclusion. But the definition of God tells us that this disjunction is invalid. God can neither be given in the obvious fashion of a sense-object, since He is in all such objects and therefore is not peculiarly given in any one of them, nor can He be simply inaccessible, for then He would not be the universal ubiquitous ground of things. And this ground, Anselm would say, “it is better to be than not to be.” Hence God can only be conceived as having such a status. In saying that we

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could not in any fashion know or experience God, Kant is saying that God could not exist.

The great but, even so, calamitously overestimated German philosopher holds that if there be a concept which implies the existence of its object, still that concept is “accepted voluntarily only, and always under the condition that I accept the object of it as given.”³¹ If Kant were here confessedly representing positivism, not atheism or agnosticism, he would be in the right in the first three words of the quotation: the concept need not be accepted as ‘well formed’ or ‘cognitive’. But the atheist does not reject, he uses, the concept, and if it does imply the necessary existence of its object, then the atheist contradicts himself. He is saying, "God or Greatness, whose appropriate definition (and Anselm'’s argument for its appropriateness has not been refuted) implies that He cannot be conceived not to exist, I yet do conceive as (perhaps) not existing.” If this is allowed, what can be forbidden?

Kant thus fails to define the ground of his negations sharply as between atheism and positivism. Anselm proved that only the latter has a case. Here is another example. Kant says: “In introducing into the concept of a thing, which you wish to think in its possibility only, the concept of its existence, . . . you have been guilty of a contradiction . . . you have achieved nothing, but have only committed a tautology.”?? However, it is simply false that Anselm, Descartes, or Spinoza wished to think God ‘in His possibility only’. They wished to think God in whatever way is compatible with the suitable definition of this term. The definition says it cannot be as

31 Kant, op. cis., p. 479.

32 Ibid,, p. 481.

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‘possible only’; so how can it be? Either as necessarily existent, or not at all, ie., existence must be affirmed, or the concept dropped as not genuine and consistent. If this last was Kant's point, why did he not say so more clearly? Am I deluded or was Kant? If it is I, then forty years have gone by, and I have not been able to see that he was right, though I have made many attempts. Will someone, out of the many who with Kant are so much wiser than I, not help me?

But might not what was neither contingent nor logically impossible yet be really impossible? This seems to be the purport of some of Kant's remarks. However, real possibility or impossibility can only mean, on such and such existing conditions. If, then, the conditions required for a thing are themselves logically possible—and if not, neither is the thing itself—yet are really impossible, we have a vicious regress of conditions of the conditions. To avoid this, we must give up the alleged distinction between real and logical possibility, as applied to our problem. The distinction is quite valid with respect to localized items of reality; for what is logically possible somewhere may lack the required conditions just here, or here. But a nonlocalized reality such as deity cannot be treated in this way. It can have no special conditions whatsoever. If it were not really possible everywhere and always, it would be impossible absolutely and in its very meaning. All possible conditions must be compatible with its existence, and then either real and logical possibility coalesce, or else the idea is not possible at all, whether logically or really.

Let us now consider an extended passage.

Being is evidently not a real predicate, or a concept of something that can be added to the concept of a thing. It is merely the admission of a thing, and of certain determinations in it

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Logically, it is merely the copula of a judgment The proposition, God is almighty, contains two concepts, each having its object, namely, God and almightiness. The small word is, is not an additional predicate, but only serves to put the predicate in relation to the subject If, then, I take the subject (God) with all its predicates (including that of almightiness), and say, God is, or there is a God, I do not put a new predicate to the concept of God, but I only put the subject by itself, with all its predicates, in relation to my concept, as its object Both must contain exactly the same kind of thing, and nothing can have been added to the concept, which expresses possibility only, by my thinking its object as simply given, and saying, it is. And thus the real does not contain more than the possible. A hundred real dollars do not contain a penny more than a hundred possible dollars. For as the latter signify the concept, the former the object and its position by itself, it is clear that, in case the former contained more than the latter, my concept would not express that whole object, and would not therefore be its adequate concept. In my financial position no doubt there exists more by one hundred real dollars, than by their concept only (that is their possibility), because in reality the object is not only contained analytically in my concept, but is added to my concept (which is a determination of my state), synthetically; but the conceived hundred dollars are not in the least increased through the existence which is outside my concept.

By whatever and by however many predicates I may think a thing (even in completely determining it), nothing is really added to it, if I add that the thing exists. Otherwise, it would not be the same that exists, but something more than was contained in the concept, and I could not say that the exact object of my concept existed. Nay, even if 1 were to think in a thing all reality, except one, that one missing reality would not be supplied by my saying that so defective a thing exisws, but it would exist with the same defect with which I thought it; or what exists would be different from what I thought If, then, I try to conceive a being, as the highest reality (without any defect), the question still remains, whether it exists or not. For though in

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my concept there may be wanting nothing of the possible real content of a thing in general, something is wanting in its relations to my whole state of knowledge, namely, that the knowledge of that object should be possible a posteriori also. And here we perceive the cause of our difficulty. If we were concerned with an object of our senses, I could not mistake the existence of a thing for the mere concept of it; for by the concept the object is thought only as in harmony with the general conditions of a possible empirical knowledge, while by its existence it is thought as contained in the whole content of experience. Through this connection with the content of the whole experience, the concept of an object is not in the least increased; our thought has only received through it one more possible perception. If, however, we are thinking existence through the pure category alone, we need not wonder that we cannot find any characteristic to distinguish it from mere possibility.

Whatever, therefore, our concept of an object may contain, we must always step outside it, in order to attribute to it existence. With objects of the senses, this takes place through their connection with any one of my perceptions, according to empirical laws; with objects of pure thought, however, there is no means of knowing their existence, because it would have to be known entitely a priorsi, while our consciousness of every kind of existence, whether immediately by perception, or by conclusions which connect something with perception, belongs entirely to the unity of experience, and any existence outside that field, though it cannot be declared to be absolutely impossible, is a presupposition that cannot be justified by anything.

The concept of a supreme Being is, in many respects, a very useful idea, but, being an idea only, it is quite incapable of increasing, by itself alone, our knowledge with regard to what exists. . . . The analytical characteristic of possibility, which consists in the absence of contradiction in mere positions (realities), cannot be denied to it; but the connection of all real properties in one and the same thing is & synthesis the possibility of which we cannot judge a priori because these realities are not given to us as such, and because, even if this were so, no judgment whatever takes place, it being necessary to look for the

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characteristic of the possibility of synthetical knowledge in experience only, to which the object of an idea can never belong. Thus we see that the celebrated Leibniz is far from having achieved what he thought he had, namely, to understand a priori the possibility of so sublime an ideal Being.

Time and labor therefore are lost on the famous ontological (Cartesian) proof of the existence of a Supreme Being from mere concepts.³³

In these famous passages Kant seems scarcely aware that from the standpoint of the second Anselmian or Cartesian Proof the question is not whether ordinary or contingent existence could ever be derivable from the mere concept of a kind of thing, but only whether a uniquely excellent kind of existence, necessary existence, can be derived from a unique concept, that of divine perfection or Greatness.

Insofar as the Critical Kant was aware of the relevant question, his view was apparently similar to that of Hume before him: necessary existence, taken as a quality or excellence, is without intelligible content, so that the idea of it could amount to no more than this: the necessarily existent (supposing the phrase means anything) necessarily exists. No other quality, in short, is logically connected with this alleged quality. We still should not know whar necessarily exists.34 Yet Anselm had tried to exhibit some two-way logical bridges between necessary, essential existence, or self-existence, on the one hand, and eternal existence, existence without parts, dependency, or defect, and thus existence as that of the Unsurpassable or Greatest, on the other. And we have seen

³³ Ibid., pp. 483-86.

³⁴ Henrich (see Bibliography I) reaches approximately this conclusion in his study of Kant's criticism of the Proof.

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in Part One that still other and stronger bridges can be constructed or found. Neither Kant nor Hume is adequately aware of the classical literature of this subject, much less of the unexplored possibilities which neoclassicism discloses for accomplishing the end more convincingly.

By remarking that existence is not a predicate, did Kant state clearly the abstract-concrete paradox involved in the Anselmian use of the Proof? It seems not. Existence in the necessary case, for all Kant shows, might be a predicate; but it could not, as necessary, be concrete, or identical with God as concretely actual. There must then in God be a real distinction between His necessary existence and His total reality. Where does Kant even touch on such an idea? Yet the logic of the problem leads us straight to it, unless we have made up our minds not to go in that direction.

Furthermore, Kant overstates his case in denying that ‘existence’ is, in any way, a predicate, or that the existing is in any sense more than the merely possible. There must be some sense in which it is more. And when Kant says, if real dollars contained anything [a penny] more than possible dollars, “my concept would not express the whole object, and would not therefore be its adequate concept,” he gives himself away. For by what right does he assume the possibility of such a thing as an ‘adequate concept’ in this sense? Of course, there are only one hundred pennies in a real, as in a possible, dollar, but neither a dollar nor a penny can be fully expressed in a concept. Only sheer intuition could do this. The conceptual description of a kind of thing may at most account for so much of its quality or value as is expressible in merely abstract terms. But the full quality is not thus expressible. The actual in its unity has quality or value, and this is no ‘predi-

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cate’ or bundle of predicates to which reference can, in a particular case, be made, save by pointing to the concrete and speaking of ‘its’ value. To treat this value as a universal, or a ‘possibility’, is merely verbal, as Bergson (also Dewey) has pointed out; for there is no way to separate it from its actuality. We are only setting up a verbal duplicate of the actuality, and assigning it to another date, in speaking of it as an ‘antecedent’ possibility, if we really mean the unitary quality of the actuality. Thus Anselm and Descartes were not wrong in saying that the actual is greater than the unactualized yet possible. The former has a uniqueness, a concrete definiteness, which mere possibility lacks. And in this unique definiteness is all the richness and beauty of the real world, beside which ‘possible worlds’ are pale shadows. If it were not so, possibility might just as well be left unactualized, and God did nothing when He created the real world.

Yet the foregoing sense in which existence is a predicate is irrelevant to the ontological argument. For, manifestly, that in actuality which is 'more’ than what is conceptually or abstractly expressible for that very reason cannot follow from any concept or definition; hence it cannot be used to establish the necessity of God. And yet Prosl. II and the parallel passages in Descartes give the impression of trying to use it in this way.

Kant seems to feel that it is absurd to suppose that we could know an individual without empirically perceiving it. Yet note that “Such that nothing greater is conceivable” refers to no empirical or contingent fact; Greatness is defined with reference to what could be, not with reference to what is. It is a concept wholly a priori. By contrast, ‘dollar’ cannot be defined without some empirical reference. Moreover, whereas

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a particular dollar exists at or for a certain time—and all dating is empirical—'God exists on August 26th, 1963’ says nothing more than that He exists, and that there is such a date as the one mentioned. For God's existence (not His actuality) is regardless of dates.

True, since God is necessarily somehow actualized, our experience (and all things else) must be in relation to this actuality, and so it may well follow that in some sense, not necessarily conscious, we must intuit, experience, or feel it And how does Kant know that we do not do this? A lack of distinct awareness of something is not a distinct awareness that it is not given. It is merely an absence of conscious perception of the thing as in experience, not a conscious perception of its absolute absence from experience. (Such an absolute absence could only be perceived by a mind with unrestricted cognitive power.) Moreover, it follows from the idea of God that either the idea is illogical, or God exists necessarily and ubiquitously, and from the latter it follows that all experience must have Him as datum, however inaccessible the datum may be to easy and clear conscious detection.

To the query, how do we distinguish God from a mere possibility, we reply, simply by the contradictoriness of ‘mere possibility of Greatness’. Nothing can make Greatness possible, or self-consistent, but its own necessary reality as inevitably somehow actualized. We do not ‘add’ existence to the ‘bare possibility of God’, we deny that this latter phrase has a consistent meaning. Nor do we ‘add to our concept’ of God in affirming His existence; for the only proper concept of God is as existent. He can have no other status.

From a recent article (see Bibliography, Engel) I quote the following:

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Kant . . . goes on to conclude . . . that when I, . . . think a Being as the highest reality, without any defect, the question still remains whether it exists or not—that is, whether (as he goes on to explain) it exists as some part of this (whole) world of my experience. Now the obvious answer . . . is that of course God does not exist in that way. . . . But this simply means that God lacks contingent existence . . . this is hardly a defect, for if he had contingent existence he would not be God, or what we ordinarily understand by that term.

The author adds in a footnote: “if the ontological argument fails to prove what it sets out to prove, the reasons for its failure must be other than those given by Kant” This article is at least a bit of evidence that the almost hypnotic spell of Kant's ‘refutation’ has now been broken. For this we need, no doubt, to thank Norman Malcolm more than anyone else.

We have already dealt, early in this section, with the Kantian contention that we do not know that ‘all realities’ could be combined in one reality, the Supreme Being. In any case, this is the positivistic, not the atheistic, objection to Anselm, and it leaves his refutation of atheism intact, so that he still would have proved something and something important, ie., that God could not be an unrealized possibility. Moreover, the Proof need not, and in neoclassical use does not, take God to be the actual union of all possible realities, the ens realissimum, but only the actual union of all actual realities, and the potential union of all possible ones so far as mutually compossible.

If Kant were to insist that only experience could tell us— but yet it does not and cannot tell us—that perfection, thus defined, is possible—or impossible—we should ask him, who then could know the truth here? Or is it unknowable absolutely? Obviously God could not know His own impossibility! We too, it seemns, cannot know it. What meaning, then, has the

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term ‘impossible’ in this case? And if it has none, what is the dispute about? Certainly God could know—if He could do anything—His own possibility and (the same thing) His own (necessary) existence. Also, it cannot be simply impossible even for us to know it, since by definition the divine existence would be the necessary ground of ours, in its every aspect. Hence, we know must somehow imply the existence of God, and so exclude His impossibility. How then could this be wholly unknowable?

The strongest objection of Kant's is much like one of Thomas's. How can we deduce existence—or anything else— from a divine nature of which we do not initially have a clear conception? Anselm’s answer was that his definition does not claim to tell us anything about God beyond the mere impossibility of something superior to Him. Another answer might be that ‘nature’ is here profoundly ambiguous. If it means, the most abstract, necessary, or merely eternal aspect of God’s reality, then to know this is nothing hopelessly difficult, since we have only to abstract sufficiently from more concrete conceptions, in all of which the most abstract nature must be immanent. Concreteness, not abstractness, is the most baffling thing.

(In view of mathematics and formal logic—compared, say, to psychology—this should be commonplace.) If, in contrast, ‘nature’ means the concrete quality of God as God of this world, and of all created worlds in the near and remote past of the cosmic process, then this nature indeed we cannot know; but it is contingent, and not in question in the argument. There is no more tremendous difference than that between these two aspects of deity.

(If it seems to some remarkable, to the point of absurdity, that one being can unite such contrasting features, the appro-

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priate comment is simple: it is not one whit more remarkable than all the other implicadons of Greatness. Omniscience must somehow unite all things whatsoever. We are back at the positivistic objection, which must always have some plausibility: can God's existence be conceived at all? There is no obvious reason why it should be wholly easy, nor yet simply impossible.)

Kant's entire philosophy rests heavily upon the assumption that theism must mean classical theism. It follows that space and time cannot in any way describe the highest form of reality, for deity is classically viewed as strictly immaterial and immutable. Kant is assuming that Greatness excludes every conceivable kind of becoming as inferior; but this assumption is never really argued, it is never shown that it is better to be so complete that change is irrelevant than to be capable of enrichment of content. Nay, Kant himself holds that we cannot know completeness in this sense to be possible. But if not possible, it is also not better; for there is no virtue in sheer impossibility. Hence Kant does not know that divine Greatness implies immutability, he merely assumes it. Had he gone back to Anselm'’s proposal, he might more easily have seen that he was begging a most important question.

Again, take Kant’s view that noumena could be known only by a wholly active mode of intuition or perception. This is classical theism again, for it assumes that to be wholly without receptivity or passivity is a merit. But on what ground? Are men less receptive than atoms, or incomparably more? The latter seems obvious. Then are men inferior to atoms? Kant was here repeating Anselm in his weakest aspect, his mistaken deduction of the negative theology from Greatness. Greatness is indeed defined negatively, but what it negates is not prop-

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erties in God, but only the possibility of better properties in another individual. This allows God to have any positive property which is wholly good. And receptivity, sensitivity to the realities making up the universe, is indeed wholly good. The more of it a being has, the higher it stands. The absolutely insensitive is the absolutely dead, not the supremely alive. The Platonists (perhaps not Plato) are blind to this truth. Suppose Kant had seen this. He might then also have seen that true knowledge requires conforming the subject to its objects, not sheer making of these objects. (The latter would mean that the known was merely one’s own thinking, one’s own thoughts or feelings.) Kant’s whole epistemology could have been very different—and less subjective—had he realized the arbitrary character of his presupposed idea of God. And the study of Anselm, if ‘critical’ enough, could have taught him this.

Kant repeats, for the phenomenal world, Hume’s determinism, and he does not effectively or ontologically overcome even Hume's radical pluralism, in that he makes, not things or events, but only our experience of things or events, an interconnected whole. Thus he, like Hume, is playing against theism with loaded dice. One of the penalities of accepting the Newtonian conception of absolute causal regularity is that the way was thus barred to an objective or ontological view of modality. (Most logicians are still resolute Newtonians even today in their insistence upon the strict independence of denotation and truth from time.) Only if there is a real contrast between the determinate past and the determinable future can we have a basis for the concept of real possibility, of which real necessity is the most general or abstract aspect. Here is the crux of the modal problem. So of course Kant disclaims any

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ontological knowledge of modality. But it follows immediately that he must disclaim any knowledge of God as necessarily existing, hence any knowledge of God, who only so could exist. Kant's dictum that all our conceptions must find their clue in the temporal structure of experience is correct; however, (a) determinism obscures that structure, and (b) Kant’s phenomenalistic restriction upon the scope of time makes the dictum entail a general agnosticism. According to the idea of divine unsurpassability as entailing divine self-surpassing there must even be an eminent or divine kind of time! So here too Kant has decided against theism before even taking up the subject.

Other features of Kantianism come under the same heading. Thus Kant falls behind Hume in his account of the self by admitting a transcendent timeless soul or noumenal absolute petsonal identity other (it seems) than that of deity, and at least morally certifiable. And he makes still other concessions to the classical theory of ‘substance’. Kant also is farther than Hume was from seeing that classical theism is not the only form theism can take. (Hume's Cleanthes makes an energetic, though not successful, effort to formulate what would have been neoclassical theism had he succeeded.)

When our valiant Konigsberger took it upon himself to declare as “labor lost” all future efforts to discover a valid point in the Argument, was he not “barring the path of inquiry”— alas, only too effectively?

Yet Kant did make a contribution to the Anselmian problem. This was in his contention that the supposedly empirical arguments for God's existence conceal an a priori. If it were in principle impossible to ‘argue from idea to existence’ in respect to God, there could be no theistic argument at all. Kant thus supports Anselm'’s intuition that it is wrong to turn over the

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stones of fact to see if perchance God's existence—or His nonexistence—can be found lurking under them. If anything can indicate God, everything must do so, including particularly the bare idea of God itself. What Kant refuted was not the ontological a priori proof of God—he never clearly stated that (in any form equivalent to Prosl. III). What he refuted was the claim to avoid the a priori in the religious sphere. And indeed, to say that we cannot infer God from the logical possibility of His idea, though we can infer Him from cats, mountains, or our own existence, seems downright frivolous. Either the idea of God is a creature, or it is God's self-knowledge (simply that, or as participated in by a creature); there is within theism no third thing it could be. Either way, its reality entails that of God, if anything whatever can do so. For delivering us from the notion that there is a special order of entity, such as the existing world, or our sense perceptions of this world, with which we must start in order to reach God, we can thank chiefly two men, Anselm and Kant. We can start anywhere, and with anything whatever; the question only is, can we understand it well enough to see the reality of God which, unless theism is absurd rather than false, must be there?

[Return to Part Two Contents]

11. Hegel

Hegel's defense of the Proof did it little good, first, because he never properly stated it and second, because his system was too unclear to appeal permanently. Anselm had a lucid mind; he generally used words with a nice exactitude. He meant by God the absolute actualization of all that is desirable and good. This complete actualization did not include that of the world, which was, strictly speaking, superfluous. God might

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not even have been ‘supreme’, since He might have been solus. Deity is absolute self-sufficiency. This at least is clear. Spinoza also was clear enough: God is indeed absolute self-sufficiency, absolute actualization, but because His essence includes the world and because the world is all possibility exhaustively actualized. There is a third view: God is not in every sense selfsufficient, for although He exists independently, He depends for His particular actuality, or how He exists, upon what other things exist. Necessary or absolute in His bare essence and existence as divine, or simply as God, He is yet, in His concrete actuality, contingent, relative, and forever incomplete, because forever in process of further enrichment, value possibilities being inexhaustible. This, roughly stated, is neoclassical theism.

What is Hegel’s position? Perhaps he is a neoclassical theist? On the whole, I think he is a man who is and wants to be in a perpetual systematic muddle between classical theism, classical pantheism, and something like neoclassical theism, with a dose of humanistic atheism, or the self-deification of man, thrown in for good measure.

In his astute but cloudy way, Hegel accepts the Proof as integral to his system. He rightly points out that we should expect the infinite to obey partly different laws from the finite. For Hegel, the infinite, or God, is the absolute unity of subject and object, or thought and reality. Hence the notion of God as mere idea is absurd. As usual in Hegel, there is sense in this but sense entangled in ambiguities. Divinity, for one thing, is not simply identical with infinity; as Hegel himself knew, the merely infinite without the finite is an empty abstraction. But just how the concrete finiteness and the abstract infinity are together in the divine reality—has anyone ever been able to learn this from Hegel? Most of us have had to look else-

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where for any clear light on the topic. That ‘every step toward concreteness is contingent’ is either denied by Hegel or at best admitted in most grudging and unclear fashion. I think it needs to be accepted outright, and without cavil. That the ultimate abstraction is somehow concretized may be necessary, but all else must be contingent. Only so can we avoid “deducing” the logically stronger from the weaker.

(It is only fair to say that the work from which the following is quoted was assembled from notes, partly by students.)

As is well known, the first genuinely metaphysical proof of the cxistence of God took the turn, that God as the idea of the being which unites in itself all reality must also possess the reality of existence. . . . ‘For if it is merely an object of thought it is not the highest thing; 'it can therefore be assumed that it exists: this is greater’ than something merely thought. . . . This is quite right; however, the transition is not exhibited, the subjective understanding is not shown to transcend [aufheben] itself.

. . . for the true proof it is requisite that the procedure should not be according to the [abstract] understanding; but that thoughe should, of its own nature, be shown to negate itself, and . . . to determine itself to existence. And conversely, it must be shown of existence that it is its own dialectic to transcend itself and posit itself as the universal, as thought.³⁵

There is in Hegel’s pages on Anselm not a hint of the content of the vital passages which come after Prosl. II, mostly in the Reply. Thus Hegel essentially re-echoed the Gaunilo tradition, adding the peculiarities of his own dialectic of universal

³⁵ Translated from the text of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Samsliche Werke (Stuttgart: Fr. Frohmanns Verlag, 1959), vol. xix, Vorlesungen dber die Geschichte der Philosophie, bd. iii, pp. 165, 167. [Hegel did a better job on the Cartesian ontological argument, giving some idea of the second or stropger version. See op. cis., p. 347.]

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and concrete or particular, thought and reality. Obviously he is dealing in his own way with the abstract-concrete paradox, but is he making a clear advance toward its resolution? Or is he showing a muddled awareness of problems which are left for someone else to subject to lucid analysis?

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12. Ludwig Feuerbach

Because it is arguable that Hegel’s greatest influence has been through the Marxists, it is worth noting that his acceptance of the Gaunilo legend was in a sense echoed in that main source of Marxist atheism, Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity. There, after quoting the Latin of Anselm’s definition of divine Greatness, the author tells us that the Proof runs: nonexistence is a defect (Nichtsein ist ein Mangel), therefore. . . .³⁶ This of course is Prosl. II, for the hundredth time posing as the heart of the matter. One need add only two syllables to get an approximation to the proper form of the major premise: Nicheseinkonnen ist ein Mangel, the possibility of nonexistence is a defect. But to be wise enough to make and understand this addition, one might perhaps need to read what Anselm wrote on the subject. And this, it seems, one does not do, no matter to what school of philosophy one belongs.

Notable also is Feuerbach's assumption that the real existence of God, or of anything else, must be ‘particular’ or ‘empirical’. Much of Feuerbach’s brilliant attack upon theism reads like a diffuse exploitation of the abstractconcrete or Findlay paradox, that God both must and must not be an

³⁶ The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper's, 1957, p. 198 (ch 20). German edition (Leipzig, 1904), p. 300

(ch. 21).

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empty abstraction, devoid yet not devoid of concreteness or particularity. I ind in this writer no notion of the neoclassical solution of the paradox, that it is the actuality, not the existence, of God which must be particular or empirical, and that the existence is merely the being-somehow-particularized, not the how of particularization. Only the latter need be empirical. It is precisely the extreme abstractness of the divine essence which makes necessary its being somehow actualized or particularized. The essence of the human mind, which Feuerbach would substitute for divinity, is by no means so abstract. As Barth points out, man dies, his actions are pervasively tinged with evil, and he exists not as a single universal individual but as each one of us in our distinct individualities.3” These and many more restrictions upon the pure essence of understanding, love, or will are required to transform these concepts, with which divinity is identified by Feuerbach, into that of humanity. Such restrictions cannot be necessary. Thus Feuerbach, like his ‘bourgeois’ teachers, Kant and Hegel, failed to deal clearly and logically with the Anselmian challenge at its center.

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13. Robert Flint

This author belongs with Cudworth as having come closer to Anselm than any of the other moderns considered so far in Part Two. Yet even he could not prevent the Gaunilo tradition from warping his presentation somewhat. Thus, he begins by stating the thought of Prosl. II as though it were the entire

37 See the conclusion of Barth's preface to The Essence of Christianity (1957).

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technical argument, and only then begins to show that he really knows better.

It is heartening to note his awareness that Descartes had two forms of ontological proof (the second coming close to Prosl. III), and he may possibly be the first modern thinker to take clear note of this fact. Is it not permissible to salute this tough Scotchman’s insistence upon doing his own reading and thinking, instead of letting a dozen other persons do it for him?

This reasoning [he has summarized Prosl, II] . . . has commended itself completely to few. Yet it may fairly be doubted whether it has been conclusively refuted, and some of the objections most frequently urged against it are cerwainly inadmissible. . There is . . . no force, as Anselm showed, in the objection of Gaunilo, that the existence of God can no more be inferred from the idea of a perfect being, than the existence of a perfect island is to be inferred from the idea of such an island. There neither is nor can be an idea of an island which is greater and better than any other that can ever be conceived. Anselm could safely promise that he would make Gaunilo a present of such an island when he had really imagined it. Only one being—an infinite, independent, necessary being —can be perfect in the sense of being greater and better than every other conceivable being. The objection that the ideal can never logically yield the real—that the transition from thought to fact must be in every instance illegitimate—is merely an assertion that the argument is fallacious. It is an assertion which cannot fairly be made until the argument has been exposed and refuted. The argument is that a certain thought of God is found necessarily to imply His existence. The objection that existence is not a predicate, and that the idea of a God who exists is not more complete and perfect than the idea of a God who does not exist, is, perhaps, not incapable of being satisfactorily repelled. Mere existence is not a predicate, but specifications or determinations of existence are predicable. Now the argument nowhere implies that existence is a predicate; it implies only that reality, necessity, and independence of existence are predicates of existence; and it implies this on the ground that existence in re can be distinguished from existence

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in concepts, necessary from contingent existence, self-existence from derived existence. Specific distinctions must surely admit of being predicated. That the exclusion of existence—which hete means real and necessary existence—from the idea of God does not leave us with an incomplete idea of God, is not a position, I think, which can be maintained . . . the idea becomes either the idea of a nonentity or the idea of an idea, and not the idea of a perfect being at all. Thus, the argument of Anselm is unwarrantably represented as an argument of four terms instead of three.  . . .

The second form of the Cartesian argument is, that God cnnot be thought of as a petfect Being unless He be also thought of as a necessarily existent Being; and that, therefore, the thought of God implies the existence of God. . . . It is futile to meet this by saying that existence ought not to be included in any mere conception, for it is not existence but necessary existence which is included in the conception reasoned from, and that God can be thought of otherwise than as necessarily existent requires to be proved, not assumed. To affirm that existence cannot be given or reached through thought, but only through sense and sensuous experience can prove nothing except the narrowness of the philosophy on which such a thesis is based.³⁸

Flint overlooks the abstract-concrete paradox, and the consequent need to transcend classical theism. But it was fifty years after his writing the above words, at least, before more than a minute fraction of the philosophical world had anything like so definite and accurate a grasp of what either Anselm or Descartes had meant. It is probably still a small fraction.

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14. W. E. Hocking, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana

Anselm’s Proof has seldom played a positive role in Ameri-

38 Theism (Edinburgh and London, 1877), pp. 278-80, 282-84 [ Since Flint refers to Cudworth, the latter's rare understanding of the Argument was not quite lost in his vast volumes, after all.]

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can philosophy. Two of our philosophers, however, Hocking and Royce, early in this century called an argument of theirs *ontological’, and one of these said, some fifty years ago, that it was in principle the ‘only’ argument for God. The rather pathetic facts, however, are that neither writer has given a tolerably accurate account of the original Argument and that one of them gives an exceedingly inaccurate account.³⁹ (Since the writer of this commentary is deeply indebted to Professor Hocking as a former teacher, he wishes it were otherwise.) Hocking intended to improve upon Anselm. But alas, his Anselm never existed. In one short paragraph, four incorrect notions concerning the Saint’s procedures are expressed, as anyone who compares the account with the relevant Proslogium pages may ascertain for himself. Nor is there any suspicion of the central principle: that, the nonexistence of which is inconceivable, is greater than that the nonexistence of which is conceivable.

This is how Anselm has been treated—even by many of those with the least motive for misrepresenting him.

In a more constructive and characteristically ingenious passage, Hocking briefly presents his own so<alled ontological argument,

The ontological argument is the answer to the question, May the idea of God be ‘merely subjective?” That answer is, In forming the essence ‘merely subjective, you have at the same time formed the essence ‘not merely subjective’ as in contrast thereto; and God as essence belongs to the ‘not merely subjective.’ Whatever artificiality there is in the argument hails entirely from the

39 “The Ontological Argument in Royce and Others,” Contemporary I1dealism in America, ed. C. Barrett (New York: The Macmillan Compaoy, 1932), p. 49.

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artificiality of the question. The natural situation may be stated thus: the essence of God must be real, because it is an essence inseparable from my continuous consciousness or experience of reality. ⁴⁰

The second sentence by itself looks like the very argument of Prosl. II which Hocking has rejected. However, taking into account the last sentence, and the setting of the quotation in Hocking’s general position, what we have is not an ontological argument at all, but a Berkeleyesque version of what I call the epistemic or idealistic argument. This version runs: we experience nature, this amounts to experiencing God, since nature is only something in or ‘between’ minds, not a possible thing in itself, and since our perception of nature is not our own doing and can only be God ‘creating us’, at least to that extent. Berkeley had said much of this in his own way: nature is ideas, but not essentially our ideas; hence God’s, which He causes us to share (or approximate to), and thus a ‘language’ whereby God speaks to us. Calling such an argument ‘ontological’ seems to be twisting words to little purpose. The original Argument proceeded directly from the logical possibility or conceivability of God to His necessary existence. Nothing about our human situation relative to nature needed to be invoked. The conceivability of God is not the fact that human beings conceive Him; no failure to conceive can nullify a logical possibility. If we understand that God is conceivable, we also understand, for it is the same, that He necessarily exists. For in this unique case, nonnecessity is equivalent to nonpossibility. The point is related to what nature might be only insofar as all metaphysics is one. There may be a valid form of epistemic argument, but it is not the argument Anselm

⁴⁰ Op. cit., p. 65.

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invented (and Descartes used) in either its weak or its strong form. It needs another name.

In the same essay—based in part on students’ notes of some of Royce’s lectures—Hocking deals with the Roycean so-called ontological argument. It does not appear that Hocking's teacher came any closer to Anselm than Hocking himself. Nor is this surprising. “Our American Plato” (as Peirce called him) based his views mainly on German philosophy which, almost throughout its history, has been unaware of the real Anselm. And for another reason also, Royce was not in a good position to appreciate the Argument. (He did much better with the epistemic argument.) For Royce, though less clearly and candidly, took the view of the Stoics and Spinoza (and Leibniz by implication) that the eternal essence of God implicated the entire detail of existence. Thus everything is as necessary as God. To use the Proof for this view, with its glaring paradoxes, is to misuse it in one way as Anselm had in another. Classical theism and classical pantheism are the two horns of the classical dilemma. But of the two, it is the Spinozistic doctrine which more obviously must in effect “deduce the concrete from the abstract.” And, just as Hume’s absolute denial of internal relatedness makes nonsense out of theism, so does Royce's absolute denial of external relatedness and hence of contingency. This is an example of the power of Anselm’s discovery; it forces us to regard either theism, or else both extreme monism and extreme pluralism, as self-inconsistent.

That Royce, as a classical pantheist naturally would do, distorted the Proof by attenuating to the vanishing point the distinctiveness of necessary existence compared to existence in general is made quite clear in Hocking’s account. Royce wants to generalize the ontological principle that ‘essence entails exist-

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ence’ by making experience entail the entire universe. Otherwise, he thinks, we cannot escape solipsism. Now, that experience cannot be of nothing, and that it must somehow exhibit the experienced, may indeed be a valid metaphysical axiom. But the inference from our experience to the particular world experienced is one from brute fact to brute fact, from particular to particular. This is almost as far as one can get from the original ontological argument. Royce conceals this from himself by identifying ‘essence’ with whatever is experienced or in the mind. However, Anselm starts from an abstract definition, not a concrete experience or anything concrete, and deduces that no matter what else there may be, God as defined must really exist. This is the total independence or self-sufficiency of God’s existence, its absolute neutrality with respect to all other individual existences. This notion—essential to the Proof—is swept away in Royce’s version (as in Spinoza’s).

Yet Royce is groping toward a metaphysical truth (so subtle is this problem, and so inclusive of all the metaphysical problems). The ontological principle may indeed be applied to more than just God. What it cannot do is apply to individuals other than God; rather, it applies to all abstractions or detetminables on the highest level of generality. God in His merely necessary reality is an abstraction, though a perfectly individual abstraction for all that! But God as such and world as such are correlative, and equally abstract; both must be somehow concretized. However, this our actual world—which was Royce’s theme—is the absolute opposite of the uttermost abstraction or determinable, since it is the uttermost determinate. To lump together these two problems without clear notification of what is going on is confusion indeed. We are being entangled in the pantheistic version of the Findlay paradox inherent in all

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classical thought, without the admission of how paradoxical it is. The Perfect individual can be necessary only because its individuality is totally noncommittal as between particular alternatives of actualization. So far from the entire actual universe following from or being presupposed by its existence, nothing follows, and nothing is presupposed, save that some divine and some worldly actualization there must be. (That world as such is equally noncommittal does not make it a rival necessary being. For world as such is simply the content of the divine knowledge so far as more than mere self-knowledge. It designates, not an individual in the primary sense, but the completely indefinite generalized collection of nondivine individuals.)

As Hocking shows, Royce defined his ideas about the Argument partly by reaction to those held by his brilliant colleague George Santayana. In the first chapter of the latter’s Realm of Truth, we find the following characteristically luminous discussion.

The most real of beings, said St Anselm, necessarily exists: for evidently if it did not exist, far from being most real, it would not be real at all Is then reality, we may ask, the same as existence? And can existence have degrees? St Anselm explains . . . a nonexistent essence would woefully lack moral greatness, perfection, or dignity: it would be a contemptible ghost, a miserable nothing. Undoubtedly for a careladen mind seeking salvation—unless it sought salvation from existence—power, which certainly involves existence, must be the first mark of reality and value.  . . .

At the other pole of reflection, on the contrary, as among the Indians or the Eleatics, the most real of things might seem to be pute Being, or the realm of essence, excluding change and existence altogether: because in change and existence there is essential privation. ...

I do not mention this paradox in order to laugh at St Anselm

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or at his many disciples . . . their argument was fallacious and even ridiculous, if by ‘necessary existence’ we understand a necessity artaching to events ar to facts, that is, to contingencies. Yet the same argument breathes a fervent intuition and a final judgment of the spirit, if it intends rather to deny final validity to an existential order which, by definition, is arbitrary, treacherous, and self-destructive: a realm of being over which inessential relations are compulsory and essential relations are powerless. . . . we may come to sce how the maximum of reality mighe logically involve infinity, impassiveness, and eternity: all of which are contrary to the limitation, flux, and craving inherent in existence. No essence, not even this essence of existence, has any power to actualize itself in a fact; nor does such actualization bring to any essence an increment in its logical being. ...

The existence of God is therefore not a necessary truth: for if the proposition is necessary, its terms can only be essences; and the word God itself would then designate a definable idea and would not be a proper name indicating an acrual power. If, on the contrary, the word is such a proper name, and God is a psychological moral being energizing in space and time, then His existence can be proved only by the evidence of these natural manifestations, not by dialectical reasoning upon the meanings of terms.⁴¹

Our Americanized Spaniard’s brilliance has not saved him from missing much of the import of Anselm’s reasoning.

First, the proof which he attributes to the Saint is but a loose paraphrase of Prosl. II. In spite of his claim that when he began his studies at Harvard the scholastic proofs for God’s existence were “warm in his mind,” the evidence before us strongly suggests that he either had not read, or when he wrote the quoted passage had forgotten, Prosl. III and Reply I, V, IX.

⁴¹ The Realm of Truth (New York: Scribner’s, 1938), pp. 7-10.

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Second, it is assumed, not proved, that all essences have the same relation to existence—of course, the very point at issue. Actualization, it is urged, involves arbitrary limitation, negation, or exclusion of other essences from actualization. Essences being thus competitors for actualization, their existence is always contingent. But what Anselm, in effect, proved is that there is one noncompetitive yet individual essence, wholly independent, in its mere existence, of what else does or does not exist. A dogmatic statement that all essence is competitive is worthless against this explicit argument for an exception to the rule.

To say that “no essence, not even this essence of existence, has any power to actualize itself” prompts the rejoinder, does any essence have power even to ‘subsist’ totally out of relation to existence? We confront the old Aristotelian question. Santayana cannot refute Anselm merely by voting, against Aristotle, for the complete “separability of forms.” (See Part One, Sec. 13.)

That no actualization can “bring to any essence an increment in its logical being” is correct; but it may for all that be true that the denial of actualization to so abstract or noncommittal an essence as existence as such, or God the universal existent, is contradictory of its logical being. In spite of Kant, it is illicit to substitute, Can you add existence to an essence and get a greater essence? for the only relevant question, which is, Can you without contradiction subtract existence from, or deny it to, a certain supreme (and noncompetitive) essence and have the essence at all? Such an impossibility of subtraction does not imply the possibility of a prior addition, rather the contrary! Kant's point here was an ignoratio elenchi. No Anselmian who remembers Prosl. 1II wants to “add” existence to the divine nature. He wants to show that there is no room

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for such an addition, since existence is inherently there. The alternative to ‘God existent’ is not ‘God nonexistent and therefore inferior’—it is contradiction or nonsense.

So what we have is: lack of acquaintance with Anselm, inconclusive and in part irrelevant objections and dogmatic platonism. Here is no secure hiding-place from the Anselmian challenge.

Santayana also begs the question, not only by his extreme platonism, but by his extreme Humianism, or pluralism. Each momentary state of experience (‘spirit’) is independent logically of its predecessors. Mind has no power, only matter. But then of course there is no sense to the idea of God!

True enough, the “actual power” influencing our world transcends any essence; but all that the Proof tries to show, neoclassically interpreted, is that some divine actuality, genidentical with any other, is influencing it.

Santayana and Royce are interesting opposites to one another. Whereas Royce held, in effect, that all genuine essences must be actualized, since the world, in every detail, is the best or only ‘really possible’ choice that the Absolute Wisdom could make among apparent or ‘merely ideal’ possibilides, Santayana had said that any actualization, and even no actualization, is as possible, as thinkable, as the reality which in fact exists. Here, as always, a critical Anselmian takes the moderate position: the divine essence, and all equally general or abstract essences, cannot conceivably be unactualized, but the more particular essences may or may not acquire actualization. Again, whereas Royce held that all details are providential, a theist who has given heed to the abstract-concrete paradox will not say this; but neither will he, with Santayana, see the world as bald fact influenced by no universal ideal or directive.

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So penetrating and various are the implications of Anselm’s discovery. The world has evidently felt a deep need to evade these implications; and meeting this need is a job which has been almost incredibly well done. The chief methodological rule for doing it has been simple: do not study or reflect upon Anselm’s text for yourself, rely upon another. Read only with another’s eyes, reflect only with another’s mind. Scholarly thoroughness, self-reliance, one or both, have nearly always been in scanty supply in this context.

There is a third quality insufficiently manifested in the Anselm debate: intellectual curiosity, the desire to explore ideas as a mathematician explores them with a view to learning what could coherently be thought, regardless of whether it has been thought or not, regardless of what one wishes to believe or disbelieve. How could one formulate the idea of a worshipful being? Is something like the Philonian-Thomistic approach the only possibility—apart from Spinozism, Leibnizianism, Hegelianism, Kantian agnosticism, or a Comtean rejection of the very idea of God? (The inexhaustiveness of the disjunction should be clear.) Like Anselm himself, Santayana did not seriously put this question, and neither did Royce, who dealt only with the issue between agnosticism (or pure mysticism) and some approach to an Hegelianized Leibnizianism.

Thanks to the influence of William James, Hocking did put the question just referred to. He is essentially a neoclassical theist (to the great profit of at least one of his former students), but with a post-Kantian and Roycean background somewhat unfavorable to lucid analysis. We need a larger dose of ‘Latin clarity’, such as characterizes the thought of Anselm.

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15. R. G. Collingwood

This author gives us an admirable short account of the historical background of the Proof. One may doubt if the special role of faith is properly estimated in this account. But on the other hand, one could hardly have a clearer realization than the passage expresses of the enormous systematic philosophical issues which are entwined in this one.

An ingenious argument, not included in the quotation below, is given to show that logic and ethics, like metaphysics, must assert existence as involved in essence. Thus—for instance— in talking about propositions we create propositions, and hence their existence cannot be denied. This seems rather different from the necessity that God should exist; but possibly the consideration is relevant. In any case, if all existence is contingent, metaphysics is a will-o’-the-wisp, and so is much of what has been regarded as philosophy.

Of the three phrases quoted below from Boéthius, the last and most significant is in the Consolations of Philosophy, Book III, X. It is indeed close to Anselm: “nothing better than God can be thought of.” Boéthius uses the formula to prove that God must have perfect goodness, since otherwise, inasmuch as “perfect things were before the imperfect,” thete would be something better than He. Still, this is not Anselm. For the procedure requires us to prove independently that perfect goodness exists, whereas all that is needed is that it be conceivable, since then that which is thought of as not admitting even the thought of a greater must be thought of as perfectly good. Similarly it must be thought of as existing necessarily—again assuming only that necessary existence is conceivable and would be superior to contingency. There is another bit of

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evidence that Boéthius did not have any very penetrating grasp of his own formula: in the very sentence in which he in effect defines God as such that nothing better can be thought, he goes on: “who doubteth but that that is good than which nothing is better?” (id quo melius nihil est), thus relapsing from the modal to the merely existential level. Nevertheless, Collingwood is probably right in assigning this passage the honor of most nearly approximating Anselm’s definition. Very likely, however, it was Augustine, if anyone, who led the Magnificent Doctor to his formula. Thus in De Libero Arbitrio (Vi, 14) we find God referred to as quo nullus est superior, or again quo nihil superior est constiteris. Also in De Doctrina Christiana, L I, C VII, we read: ut aliquid quo nihil melius sit atque sublimius illa cogstatio conetur astingere. (For these citations I am indebted to F. H. Ginascol.) None of these quite say that God is such that nothing greater can be thought, but only that nothing greater exists, or can be demonstrated, or that thought about God tries to arrive at a being to which nothing would be (sit) superior. Perhaps the difference is hairsplitting? If I am right that the modal structure of Anselm’s argument is decisive, nothing is more essential to it than the explicit, unmistakable reference to conceivability. And this we find in Boéthius, not quite in Augustine. But whether this passage of Boéthius actually influenced Anselm is, of course, another question.

Plato had long ago laid it down that to be, and to be knowable are the same (Rep. 476 E); and, in greater detail, that a thought cannot be a mere thought, but must be a thought of something, and of something real (ovros, Parm. 132 B). The neo-Platonists had worked out the conception of God in the metaphysical sense of the word—a being of whom we can say est id quod est, a unity of existence and

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essence, a perfect being (pulcherrimum fortissimumque) such that nihil deo melius excogitari queat (the phrases [except the last] are from Boéthius, De Trinitase). Anselm, putting these two thoughts together, the original Platonic principle that when we really think (but when do we really think, if ever?) we must be thinking of a real object, and the neo-Platonic idea of a perfect being (something which we cannot help conceiving in our minds; but does that guarantee it more than a mere idea?), or rather, pondering on the latter thought until he rediscovered the former as latent within it, realized that to think of this perfect being at all was already to think of him, or it, as existing.

. . . Anselm . . . was careful to explain that his argument apphcd not to thought in general, but only o the thought of one unique object . . . the slightest acquaintance with writers like Boéthius and Augustine is enough to show that he was deliberately referring to the absolute of neo-Platonic metaphysics; and in effect his argument amounts to this, that in the special case of metaphysical thinking the distinction between conceiving something and thinking it to exist is a distinction without a difference.

. . . Of all the legacy of medieval thought, no part was more firmly seized upon than the Ontological Proof by those who laid the foundations of modern thought . . . and it remained the foundation-stone of every successive philosophy until Kant, whose attempt to refute it—perhaps the only occasion on which anyone has rejected it who really understood what it meant—was rightly regarded by his successors as a symptom of that false subjectivism and consequent skepticism from which, in spite of heroic efforts, he never wholly freed himself.

. . . the Proof is not to be dismissed as a quibble . . . what it does prove is that essence involves existence, not always, but in one special case, the case of God in the metaphysical sense: the Dews ssve natura of Spinoza, the Good of Plato, the Being of Aristotle: the object of metaphysical thought. But this means the object of philosophical thought in general; for metaphysics, even if it is regarded as only one among the philosophical sciences, is not unique in its objective reference . . . all philosophical thought . . . partakes of the nature of meta

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physics, which is not a separate philosophical science but a special study of the existential aspect of that same subject-matter whose aspect as truth is studied by logic, and its aspect as goodness by ethics.

Reflection on the history of the Ontological Proof thus offers us a view of philosophy as a form of thought in which essence and existence . . . are conceived as inseparable . . . unlike mathematics or empirical science, philosophy stands committed to maintaining that its subjectmartter is no mere hypothesis, but something actually existing.⁴³

Let it be noted well that, even in this exceptionally sympathetic account, there is no distinct echo of the logic of Prosl. III, As a result the formulation, like so many others, is less cogent than Anselm’s own, when that is taken as he wrote it, without truncation or mutilation. After all, the questions are, why does this essence involve existence? And how do we know that it does? Anselm saw more deeply into these questions than most of those who came before or after him.

The assertion that Kant understood the Proof is of doubtful value in the absence of any evidence that Collingwood had in mind the actual course of the Proof in the ten essential Anselmian pages to which we have repeatedly referred.

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16. Hans Reichenbach

Here is our last example of a philosopher refuting an Anselm who never existed, an Anselm whose only wisdom was that existence is one of the predicates which a thing may be conceived to have. Anselm was a man who thought this, but he was not a man who had no other thoughts relevant to the Proof. And only that fictitiously unresourceful man is refuted in the following.

⁴³ Philosophical Method (Oxford, 1933), pp. 124-27.

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[Refuting Prosl. 11]

[Anselm’s] demonstration begins with the definition of God as an infinitely perfect Being; since such a being must have all essential properties, it must also have the property of existence. Therefore, so goes the conclusion, God exists. The premise, in fact, is analytic, because every definition is. Since the statement of God's existence is synthetic, the inference represents a trick by which a synthetic conclusion is derived from an analytic premise.

. . . If it is permissible to derive existence from a definition, we could demonstrate the existence of a cat with three tils by defining such an animal as a cat which has three tmils and which exists. Logically speaking, the fallacy consists in a confusion of universals with particulars. From the definition we can only infer the universal statement that if something is a cat with three tails it exists, which is a true statement. . . . Similarly, we can infer from Anselm’s definition only the statement that if something is an infinitely perfect being it exists, but not that there is such a being.48

Whether, or in what sense, ‘God exists’ is synthetic is of course the very question at issue. In Prosl. III it was shown that ‘Greatest Conceivable’ is not conceivable unless as necessarily existent; hence, since a statement which is conceivable but only as true is in the broad sense analytic, either ‘God exists’ is true and analytic, (true ex vs terminorum) or it is not conceivable, is not a genuine proposition. It certainly is not synthetic in any but a narrow and merely technical sense.

The reductio ad absurdum from the definition of an ‘existent three-tailed cat’ is invalid against the above argument; for a definition which includes existence in the a priori specifications of a thing makes sense only if the form of existence involved

48 The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), p. 39.

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is necessary existence. But then, since ‘necessarily-existing cat’, like ‘perfect island’, is an absurdity, the reductio is therefore invalid (since anything can be deduced from an absurd concept, taken not to be absurd).

Concerning particular and universal statements: ‘God exists’ is not ‘particular’ in the same sense as ‘cats exist’ is so. As we saw in Part One, ‘Greatness exists’ is, in a relevant sense, as nonparticular as ‘some individuals exist’, which Reichenbach in his logic allows to be an assumption of logic itself.

I think we can dismiss this refutation, along with so many others like it, as missing the mark.

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17. J. N. Findlay

The most important contribution since Kant to the Anselmian controversy, on its skeptical side, has in my judgment been made by this author.

The proofs [for God's existence] based on the necessities of thought are universally regarded as fallacious; it is not thought possible to build bridges between mere abstractions and concrete existence . . . Religious people have . . . come to acquiesce in the total absence of any cogent proofs of the Being they believe in; they even find it positively satisfying . . . And nonreligious people . . . don’t so much deny the existence of a God, as the existence of good reasons for believing in Him. We shall, however, maintain that there isn’t room, in the case we are examining, for all these attitudes of . . . doubt. For . . . the Divine Existence can only be conceived, in a religiously satisfactory manner, if we also conceive it as something inescapable and necessary, whether for thought or reality. From which it follows that our modern denial of necessity or rational evidence for such an existence amounts to a demonstration that there cannot be a God.

... We ask . . . whether it isn't wholly anomalous to worship anything lsmited in any thinkable manner. For all limited superior-

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ities are tainted with an obvious relativity, and can be dwarfed in thought by still mightier superiorities, in which process of being dwarfed they lose their claim upon our worshipful attitudes And hence we are led on irresistibly to demand that our religious object should have an unsurpassable supremacy along all avenues, that it should tower infinitely above all other objects. . . . We ask also that it shouldn’t stand surrounded by a world of alien objects, which owe it no allegiance, or set limits to its influence. The proper object of religious reverence must in some manner be all-comprehensive: there mustn’t be anything capable of existing, or displaying any virtue without owing all of these absolutely to this single source. . . . But we are led on to a yet more stringent demand: . . . we can’t help feeling that the worthy object of our worship can never be a thing that merely happens to exist, nor one on which all other objects merely happen to depend. The true object of religious reverence must not be one, merely, to which no actual independent realities stand opposed; it must be one to which such opposition is $mconcesvable. God mustn't merely cover the territory of the actual, but also, with equal comprehensiveness, the territory of the possible. And not only must the existence of other things be unthinkable without Him, but His own nonexistence must be wholly unthinkable in any circumstances. And so we are led on . . . to the barely intelligible notion of a Being in whom Essence and Existence lose their separateness.

It would be quite unsatisfactory from the religious standpoint, if an object merely happened to be wise, good, powerful, and so forth, even to a superlative degree, and if other beings had, as a mere matter of fact, derived their excellence from this single source. . . . Wisdom, kindness and other excellences deserve respect wherever they are manifested, but no being can appropriate them as its personal perquisites, even if it does possess them in a superlative degree. And so an adequate object of our worship must possess its various qualities in some necessary manner. These qualities must be intrinsically incapable of belonging to anything except in so far as they belong primarily to the object of our worship. Again we are led on to a queer and barely intelligible Scholastic doctrine, that God isn't merely good, but is in

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some manner indistinguishable from His own (and anything else’s) goodness.

What, however, are the consequences of these requirements . . .? Plainly (for all who share a contemporary outlook), they entail not only that there isn't a God, but that the Divine Existence is either senseless or impossible. . . . Those who believe in necessary truths which aren’t merely tautological, think that such truths merely connect the possible instances of various characteristics with each other; they don’t expect such truths to tell them whether there wsll be instances of any characteristics. This is the outcome of the whole medieval and Kantian criticism of the Ontological Proof. And, on a yet more modern view of the matter, necessity in propositions merely reflects our use of words, the arbitrary conventions of our langusge. On such a view the Divine Existence could only be a necessary matter if we had made up our minds to speak theistically whatever the empirical circumstances might turn out to be. . . . This wouldn't suffice for the fullblooded worshipper. . . . The religious frame of mind seems, in fact, to be in a quandary; it seems invincibly determined both to eat its cake and have it. It desires the Divine Existence both to have that inescapable character which can, on modern views, only be found where truth reflects an arbitrary convention, and also the character of ‘making a real difference’ which is only possible where truth doesn’t have this merely linguistic basis. We may accordingly deny that modern approaches allow us to remain agnostically poised in regard to God; they force us to come down on the atheistic side. . . . Modern views make it selfevidently absurd (if they don’t make it ungrammatical) to speak of such a Being and attribute existence to Him. It was indeed an ill day for Anselm when he hit upon his famous proof. For on that day he not only laid bare something that is of the essence of an adequate religious object, but also something that entails its necessary nonexistence.⁴⁴

This is the only refutation of Anselm known to me, at least of those published before 1958, which shows an awareness of

⁴⁴ “Can God's Existence be Disproved?,” Mind, 57 (1948). Reprinted in Findlay's Language, Mind, and Value. [See Bibliography for a relevant quotation from this book.]

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what Anselm’s Proof in its essential steps actually was. And it puts the matter in a different and clearer light than other refutations. Anselm declared that God could not exist contingently, from which by modal axioms it follows that He could not contingently fail to exist. What then? Obviously, either He could and does exist necessarily, or He necessarily fails to exist, i.e, His existence is logically impossible. Anselm, defended recently by Malcolm, rejects impossibility and infers necessary existence; Findlay rejects the logical possibility of necessary existence and infers the impossibility that God should exist at all. Most critics, so far as they have been at all clear about what they were doing, have by implication at least asserted either that God might contingently exist just as He might contingently fail to exist, or that He might contingently fail to exist even though, should He exist, it must be necessarily. The second alternative—here Anselm, Descartes (not quite so explicit on the point), Cudworth, Flint, Koyré, Malcolm, Findlay, and I agree—is modal nonsense. And the first— here again we agree—contradicts the meaning of ‘God’.

Findlay's ‘disproof’ then is: ‘if the idea of God is logically possible, the axiom of the nondeducibility or contingency of existence cannot be universally applicable; yet considering the manifest impossibility of deducing concrete actuality from mere universals, abstract concepts, or definitions, the axiom must be universally applicable. Not even divine actuality can be an exception’. This is a significant and serious paradox, like those of logic without some equivalent of type theory. It is a mistake to brush it aside as a mere sophistry, thereby refusing a chance to learn, as logicians have learned from their paradoxes. It is this brushing aside of serious difficulties which has partly vitiated nearly every contribution to this controversy.

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That the concrete cannot be deduced from the abstract is an unshakable truth. Findlay is right to say so, and Malcolm here seems simply to miss the point. Findlay is also right, however, with Anselm and many other great men, when he says that God is the necessary being—or nothing thinkable. He is wrong only in supposing that a deducible or necessary divine existence must be actual or concrete. And this is the solution of the paradox: God's existence is not itself an actuality and is as abstract as the concepts from which it is deduced. It is their irreducible content. Nor need ot can it ‘make a difference’ (except that our awareness of it makes a difference to us). It is the particular actuality of God which makes objective differences, and this is not what the Proof proves, but only that there is some such actuality, making some appropriate difference or other. Classical theism cannot admit this solution, which implies a real distinction in God between abstract existence and concrete actuality, the former necessary, the latter contingent. We have seen that this is just what neoclassical theism not only admits but gladly asserts.

The strength of Findlay's argument can be seen in this way. To refute the Anselmian contention of the incompatibility of perfection with contingency, one must maintain that God could conceivably exist contingently. Accordingly, skeptics who reject Findlay’s conclusion are obligated to explain how they conceive an existence as perfect and yet contingent, or how they explain away the appearance of imperfection or essential limitation in the notion of accidental existence. When have they seriously attempted this? They usually do not even see the problem. And when they do, they treat it casually indeed. But it is the heart of the matter, not a detail. Findlay sees this, and strikes a blow at the heart. He grants that an implication

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of the idea of God is noncontingency; but since the idea also implies concreteness, actuality, and this cannot be necessary, the idea has no consistently conceivable relation to existence. On the one hand, religious thought and feeling require a unique or absolute security and logical priority for the divine existence; on the other, logic apparently rules out any such thing; ergo it rules out religious belief.

Findlay thus shows us a new aspect of the Anselmian problem which the older refutations failed to make explicit; but he still does not freely explore the terrain. He also knows too well the conclusion he must reach about the whole matter. That the Proof might, while disposing of the old conclusion, point the way to a different but equally positive one, he did not (at the time he wrote the quoted passages) for a moment imagine. At least, however, he explored the terrain in one rather new direction.

Certainly a theist must be prepared to ‘speak theistically’ no matter what the empirical facts. For he sees the meaning even of ‘possible fact’ in theistic terms; how then can it matter, for the mere question of theism as such, which possibilities are actualized? But a theist need not and will not speak about the concrete divine actuality regardless of the facts. ‘God knows I am innocent’ is inappropriate if in fact I am guilty. But be I innocent or guilty, God exists, and knows me as I am, if in fact I exist at all. And if I do not, then He exists knowing that situation as it is. It drives one almost to despair sometimes that such plain distinctions should be thought esoteric or irrelevant.

The most impressive aspect of Findlay’s reasoning is not his reliance on ‘modern’ views—which is at best rather questionbegging. It is rather his point, at the outset, about the ab-

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stract and the concrete, or—as one may also say—the logically weak and the logically strong. From the former there cannot be a deductive bridge to the latter. This is not modern, it is timeless good sense. But the question remains: is ‘somehow actualized’ any less abstract than ‘perhaps unactualized’? On the assumption that there is a conceivable status of ‘unactualized Greatness’ and another conceivable status of ‘actualized Greatness’, then the assertion of the latter must be less abstract, and logically stronger. But this double conceivability in relation to actualization is just what Anselm and Findlay— wiser than he knows—deny. Naturally, one must admit the double conceivability in ordinary contingent cases; the contrast of God with these conceivably nonexistent natures not only harmonizes with their admission but requires it. The admission of ordinary things as conceivably nonexistent (and therefore not divine) is the same point, put from the other end.

Beyond the abstract-concrete paradox, overcome in neoclassical doctrine, what is left of Findlay’s ‘atheistic’ argument (really ‘positivistic’, in the categorical or dogmatic sense, as I have been using terms) ? Does not what was well designed as an attack on traditional theism become a valuable instrument of defence for a less conventional form of religious thought?

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18. Robert S. Hartman

Apparently inspired partly or chiefly by Barth’s fine work, an exciting and imaginative essay on Anselm’s argument has recently appeared. It is not wholly clear what its author would do with the Findlay paradox, yet there is some evidence that he may be aware of it. (The promised sequel to the essay should clarify the question.) This article is another of the

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recent studies which seem to show that to read Anselm carefully is to see that the standard criticisms are far from adequate, and that we are by no means finished with the most famous— and most misunderstood—of all philosophical arguments.

Hartman tries to save Prosl. II by arguing that the existent is richer in properties than the merely possible; hence the ‘richest possible’ thing must be conceived as existent. One can still object that ‘richest conceivable’ thing means, that which would, if it existed, be richest; how then can the Argument get under way? For if the thing existed, it would also have the richness accruing from existence; while if it did not, there would be no ‘it’ characterized by the greatest richness, and hence no question of ‘its’ having a character incompatible with that— hence no contradiction. Only inconceivability-of-nonexistence, as a property, can rule out this escape.

Our author’s suggestion is also open to the grave objection that an ‘absolute maximum of richness’ is doubtfully consistent, as we have seen earlier.

Hartman’s contention that the Proof is ‘not analytic’ should be taken in conjunction with his comparison of it with mathematics. The synthetic element is in the application of a pure logical form to an intuitive datum, in this case religious faith. But (a) nothing is taken from faith except the ‘name’ of God which specifies what the question about His existence is to mean. So the Proof is an analysis of the meaning of ‘God’ for faith, and in this sense is analytic. Furthermore, (b) since the existence of God is, according to faith, the very principle of all actual or possible existence, and truth about it is Truth itself, this existence is no factual matter, in the proper sense of fact, nor, therefore, is its afirmation synthetic in the most usual sense. The Proof shows that the sole way to render faith con-

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sistent is to take it as mecessarsly true. This truth is then analytic in the broad sense that its falsity is either nonsense or contradiction.

Hartman's point of view may be in accord with this. But to be wholly clear as to his meanings one must be acquainted with his own original theory of axiological axiomatics, a doctrine whose careful evaluation belongs to the future.

Proslogion 2-4 consists of four pages . . . All the books and essays written about them . . . would fill libraries . . . What is it in these four pages, that makes them so potent a challenge to the best minds of humanicy? . ..

I suggest that we have in these pages the first and so far the last—that is, the only—example in the history of thought of an entirely new philosophical method, which is the exact opposite of what has usually, both before and after Kant, been regarded as this method. It is neither categorical nor analytic, but axiomatic and synthetic. It is the method of mathematics itself, . . . the most effective cognitional method, that of science, applied to the most sublime subject. ...

The reason that the proof has been so puzling and challenging is that Anselm’s argument presupposes a whole new system of thought of which the argument itself is only a part—Ilike a promontory of a vast hinterland shrouded in fog. The passion aroused by the argument is that of exploring the known unknown—the passion of discovery, which is aroused by the expectation of finding unheard-of treasures in a realm which is known to be there but whose nature is unknown.

. . . A featureless existence is the exigentia of an essence: it is a Problem. The most powerful method of problem solving is the scientific, in particular, the axiomatic method, which posits a formula originating a system of thought applicable to the reality in question. The most famous example of this procedure is Newton, whose gravitational formula originated a system applicable to the whole universe. So Anselm, according to his own account, found a formula applicable to divine reality. The result was for him a matter of

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rejoicing, delectatio—the same kind of joy a scientist feels on breaking through to the properties—the definition—of what he knew was there but did not know what it was.

Behind the Anselmian proof there is hidden an axiomatic system of which the proof itself is a small part . . . in such a system Anselm’s axiom—the name of God: ‘that than which nothing greater can be thought'—would appear not as axiom but as . . . theorem of a system. This system—the meta-Anselmian axiomatic—would have its own axiom, from which the Anselmian name of God would be deduced as a theorem; and the whole proof would become an integral part of the system itself....

. . . Barth makes it clear that the proof is not an analytic but a synthetic or axiomatic one. Anselm posits synthetically the name of God, as a formula, and deduces the proof from it . . . modo geometrico. The proof thus is purely formal: the name, the significance, proves itself. Where the name of God has been announced, heard, and understood, God exists in the cognition of the hearer—but . . . a God who only existed in cognition would be in an intolerable contradiction to His own revealed and believed name; He would have the name of God but would not be what the name says . . . The proof is really a reductio ad absurdum.

Vere ess means God is not only in thought but also over agasnss thought But God does not exist for thought as does any object created by Him: . . . Prosl. 3 . . . proves that God stands over against thinking in the unique manner in which the creator stands over against the thinking of the created creature.

The premise for Anselm is a word . . . but a word of God in the context of His revelation . .. From this . . . it is true, one cannot deduce

His existence; but one can deduce the impossibility of His nonexistence. The proof does not satisfy Gaunilo because, positivist that he is, he seems to want a proof of God based on some sense experience; and such a proof has nothing to do with the Anselmian insellectus fides and would be incompatible with Anselm'’s concept of God.

. .. the third chapter of Proslogion adds a higher stage to the masus and msnus of the second chapter. . .. A being whose existence is independent of the dialectic of cognition and object is maius and belongs to

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a higher stage of being than a being which, no matter how truly it exists, how vere est, is subject to this dialectic; that is, whose existence can hypothetically be denied by the same thinking which may also affirm it The former is an absolute being beyond the opposition of the subjective and objective. It not only exists in truth but it exists ar truth; it is the truth of existence itself. . . .⁴⁵

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19. Jan Berg

Among the few careful attempts to apply the techniques of modern logic to Anselm's text is the one we are now to consider.*® The following symbols are used:

*3x (—x—)"’ ‘there is an x such that —x—’

‘1x(—x—)’ ‘the unique x such that—x—"’

‘G’ abbreviates ‘nihil maius cogitari possit’. Thus ‘G(x)’ means that ‘nothing greater than x can be conceived’.

'~' ‘it is false that’ After several attempts to formulate Anselm’s reasoning in Prosl. 11, attempts which are found to assume what is to be proved (the divine existence), the following formula is said to avoid this assumption:

‘~3y(y =1x(G(x)))>(~G) (x(G (x)))’ This formula says: ‘If there is not a y identical with the unique x such that none greater can be conceived, then the unique x than which none greater can be conceived has the property of being not such that none greater can be conceived’. To avoid the contradiction in the consequent one must deny the antecedent in the initial formula, by asserting:

45 "Prolegomens to a Meta-Anselmian Axiomatic,” Review of Metaphysics 14 (1961), 638, 640, 666f.

46"An Examination of the Ontological Proof,” Theoris 27 (1961), 99106.

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‘3y (y=1x (G) )’ ‘There is a y identical with the unique x such that none greater can be conceived (God exists)’.

Though formally valid, the argument throws no light upon the justification of the initial premise. This is not a logical truism, but depends entirely upon an assumed peculiarity of the predicate G from which it is to follow that its failure to be instantiated in a unique individual would be contradictory. Here Berg has nothing to offer unless it be the Prosl. Il notion that the existent is superior to the nonexistent. The difficulties with this principle are notorious and, as we have seen, are not obviated by rejecting, as Berg does, the dictum ‘existence cannot be a predicate’. (See above, Sec. 10.)

Berg does not himself afirm the correctness of the formula, nor (I think) is he convinced of its correctness. This is not surprising since he makes no use of the modal principle that the necessarily existent is superior to the contingently existent. His formalization is in extensional, not modal, logic. And he thinks Malcolm’s (and my) distinction between the simple and the modal form of the Proof ‘mistaken’. But only the modal form gives a clear reason for imputing a contradiction to the hypothesis of noninstantiation.

If the modal argument is nos distinct, then what is one to make of the assertion in Prosl. III that to be necessarily existent is to be superior to what is contingent? If this principle is valid, why can it not be used as premise for a proof? Will Berg argue that the validity of the principle cannot be knowa unless it is known that something does exist necessarily? But, as Anselm implies, one needs to assume only the conceivability of necessary existence and to have an insight into the superiority of the status so conceived. For, granting these two points, it follows that to apply the property G to a contingently existing

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thing would be contradictory; furthermore, to assert that a property is not instantiated is to imply that its noninstantiation is conceivable, and hence that any possible instance of it would be something existing contingently. Will Berg say that there is no reason to regard necessary existence as superior? But anyone who holds that is so remote from Anselm’s point of view that he might do better than try to construe his text.

Nevertheless it is good that the attempt has been made to express Anselm in nonmodal yet formal terms and that a way has been found to construct in these terms a valid Anselmian argument, valid save (no trifling qualification) for the blindness of its initial premise.

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20. Jerome Shaffer

One of the many recent attempts to improve upon traditional criticisms of the Argument discards the contention that the Argument is invalid simply because existence is not a predicate. We can, if we wish, make it a predicate in a certain case by definition. But then, it is urged, there still remains the question, does anything correspond to the definition?

Until further arguments are offered, it seems reasonable to hold that there is nothing logically imptoper in so defining the expression, ‘God’, that *God exists’ is a tautology and *God does not exist’ selfcontradictory. In fact it seems to me that the definition I have given expresses a concept of God (i.e., as necessarily existing) which many people actually accept (just as it is a common conception of Satan that he merely happens to exist). I wish . . . to show that this concept of God can give no support to the religious. I shall argue that no matter what its content, this concept of God is still simply a concept. What must be shown, and what cannot be shown just by an analysis of the concepr, is that there actually exists something which answers to the concept. Even if

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we have here the concept of an object which necessarily exists, a further question remains whether any existent meets the specifications of the concept. The difficulty lies in showing that this further question makes sense, for I have admitted that ‘God exists® is a necessary statement, analytically true, and therefore it looks as if there could be no further question. But that is an illusion. It must however be dispelled.

As a first step, I wish to point out that the concept of God is hardly unique in its capacity to generate a tautological existential statement. . . . Suppose we introduce the word, ‘particular’ to mean ‘object which exists’, and the word ‘nonentity’ to mean ‘object which does not

exist’. Then . .. we might say tautologically, *Particulars exist and nonentities do not exist’. . . The following sentences all have tautological

uses: ‘Existences exist’, ‘Fictitious objects do not exist’, ‘Members of extinct species existed once but no longer exist’ . . . these sentences . . . may be used tautologically in those circumstances in which we wish to include as a necessary feature, as a defining element, notions of existence or nonexistence.

. . Take the tautology, ‘Fictitious objects do not exist’. One mighe think that this means the same as *There are no fictitious objects’. But . . . this is incorrect, for although the former is true the latter is false. There are fictitious objects, many of them—aAlice’s looking glass, Jack’s bean stalk . . . to mention only a few. In general, given a tautology of the form, ‘A’s exist’, we cannot deduce from it, *There are A's’, nor from a tautology of the form, *A’s do not exist’ can we deduce 'There are no A's’. And specifically, given the tautology, ‘God exists’, we cannot deduce from it, 'There is a God’. The statement, ‘God necessarily

exists, but there is no God’, is not self-contradictory.

As it stands the situation is most paradoxical. . . .

It is tempting to try to resolve the paradox in accordance with Aristotle’s principle that ‘there are several senses in which e thing may be said to be’. Then to say that fictitious objects do not exist would be to say that fictitious objects lacked, say, spatio-temparal existence, whereas to say that there are fictitious objects would be to say that they had some other kind of existence—hence no contradiction. . . . But appea]s to the systematic ambiguity of ‘exists’ will not work in all cases. . . . For example, it will be tautologically true that

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particulars exist in precisely the sense of ‘exist’, say, temporal existence, that it might be true that there are no particulars.

A more promising line of argument consists in showing that a tautological existential claim is quite different from a non-tautological existential claim. How are we to explain the difference? Suppose we say that a tautological existential assertion consists in attributing to the subject a special property, the property of necessary existence. We could explain this property by saying, ¢ ls Malcolm, that a being which has this property is such that it is senseless to speak of its non-existence or of its coming into existence or going out of existence or of the existence of anything else as a condition of its existence (pp. 44-59). Now this account will not do. First, the attempt to explain the necessity of the statement by postulating a special property commits us to an infinite regress of propetties, for presumably this special property might not be one which a being just happens to have but one which it necessarily has and which it is senseless to speak of its not havmg, and thus by similar reasoning we are led to necessary necessary-existence, etc. And it is most unclear what these properties could be or how we could distinguish them. But secondly, it is not clear what this property of necessary existence, is, if this is any more than a way of saying that the existential proposition is necessary. Am I making anything clearer when I say that squares, which are necessarily four-sided, have the special property of necessary four-sidedness? A defining property is not a special kind of property. So the tautological character of the existential assertions I have been discussing cannot be explained by postulating a special predicate, necessary existence. Their tautological character arises from nothing but the definition we have stipulated for the subject term. . . .

What lies at the heart of the puzzle about the Ontological Argument is the fact that our concepts have two quite different aspects, marked by the familiar philosophical distinction of intension and extension ... In making assertions about the extension of a concept there are typical forms of expression which we use: * . .. exist’, ‘There are no ... ' '... are scarce’, . . . etc. That such expressions are typically used in assertions about the extension (or lack thereof) of particular concepts is what is correctly brought out in the slogan, * ‘exists’ is not a pred-

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icate.” But the typical use is not the only use. Since any statement, with suitable definitions, can be true by virtue of the meanings of the terms, sentences with existential expressions can be used to express tutological statements. . . . ‘Particulars exist’, when asserted tautologically, is used to make a claim about the meaning of the word, ‘particulars’, and therefore cannot be used to make a claim about the extension of the term. Similarly, if someone uses the sentence, ‘God exists’, tautologically, he tells us only that being an existent is a logical requirement for being God. If, on the other hand, someone asserts, ‘God exists’ nontautologically, then he claims that the term, ‘God’, has extension, applies to some existent. . . . The prima facie plausibility of the Argument comes from the use of a sentence intensionally when the typical use of that sentence is extensional. In this way it conceals the illicit move from an intensional to an extensional statement.

. . . Even when we have an existential tautology like ‘Particulars exist’, or ‘God exises’, it still remains an open question whether the concept of particulars or the concept of God has application, applies to any existent. What is settled at one level is not settled at another. It is important to see that we can go on to settle the question at the other level, too, for we can make it a priors true that the concept has application. For example, let the expression, ‘the concept of God’, mean, ‘a concept which has application and applies to a being such that . . .. Then by definition the concept of God has application; the statement, *The concept of God has application’, is now a tautology, given the definition. But nothing is gained by such a maneuver. ... We have framed a concept, namely the concept of the concept of God, and this concept makes certain statements tautologically true. Yet we can still raise the extensional question, Does this concept refer to any existent? At this level the extensional question would be whether there actually is a concept of God such that this concept has extension, and there is such a concept only if actually there is a God . . . Nothing has been settled except the meaning of a certain expression. . ..

A ... toublesome threat to the intension-extension distinction arises when we try to apply the distinction to certain concepts . . . suppose we ask whether the concept of a number has extension . . .

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What makes this case puzzling is that we have no ides what would count as establishing that the concept of a number has extension or that it does not have extension . . . Nothing would count as showing that the concept of numbers had extension over and above its intensional content, and this is to say that numbers are intensional objects.

The same thing must be said for the existence of God. The most that the Ontological Argument establishes is the intensional object, God, even if this intensional object has the attribute of existence as an intensional feature. To establish that the concept of God has extension requires adducing some additional arguments to show that over and above its intensional features, over and above the content of the concept (or the meaning of the word, ‘God’), the concept of God has extension as well. This additional argument will of necessity have to be an a posteriori argument to the effect that some actual existent answers to the concept. We are thus led to the result that the Onrological Argument of itself alone cannot show the existence of God, in the sense in which the concept is shown to have extension. And this is just as the religious wish it to be. They do not conceive of God as something whose being expresses itself entirely in the concepts and propositions of a language game. They conceive of Him as something which has effects on the world and can in some way be experienced. Here is a crucial respect in which His status is meant to be different from that of numbers. The concept of God is a concept which msght have extension. But some further argument is required to show whether it does or not.⁴⁷

Let us begin with the fifth and fourth sentences from the end of this clever argumentation. As we have reiterated, there is no necessity to identify the full actuality of God with His bare existence and good reason not to make this identification. God can have particular effects on the world without His mere existence being the entire cause of these effects. Existing neces-

47 Existence, Predication, and the Ontological Argument,” Mind, 71 (1962), esp. pp. 318-325.

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sarily, He can also make contingent ‘decrees’ (and He must make some such decrees or other). It is these free decrees which furnish the concrete reality of deity with which religion is trying, in the feeble way open to man, to deal. So we can reject Shaffer’s attempt to show that the God proved by the Argument is merely intentional or abstract and not the God of religion. It is the God of religion, but only in His most abstract, necessary aspect, which is presupposed by all more concrete and contingent aspects. The necessity is that the class of the latter aspects be nonempty.

A concept can have extension only if it has intension. But there are three sorts of concepts, those whose intension is neutral with respect to whether or not the concept has extension, those which forbid such extension (e.g., ‘absolutely isolated part of the universe’), and those which requsre some extension or other, on pain of falling into mere absurdity. Suppose the class of ‘existents’ were empty. The supposition has no clear meaning. No one could possibly know such a ‘state of affairs’, and it would not in any intelligible sense be a state of affairs. The reason is not in any mere stipulation. The word ‘existent’ might have been used for something other than the widest class which must have members, but then either another word would be used for this class, or language would be left, insofar, incomplete. Our author seems simply to assume that there can be no such necessarily nonempty class. But that is part of what is at issue in an ontological argument. And he fails to remind us that many logicians think it a requirement of logic itself that the widest class of entities should be nonempty.

Specifically, the Argument, neoclassically interpreted, shows that the class ‘divine states, genidentical with one another’, is

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necessarily nonempty, and is indeed inseparable from the class of ‘existents’, since it is essential to any existent to be in relation to divine existence. This universality of relationship between divine existence and all else is implicit in any religiously acceptable definition of God. Hence, so is the impossibility of His nonexistence.

The crucial passage in Shaffer’s argumentation is that in which he rejects—while pretending or appearing to accept it— the idea of necessary existence as definitive of deity. To suppose that the divine freedom from existential contingency can only be a property of our statements, arising from stipulations, is to deny the very possibility of God'’s existence. There is then nothing for an a posteriori proof, or search among facts, to furnish. Only an objective immunity to existential contingency is compatible with what religion means by God (and philosophy ought to mean). Our human contingency, which shows us not to be divine, is likewise no mere matter of propositions and languages; it is rather the real potentiality of the world for doing without us, or for making our existence impossible. The very notion of a corresponding anti-God potentiality is contradictory. (There could of course be an anti-demon potentiality! ) It is clear that the author has only a hazy notion of all this, or of why religion, as he mentions, takes Satan as (at most) something that happens to exist, but God as existing necessarily. When he says, “The question remains, does there actually exist something which answers to the concept of the necessarily existent,” he either means, ‘does there happen to exist such a something’, and then he is talking contradictorily; or he means, ‘is there necessarily such a something?’ But in the latter case the question answers itself. Anything which could be necessary is necessary, by the reduction principle

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of modal logic. Of course, Professor Shaffer can reject this principle. But then #has, and not what he says in this article, is his ground for the rejection of the Argument. And the principle is reasonable.

Three objections to the idea of objective necessity are offered. One is an argument from regress, the necessity of the necessary property, etc. However, the necessity of a necessity, by the reduction principle, is simply the necessity itself, and so is the possibility of the necessity. Similarly, ‘it is true that it is true’ only says, ‘it is true’. As for the contingency of the necessity, the denial of which starts the regress, it is nonsense and needs no denial. The regress seems spurious.

One could, I think, as cogently accuse Shaffer of having a regress on his hands. God ‘exists necessarily’ only means, he says, that we define Him as existing. But then this description of God is either optional or necessary. He will reply, I take it, that it can only be necessary upon some condition or other, such as that one takes the religious tradition seriously at this point. But is the tradition necessary or contingent? Could there be a religion without it, or a rational being without religion? On certain conditions, perhaps there could. But these conditions are either ultimate or they have conditions. In the latter case we have a regress. And in any case, the statement, ‘No being exists necessarily’, is not made true or false by any mere definition, nor yet by any mere fact. A fact or contingent truth cannot be precondition of an unconditional necessity. (Any being can be conditionally necessary; for instance, all past events are necessary for the present’s being as it is.) I say the statement is necessarily false, and any language in which the corresponding necessary truth cannot be expressed is defective.

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Clearly, religion has never meant by the divine necessity that we define God to exist. It has meant that to the divine existence there is no truly conceivable alternative, that God owes his existence to nothing, certainly not to a lucky accident, any more than to a rational cause, or to our ways of talking. His existence is taken to be the presuppositon of any meaning, any value, any existence or nonexistence whatsoever. To allow this requirement to be logically permissible, and then ask, but in fact, is there a being fulfilling the requirement? is to contradict the requirement one has accepted; it is to subject God existentially to contingency, either to causeless chance or to a cause beyond Himself. It is to grant that if God exists He exists either by mere chance, or as caused. But so He could not exist!

Shaffer’s second objection is that it is unclear wherein the objective necessity lies. We have shown that this challenge can be met. It lies in the divine perfection, which involves an absolute correlation between possible and possible-for-God, between ‘reality’ and ‘divinely-known-reality’. Omniscience, universal creativity, self-sufficiency of existence, all the divine attributes, are inseparable from the status of God as pervasive of reality, actual and possible, hence not, in His bare existence, the actualization of this or that particular possibility. The necessary is the universal element in the possible. That element is the functioning of God, not any particular divine functioning, but divine functioning as such.

The third objection is an analogy offered as a reductio ad absurdum. Squares are necessarily four-sided, yet it does not help to say that they have the property of necessary four-sidedness. But why is this locution not helpful? One reason is that ‘contingent four-sidedness’ is not a common expression, whereas ‘con-

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tingent existence’ certainly is (in traditional metaphysics). It is therefore helpful to make the point that no such existence can apply to God, though it does apply to all other individuals. Nor is ‘contingent four-sidedness’ an inevitably foolish expression, for ‘houses’ are only contingently four-sided, since they can be five-sided, six-sided, or circular. By the same token, squares cannot have contingent but only necessary four-sidedness. That this is ucterly trivial is because ‘square’ means by definition having four equal sides. But suppose we say instead that foursided figures necessarily have four angles, or four-angled figures have four sides. This is a truth independent of names and definitions. For whether or no we have a name for the figure between triangle and pentagon in the series of polygoans, the possibility of such a thing and hence of such a name is a necessary truth. And also necessary, regardless of names, is the relation between number of angles and number of sides. Just so the relation between ‘divinity’ and ‘necessary existence’ is not created by names or formulae. Worship implies such a relation, and worship is not a ‘language game’. And here the hypothetical element in the necessity that four-angled figures be four-sided (#f anything is the one it is the other) drops out. For necessary existence means, there mus# be something of the specified kind. To insist that every idea be capable of fitting the hypothetical mold is nothing but the positivistic assumption posing as harmless truism. ‘God’ is not an hypothesis which facts may or may not support but a theory of what it means to be a fact— i.e., to have a certain relation to omniscience. If this view is wrong, it is not merely factually but logically wrong. For it purports to explicate ‘fact’ as such, and to do this without conflicting with the ordinary meaning of the word. If it fails, the result is confusion, not just factual error. Assertions of

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existential necessity cannot be factual errors, but only logical ones. Theism is confusion unless it is an assertion of necessity. According to positivism it is confusion whether or not it is such an assertion. But this, Anselm showed, is the issue, and not any question of mere fact.

Shaffer admits that one can put ‘has application’ into the ‘concept of the concept’ of God. But then, he says, the extensional question becomes, is there such a concept of God? And, he holds, we cannot know this without knowing that there is a God. I reply, there is no concept of the religious object, appropriate to the idea of worship taken with any strictness, which does not imply noncontingency. A concept of the concept of ‘God’ which denies this aspect is a misuse of words. So we come back to the disjunction: either there is a coherent concept of the religious object—and then the divine existence is a closed question—or there is no coherent concept of God, and then positivism, rather than atheism or theism, is correct. Our author has not shown that atheism is self-consistent. The insufficiency of the Argument (by itself alone) of which he speaks is only that it fails to refute positivism. It does, however, refute atheism. That is quite enough to make it a very important discovery. Moreover, in refuting atheism it refutes empiricism. The most burning question of philosophy, it shows, is to be settled, not by observation of facts, but by examination of ideas, meanings.

The remark ‘a defining property is not a special kind of property’ is reasonable, but irrelevant. For the necessary existence of God does not consist merely in His being defined to exist, but in His being defined, and as the One worshiped correctly defined, to exist in the unique manner of noncontingency. That this is a special way of existing the author seems at times to admit and then roundly to deny. But in denying it he is

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either asserting positivism, or else failing to understand the religious idea; while in admitting it he is refuting his own argumentation.

The absurdity of the reasoning appears espedially clearly if we consider such cases of ‘defining things to exist’ as the following, ‘existing dodos’, ‘existing dragons’, and the like. Here there is no serious paradox. A dodo or dragon would exist, if at all, contingently, and hence there cannot be any logical impossibility in the nonexistence of dodos or dragons. To use a definition to make it appear otherwise is so flagrant a misuse of the defining process as to need no special further analysis. It is just the question at issue whether the religious idea is or is not the idea of a thing which would or could exist contingently. Anselm showed that it is not. Most of this author’s discussion is a series of red herrings distracting his and his reader’s attention from this central issue. His most relevant remarks are attempts to prove that all existence must, objectively regarded, be contingent. But on that assumption what Anselm showed must have been, as Findlay rightly points out, the impossibility, not the necessity, of the divine reality.

I conclude that the remarkable ingenuity of this author does not save him from missing—or not clearly seeing—the modal structure of the Anselmian discovery.

[Return to Part Two Contents]

21. Heinrich Scholz and Frederic Fisch

Our last two examples are distinguished formal logicians.

I sometimes think that Heinrich Scholz was the noblest human being that I have ever known (I met him in 1949), a theologian who turned from theological studies to formal logic because—and this is characteristic of the man—he thought

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that there was no other equally honest and effective way to further the clarification of theological questions. With Whitehead he is for me the most high-minded and inspiring rationalist of our century. With angelic steadiness he stuck to his ‘Platonic ideal’, as he called it, all through the Nazi period in Germany. Had he not been forced to live almost entirely without a stomach (literally) he might have accomplished far more than this disability, not to mention the spiritual and finally material disorder in his country, permitted him to do.

If any man in Germany was equipped to deal objectively and accurately with the logical structure of Anselm’s reasoning, it should have been Scholz. In one of his lectures, written in 1950-51, he does deal with the topic from the standpoint of ‘logistic logic’,⁴⁸ And what happens? He falls completely into the trap set for him by Anselm’s blunder in Prosl. II, and Gaunilo’s (and most modern writers’) failure to see beyond this blunder. We are expressly told that only Prosl. II is being considered! So we are prepared for all but a few minor details in the result. I shall not reproduce his formulation of the argument, as it simply duplicates Anselm’s first or nonmodal one. With great precision Scholz then shows how, in terms of modern exact logic, existence cannot without begging the question be taken as a predicate of an individual subject; for without existence there is no subject for the predicate to inhere in. Anselm confused himself here by talking about things existing in the mind, even if not in any further sense, and this, as Scholz argues, will not do, for an ‘individual’, x, ‘merely in the mind’, is not strictly individual

48 Mashesis Universalis: Abbandlungen zur Philosopbie als, sirenger Wissenschaft (Benno Schwabe & Co., Basel, Stuttgart, 1961), pp. 62-74.

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at all, but only a property or class seeking instantiation or members. With this I entirely agree. But the modal argument does not attempt to compare two individuals, one existing, the other not. It compares two hypotheses about the existential status of ‘unsurpassable individual’, and finds one contradictory: the hypothesis, ‘there is an unsurpassable individual which exists contingently’, and the hypothesis, ‘there is an unsurpassable individual which exists necessarily’. Neither hypothesis needs to be taken initially as asserted. For the point is that the first hypothesis is necessarily false, impossible, if the second is even capable of being true. To exist contingently is to be inferior to anything existing necessarily, so that if the latter is possible, the descriptive phrase ‘unsurpassable’ is in the former case used contradictorily. And if ‘necessarily existing’ is not possible, then ‘unsurpassable’ has no definite and coherent meaning. For only that which grounds all possibility, including its own, and the nonexistence of which therefore cannot be a possibility, can be strictly unsurpassable. Hence either the necessary existence or the impossibility, but not the mere nonexistence, of unsurpassability is permissibly assertible. Scholz does, as one might expect, refute, on Anselm’s behalf, the relevance of the perfect-island analogy, on the rather obvious ground that no finite thing such as an island can be the greatest conceivable, so that, whether or not there is a logically admissible idea of greatest conceivable being, there can be none of greatest conceivable island. It is hard to forgive the multitudes who have not allowed their preconvinced minds to hit upon this reply to Gaunilo’s suggestion.

Scholz also explains how Bolzmann and Frege had treated existence as a predicate, but a predicate of a property, the predicate of being nonempty or of having an instance. On this basis

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also the Prosl. II argument will not work. (For we do not compare properties and argue that the better properties are the instantiated ones. In that case, in the words of the proverb, “wishes would be horses and beggars might ride.”) Yet here we must be careful. For as we saw in Part One, Sec. 18, it is inherent in almost all theistic traditions, and Scholz as former theologian must have known this, that God does not have but és His goodness or supreme worth. In other words, the property-individual distinction, symbolized, say by ‘Px’, does not in God have the same structure as in other cases. And this is the very point Anselm had discovered, in a special aspect.

Let us look into this. Some properties are instantiated, but contingently so; others are, equally contingently, uninstantiated. All ordinary properties (those of various kinds of surpassable beings) are contingent in this sense, whether or not they be instantiated. It follows that any instance of ordinary predicates exists contingently; for if its whole species or class might not have existed at all, certainly it might not have done so. But there are predicates which could not be contingently instantiated, since they are logically absurd, like ‘round and square in the same respect’. Anselm’s claim is that ‘unsurpassability’ is a third sort of predicate, which is neither contingent nor impossible, but is necessarily instantiated. Its existence alone is possible. What has Scholz against this? He does not even put the question, naturally enough, since he is considering only Prosl. II If ordinary predicates connote contingency, and if this ordinariness, i.e., this surpassability, is the very reason for the contingency, then by the converse of the same reason, unsurpassability connotes noncontingency. Moreover, that the imperfection of nondivine things, their noneternity, compositeness, dependence, lack of self-sufficiency, is the very reason for their

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contingency is plausibly argued in various ways and in various places by Anselm, and by many before him, including Aristotle. But it clearly follows that even the hypothetical negation of imperfection will imply the negation of contingency. Moreover, the second negation cannot be hypothetical only. For modal status as such is necessary.

It is important to note that existence is no proper or intrinsic predicate of ordinary predicates. That two-handedness exists in my hands is not a part of what is meant by ‘two-handed’. For two and hand might have been two and hand, just as they are, though I had been born one-handed, or not born at all. It is really I, as individual, who exist as instantiating two-handedness. G. E. Moore is wholly unrefuted in his contention that, ‘this thing exists, and might not have’ makes entire good sense. However, since there is no a priori or purely conceptual definition of ‘this thing’, or of me as an individual, this kind of existence as a predicate cannot be deduced a priori, but only found empirically. *“This thing exists’, or ‘I exist’, is in a sense tautological; and yet it is contingent, for neither ‘this thing’ nor ‘I’ might have been possible with this meaning. What is a proper predicate of predicates (this too Aristotle had seen) is their modal status. Wholly limited, dependent, composite, generated beings must also be capable of failing or of having failed to exist; but by exactly the same principle, the Unsurpassable must be incapable of failing or having failed to exist. And here there is no real distinction between Unsurpassable and the Unsurpassable individual; Unsurpassability is its own ‘principle of individuation’. We will return to this point presently.

Not a suspicion of the foregoing is in Scholz’s essay. I add that, so far as I know, no philosopher in Germany since Kant

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(except Anselm’s monographer Hasse) has gone back to Anselm and discovered there the modal, or proper ontological, argument, and dealt carefully with its logic. Instead, all have relied upon Gaunilo, Kant, Hegel, or the nonmodal versions of Anselm, Descartes, or Thomas Aquinas, to inform them in the matter. In this case ‘German thoroughness’ quite failed to operate. More's the pity.

Scholz’s oversight is especially remarkable in that he refers to Barth, who was not guilty of it. My explanation is that, since Barth (as Scholz notes) rejected the Argument as a philosophical one, insisting it is purely theological, and since Scholz was interested in the philosophical question, he did not bother to read Barth in detail. But this is a guess.

Scholz believed in truths applicable to all possible worlds. He called these truths metaphysical, and he expected logistic to help in their elucidation. I wish I could have put the following to him.

First, logic can admit the notion of existential necessity, at least in the form, (x) fx—(Ex) fx; properties universally instantiated cannot be uninstantiated, or in other words, logic cannot deal with a simply empty universe. The widest class cannot be empty. The case for this contention, which Scholz himself accepts, seems to me conclusively made by two recent authors, Jonathan Cohen and William Kneale.⁴⁹

Second, necessary nonemptiness or instantiatedness is all that we need for necessary existence, even in the divine form_ True enough, if ‘instances’ are thought of as ‘individuals’, the ordinary meaning, then there is trouble in taking any such

49 Jonathan Cohen, The Diversity of Meanings (London, 1962), pp. 255264; Wm. and Martha Kneale, The Developmens of Logic (Oxford, 1962), pp. 706f.

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instance as necessary. (Scholz wonders how one could know a priori that just one greatest individual, God, instantiates divinity as defined.) It is indeed essential to the distinction of type between property and instance that the latter be a contingent illustration. But, as we have seen (Scholz probably did not see it, such was his respect for the theological and metaphysical tradition, which at the same time he did not attempt to defend, since he did not know how to do so with modern instruments of analysis), it is logically possible to distinguish between divinity and its contingent instances, and yet to exclude polytheism, even as possibility, and affirm the necessary existence of a unique divine individual. The key is a doctrine held by Scholz himself, the doctrine that the most concrete particular entities are not enduring individuals but momentary events or states.⁵⁰ The existence of an individual is the actuality of a certain sort of event-sequence. The sequence can be defined without specifying all the particular events, for we identify a person without committing ourselves to all his adventures past and future. Now this schema can be applied to deity, and I hold must be applied if antinomies are to be avoided. The property of divinity, defined in the neoclassical version of Anselm’s formula, cannot be contingently, but only necessarily, nonempty, and while any of its instantiating ‘states’ is contingent, that there are some such states, and also that any two of them are ‘genidentical’, i.e., in personal sequence, with one another, can and must be necessary. Is there anything in modern logic to forbid this?

You may say that logic finds the notion of necessary instantiation valid at most only with respect to properties that

50 Scholz, op. cit., pp. 405-410.

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are universally applicable. True, but divinity is in a definite, though unique, sense strictly universal. Just as any entity is identical with itself, so is any entity, according to the meaning of theism, related to God as its creator and sole adequate knower. Relativity to the divine is as essential to existence as self-identity. To deny this is to deny not simply the existence but the logical possibility of deity. We have argued this so often that we must leave it at that here. The necessary nonemptiness of the class of divine states is related to the necessary nonemptiness of the only seemingly broader class of states in general (concrete particulars as such) in this way, that for any nondivine state there must be a divine state in which the former is known. The correlation creature-creator cannot be broken up, leaving the mere creature, or the mere creator, without making the very idea of either a meaningless or incoherent notion. Thus, if there must be entities, there must be entities divinely created and known; the only alternative being the rejection of the very question of theism as incoherent.

Had Scholz glimpsed these relationships, would he have had to confess, as he did, that while he could defend metaphysica generalis, as the theory of all possible worlds, he could find no rational approach to metaphysica specialis, or the theory of ‘last things’, including presumably some sort of answer to the theistic question?⁵¹ A ‘possible world’ as such is already God, in one of His creative potentialities, and it is and can be neither more nor less than this. True, there are some difficult and important questions concerning the relation of such ideas to the language of pure formal logic. But the locus of the questions at least begins to appear when they are seen from the neo-

51 Ibid., pp. 430-432.

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classical standpoint, whereas from the classical there seems to be, as Scholz found, no promising way to connect logical to theological questions. Anselm had already come closer to the heart of the matter than anyone in the Gaunilo tradition could do. Existence is indeed, in a loose sense, an ateribute, and, moreover, in ordinary cases of special or exclusive attributes, it is a contingent ‘attribute of attributes’. But of universal, all tolerant, or nonspecial attributes, existence is always a necessary attribute, and divinity is in a sense the sum of all nonspecial or strictly universal attributes. The divine knowledge must be able to take on or acquire the form of any object whatever. Hence to assert the existence of this knowledge as such excludes nothing, is not a ‘special’ topic at all, in the relevant sense, but a, or the, strictly universal one. That some particular entities or other must exist means that some such entities must be known to God, whose infallibility means the logical impossibility of a divorce between being and being divinely known. There is only one metaphysics, general metaphysics, but there are levels of explicitness in its resules. If God seems to be left out, this can only mean that something is left obscure.

Whether or not Scholz would have been convinced by all this I am fairly sure that he would not have brushed it aside as irrelevant or unimportant. I believe he would have admitted that these matters deserve further inquiry. And he might have seen that, since the theistic view of ‘possible existent’ is simply, ‘something God might create’, it is absurd to treat the divine existence as among the things which might be and also might not be. The supposition already begs the theistic question by assuming that possibility has a meaning independent of deity. The supremacy imputed to deity includes not merely dependence of what actually exists upon God, but dependence of

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everything whatever, whether actuality or possibility, and whether the latter be real or ‘merely logical’. The notion that the least item of meaning can be independent of the divine existence is a proclamation of atheism, or rather, of positivism. It is not a neutral basis of argument. Once more, there is here no room for a merely factual question; the issue is one of meaning.

It is a great pleasure to be able to end this survey with the consideration of so refreshingly original an essay as the one which Professor Frederic B. Fitch has recently published on “The Perfection of Perfection.”52 He rejects the idea of possible entities exhibiting various properties; he also rejects the idea of existence as a property of individuals, remarking that, whereas the traditional ontological argument seems first to treat God as a perfect possible entity, and then to object that if this entity lacked the attribute of actuality it would be imperfect, what he proposes to show is rather that the attribute of perfection is logically nonempty, ‘existence’ being the nonemptiness of some attribute. Fitch then argues, with remarkable independence of the traditional disputes, that the attribute of perfection must itself be taken as supremely perfect, as its own unique instance. But then, since an empty attribute, one which is merely an attribute, is insofar deficient or imperfect, and this attribute is necessarily perfect, it must also be nonempty. When I first read this, I thought it was more curious than convincing. But further reflection has considerably altered the perspective. At worst, it is wonderful to encounter a writer who has done some thinking of his own on this old topic which

52 The Monist, 47, No, 3 (1963), 466-471.

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has become so surrounded with what one is (no doubt wrongly) tempted to call parrotry.

Let us grant that there are no ‘possible instances’ of predicates but only predicates whose instantiation is possible. However, does it follow that existence is really an attribute of (ordinary kinds of) attributes, with nonexistence a corresponding negative attribute of attributes, their being empty? To have an empty stomach is to have a special kind of stomach, in that the emptiness really qualifies the stomach at the time, giving it a different tension and so on. But an ‘empty attribute’ is not, in any parallel sense, qualified by its emptiness. Here I think (with some difidence, however) that we confront a characteristic tendency of a formal logician to mistake a feature of our symbolic machinery for a reality beyond that machinery. It is the universe, not green gianthood, which is empty of green giants. All discourse is about the actual, though the reference to actuality may be more or less involved and disguised. Even ‘person of normal size’ is, in itself, empty of actual people, though the world is full (too full perhaps) of such entities. Of course, taking things purely extensionally, the class of green giants is indeed empty (but is there such a class, in a nontechnical normal sense of ‘is’?) and that of ‘person of normal size’ is nonempty; but what holds for classes, in this respect, does not hold for properties. The class attribute never contains the individual instances, no matter how many the class itself contains.

However, it does not appear that this point affects Fitch’s argument. For what he wants to show is not merely, as he says, that the attribute of ‘perfection is nonempty’, but rather that it is necessarily nonempty. (This seems quite clear from the structure of his reasoning.) And of course an impossibility of

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being uninstantiated is a very different thing from merely being (contingently) instantiated. Against taking contingent nonemptiness of an attribute as an intrinsic attribute of that attribute is just the contingency itself. A quality must not change in being instantiated, if it can also be uninstantiated; for if it did change then, by an adaptation of one of Kant’s arguments, it would not be that very quality but another which was instantiated. However, if the attribute is incapable of being uninstantiated, then, since being instantiated is the only status we have to recognize for it, there can be no problem of how instantiation would alter or enrich the attribute. The point is that the denial of instantiation is here absurd. We still, to be sure, must be able to distinguish the particular instances from the attribute; however, as explained in Sec. 11 of Part One, this does not entail a further distinction between the attribute and its merely being instantiated somehow. Just as the abstract must be somehow embodied in some actuality (Aristotle’s contention against platonism), so that we mean by ‘an abstraction’ something somehow housed in the concrete (if only by being thought about) and yet no particular concrete entity or set of entities is required by the abstract entity, similarly a necessarily instantiated attribute could be clearly nonidentical with its instances, and yet in its very being, as an attribute, instantiated somehow.

Fitch appatently holds that it is not a fallacy (some have called it the ‘homological fallacy’) to take perfection as its own unique instance, but rather, it is obligatory so to take it. Since I have said that Greatness or Unsurpassability (clearer, in my opinion, than Fitch’s seemingly rather circular ‘highest degree of perfection’) is the very individuality of deity, that which makes God God and no one and nothing else, can I

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object to his saying that the divine essence, attribute, or individuality is the unique case of supreme perfection, ie., of itself? If the values of the variable X are taken to be individuals, then the unique X which is divinely perfect is just the existing divine perfection itself. This is a form of the Findlay paradox. It would constitute a reductio ad absurdum, so far as I can see, were it not for the possibility of taking the values of X to be, not individuals, but states. For here we have a class whose members are contingent, yet through them the class property is necessarily exemplified. That is, the class necessarily has extension (and I have argued, with Cohen, the Kneales, and others, that there must be necessarily nonempty classes, such as the class of concrete endities), and yet the class property could exist with quite other instances. So I am perhaps in agreement, insofar, with Fitch’s double contention that perfection is its own unique instance, and therefore not a mere attribute, since it must have whatever else it needs to be perfect. He seems correct also in holding that being a mere attribute is an imperfection. Certainly, if to be perfect is to surpass all (except self) a mere attribute does not do this, for it is an abstract entity, and the concrete transcends in richness any and every abstraction, its assertion being logically stronger. Moreover, a mere attribute cannot surpass itself, and the Findlay paradox, we saw, can be resolved only through the idea of self-surpassing.

Thus there is a sense in which the attribute of perfection is not itself perfect, for it is not the ‘self-surpassing surpasser of all things’. And now we see that it is not quite correct to identify the divine essence with God as an individual. The divine essence is the individuality of God, but not God as an individual. An individual can surpass itself, but not an individ-

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uality. The distinction is between the ‘defining characteristic’, in Whitehead's careful phrase, of an enduring society or ordered sequence of states or unit events, and the society itself. ‘Society’ is really more exact than ‘sequence’ (and Whitehead's language is often more exact than that of those who condescend to him); for the identity of a society is not dependent upon that of its members. A society is not an extensional class of events in a certain order. What identifies it is not its members, but the characteristic shared among them which is taken as definitive of the society. The Wilson Ornithological Society has an identity which we can project far into the future (barring overwhelming catastrophe), but we do not do this by knowing members of it for future generations and centuries. Similarly, a man has, for his acquaintances or himself, an identity in the future though neither they nor he know a single one of the future events which will actualize this identity. They know that these events will share certain characteristics, such as (barring serious disease) ability to recall various events now in the past, exhibiting certain personality traits (including, from the scientific point of view, a certain unknown but reasonably-posited gene structure which will persist until death).

On my view God is the supreme form of ‘personally-ordered’ society. His defining characteristic, the divine perfection, His gene structure, as it were, is precisely His perfection, His necessary surpassing of all, including self. Each of His states will be the uniquely adequate summing up of the cosmic actuality correlated with it and of all past states of the divine society. And it will be the only society whose defining characteristic could not fail to be actualized in ever new (and greater) states.

In what sense is this defining characteristic itself ‘perfect’? It does not surpass all concrete individuals other than God,

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for an abstracion—a mere attribute—cannot intelligibly be said to surpass concrete things. But we may compare the divine attribute with other attributes. In this comparison we can say that the divine attribute is at least equal to any essence in universality, for it is omnipresent, inherent in reality as such; but at the same time it surpasses all other essences in individuality, since it is the only pure essence which distinguishes an individual from all others. In it alone are universality and individuality completely harmonized or at one. It is the sole individual universal, or universal individual, in which neither the individuality nor the universality needs to be qualified or diluted. A man, for instance, is a sort of universal, in that his defining characteristic keeps receiving thousands of new exemplifications each day that he is alive; but on the one hand the individual identity of a man is a very relative and fluctuating affair (as a conscious person he seems not to exist at all in dreamless sleep, as a rational person in delirium or far-gone intoxication, and his ability to remember his past and his purposes and what he has been and intends to be is an affair of more or less, mostly less from some points of view) and on the other hand, the universality of the man is also a very restricted affair. It spans only a vanishingly small stretch of time, and at any one time is appreciably relevant to a vanishingly small part of space. Again, one might say that the cosmos is an individual, with a strictly universal defining characteristic. But here we must drastically dilute the significance of individual identity. The cosmos is not for itself identical through time. The unity of its sequences of events is not of a high order, even as compared to that of a man. Or, if we wish to say that the cosmos has personal order, we must also say (and I do) that the personally-ordered dominant

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society of the cosmos is God Himself. But the cosmos is not a well-integrated individual other than and rivalling God. Apart from the dominant society which is the divine ‘soul’, we

have but the cosmic body, which is an individual only in something like the sense in which a man’s body, abstracting from his

consciousness, is so. Rather the body is a nonpersonal society of cells (themselves societies of societies), and the cosmos a nonpersonal society of societies on all sorts of levels.

So the unique intersection of unqualified universality with unqualified individuality is indeed a merit elevating the divine essence among essences generally. One may also say that the divine essence is the only fully self-explanatory one. ‘Cosmos’ by itself is a riddle; it is an ordered system, but what orders the parts? It either could cease to be, or its cessation is impossible; take it whichever way you please, you will be baffled. But the personal order of the divine life is the one case in which ‘self-ordering’ and eternal self-maintenance make clear sense. Each new divine state harmonizes itself with its predecessor and with the previous state of the cosmos, somewhat as a man harmonizes himself in each new state with his previous experience and bodily state, but with the decisive difference (among others) that the man must hope, and may easily hope in vain, that the internal and external environment will continue to make it possible for his bodily harmony to survive, whereas with God there is no such problem. First, there is simply no external environment. (Plato saw deeply into the meaning of this in the Timaeus, but his thought on this point was too simply profound for most philosophers since his time.) Second, the ‘internal environment’ is here under a radical control not rivalled even by the influence of a fully conscious man over his own nervous system. Why? No mere mystery. It follows from

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the concept of the divine essence that the divine experience sums up with unique adequacy all the value of the entre actual world, and hence each thing can look to it for guidance and inspiration. Analogously, a man’s brain cells are constantly sensitive to his thoughts and feelings, which, compared to cellular experiences, are doubtless sublime and quasi-divine. Incomparably more must all things be sensitive to the unique beauty and richness of the divine experiences. Thus God needs only to continue adapting Himself to the world, with His unique adaptive skill and power. The world is then bound, for that very reason, to adapt to Him. (The leaders to whom men adjust themselves are those who at least create the illusion that they are in harmony with men and things.) The foregoing is a bare outline. But it perhaps suffices to justify Fitch’s contention that the divine essence, perfection, is itself the supreme essence, the Form elevated above all other forms as such.

Must such a form be more than a mere form, muss it be exemplified? One could fill a volume (we have been doing so) with reasons for an affirmative answer. If the form connotes the sole self-intelligible kind or order, and if the order of everything else is intelligibly derivable from its self-ordering, then that is already a reason. Again, the exact intersection of universality and individuality can hardly fail to be a logically distinctive locus in the intellectual world. Necessity of actualization is not obviously any more distinctive. All other individuals are contingent, true, but then equally all are lacking in the universal relevance of their defining characteristics. All others must be known a posteriori—of course they must, since they can only be defined a posteriori. All others have to ‘fight their way into existence’ (Peirce) against competitive possi-

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bilities; but the divine essence, the capacity to harmonize with and adapt to any situation, for just that reason is noncompetitive. It could not be generated or destroyed; an alleged contingency of its existing would have no intelligible objective reference.

I conclude: Fitch is essentially right. The divine essence, compared to others, is the perfect essence; and everything about this perfection is congruent with its actualization being necessary, and incongruent with its being even possibly unactualized.

Like Scholz, our Yale logician regards existence as an attribute of attributes. In discussing this we need to recall once more our distinction between existence and actuality. The inclusive mode of reality is actuality. This is, as Fitch says, not an attribute in the same sense as other things are attributes. Yet it is a sort of attribute, and precisely not an attribute of attributes either. It is rather an attribute of everything except attributes, whereas (ordinary) attributes are attribuces of some only of the things which are not attributes. Everything except an attribute (or a mere abstraction) is an actuality (or class or system of actualities). Being actual is the same as being wholly definite (conforming to the Law of Excluded Middle as to predicates) or as being wholly particular or concrete. What has concreteness is just any and every concrete thing. Exemplified universals or properties are not literally concrete, concreteness is just not their attribute.

‘Existence’ is the fact that, among the actual things there are one or more which exemplify (‘somehow concretize’, to speak metaphorically or loosely) a specified attribute (including individually distinctive attributes, characteristics definitive of a given individual, such as being the son of So-and-so, or even as being ‘this man’). If an attribute of something is whatever

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may be said about it, then one may call existence, or nonemptiness, an attribute of the essence actualized. But here ‘about’ has an extremely vague meaning, and ‘attribute’ a rather Pickwickian one. It is the exemplifying actualities which really ‘have’ the attribute, not it which has them. Actualization is the fact that something has the attribute. To, or in, the attribute itself this having (being had) is (in ordinary contingent cases) simply nothing.

To be necessarily had by some suitable actualities, however, is very different and is indeed an essence of an essence, an attribute of an attribute. Logically-guaranteed actualization is not just actualization. A man assured of posthumous fame could perhaps rest content, even without any actual fame in his own lifetime. And his satisfaction in the guarantee (so far as he believed in it) would not require that he knew any particular persons who would acclaim him or build upon foundadons he had laid. Analogously, it is nothing to the divine essence (though something to God in His full actuality) by what actualities it exists; nevertheless it is everything to the essence that, since its existence constitutes possibility as such, it could pot fail of actualization. Deprive it of this self-grounded necessity and it loses all its intelligibility and cannot perform any of its assigned roles. Here, in no Pickwickian sense, is indeed an attribute of an attribute. Without existential necessity, we may have an idol, we cannot have deity. It follows, nota bene, that sheer empiricism is antitheism built into a methodological principle. It simply begs the central religious question, and that is all it can in consistency do, so far as that question is concerned.

As to ‘maximal imperfection’, to which Fitch refers, I do not see that this has any clear meaning, unless it means the same

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as ‘bare nothing’. And very likely that is truly ‘the most deficient and imperfect entity in the world’. It also is necessarily unexemplified in actuality, because it is the total denial of actuality, whereas the divine petfection is (in a certain manner) the maximal assertion of it. Classical theism makes this assertion absolute in a sense which runs into totally opaque antinomies; neoclassical theism avoids these by requiring only that the divine actuality be supreme and all-inclusive with respect to whatever is actual and that the divine potentiality account for all that is possible but not actual, by being both the ground of its possibility and that which would fully inherit its richness were it to become actual. Thus all possibility of rivalry with another is made logically impossible. And this exclusion of rivalry, as a great man saw almost nine centuries ago, is the very principle which justifies worship.

[Return to Part Two Contents]

22. Conclusions

We have in Part Two considered or mentioned the responses of some forty-four philosophers to the type of argument that Anselm invented. At least twenty of these, including a dozen modern writers, appear to have known virtually nothing of the structure of the Proof as presented in Prosl. III-IV and the Reply, ot in Descartes’s Replies! About fourteen, half of them modern, have had at least a partial understanding of such a structure, in some cases (Descartes, Spinoza, Cudworth) probably not derived directly from Anselm; but of the modern thinkers discussed in Part Two, only Malcolm and Hartman pay explicit attention to the remarkable difference between Anselm’s two accounts, in Prosl. II and III, and deal with the

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obviously pressing problem of their reladonship. One is moved to ask, how careless can we be?

About half of the forty-four may be said to have accepted the Proof, or at least to have seen something in it besides a mere sophistry (including Findlay, who sees it as implicitly a forceful disproof).

Of sixteen refuters of the Proof, three medieval and thirteen modern, few in their refutations so much as mention either of the two principles upon which Prosl. III and a number of later passages turn, but about which nothing is said in Prosl. II. And only Findlay shows much understanding of these principles. Yet among the critics here considered are some of the most influential: Thomas, Hume, Kant. Let us add one more, Bertrand Russell, who in his book on Leibniz and in his History of Western Phslosophy makes it plain that he follows Leibniz and others in accepting the Gaunilo legend as containing all that there was to Anselm’s reasoning.

Thus we have seventeen refutations (counting those by Esser and Lehmen) by philosophers, mostly very famous, scattered over nine centuries. With a solitary exception, these refutations take little or no account of what Anselm said in the latter two-thirds of the four-page statement of the Proof, or in most of the sixteen-page rebuttal of Gaunilo. Is there in the whole history of controversy a parallel case of casual reading of a hotly-controverted text?

One writer (Hocking) both defends and attacks the Proof: defends in relation to his own version and attacks in relation to one which he attributes to Anselm, any resemblance of either version to the historical Anselm being negligible. Hocking’s teacher Royce was similarly remote from the Pros/. III reasoning (as was Royce’s teacher Lotze, who nevertheless

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went through the usual motions of refuting an unidentified or misidentified argument).

Have not philosophy departments in universities everywhere some responsibility to teach students the absurdity of these procedures? No one has to publish a refutation of Anselm; but if he does publish one, can it be less than his intellectual and scholarly duty to know and say whether or not he is dealing with the actual writing and reasoning of Anselm (or Descartes —for he too has been carelessly read, his refuters and even defenders often blandly ignoring his replies to some of the very objections still being made in our own time), rather than a feeble caricature, conveniently susceptible to refutation?

Since Malcolm challenged his colleagues to take Prosl. III duly into account, at least a half-dozen replies have already appeared. As we saw in Part One, Sec. 23, these all leave something to be desired. Perhaps the replies do succeed in showing —hardly so clearly as Findlay and others had already shown it —that classical theism cannot legitimately employ the Proof. However, since no other form of theism is considered, except vaguely and incidentally, the question, ‘Is the trouble with the Proof or with the type or types of theism it has been used to support?’ remains unclarified. The scholarly world, after a little delay, is grudgingly catching up to Anselm and Descartes; but alas, the subject now stands at a different point. (Professors, if intellectually ambitious, are busy people. Who can say whose fault it is if we cannot meet our responsibilities? Perhaps it is that of those who want education to be cheaper than cosmetics, power and luxury in automobiles, smoking, or drink.)

And what about defenders of the Argument? Do they give evidence of having read the two brief texts? As we have seen,

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often not, especially in modern times. Leibniz and Hegel are striking examples. It is as though, for some reason, men recoil from Anselm’s touch, almost as much when pretending to accept his Proof as when harshly rejecting it. Could the reason possibly be that there is an intuition that this Proof is a dangerous weapon? It turns against classical theism and classical pantheism, though both have sometimes used it; it turns against unqualified empiricism so obviously that empiricists have never used it. However, if our analysis is right, there is one doctrine it does not turn against, and that is the theism which has learned to free itself from the Greek overidentification of the divine with one side of the contraries, one-many, absolute-relative, necessary-contingent, being-becoming. If this conclusion is at all correct, then Anselm, without knowing it, had in principle transcended all the older forms of theism and skepticism alike and had furnished mankind with an insttument which we are only now in a position to use correctly.

Empiricism, however, has been right all along in this, that the a priori knowledge of God is at most only an understanding of His purely abstract aspect; while all that is concrete in His reality is to be known, so far as it can be known, through observation, scientific or personal. The God of our world now, and through the geologic ages, is revealed to us partly, perhaps, through Scripture, religious tradition or ritual, partly through science, certainly not through any proof. Proofs can only show that there is a divine actuality for these more concrete or experiential means to reveal, thus giving us an infinitely bare yet balanced, seemingly consistent, and intelligible outline which all our life and aspiration can joyously fill with contingent, more particular values, meanings, and surmises.

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This book has presented the following contentions. Contrary to almost universal belief, the essential principles of Anselm’s Proof are first stated not in Prosl. II, but in Prosl. III. They are: we can conceive something as such that its nonexistence 1s inconceivable; not to be conceivable as nonexistent is greater than to be thus conceivable; therefore, the concept of the greatest conceivable must be of something whose nonexistence is inconceivable.

The relevant objections are: (a) it is a mere assumption that ‘greatest conceivable’ and ‘inconceivable as nogexistent’ are themselves (consistently) conceivable; (b) a greatest conceivable must be either a greatest quantity or else a reality wholly lacking in quantity, in either case a dubious conception; (c) an absolutely greatest being must be incapable of receiving value from, or of being intrinsically related to the world, and therefore of being the loving and conscious God implied by religious attitudes; (d) the Proof appears to be an obviously illicit transition from abstract essence or idea to concrete actuality, or from the logically weaker (less definite) to the logically stronger (more defnite); (e) and consequently (Findlay paradox), if the proposed definition of divinity implies such an illicit transition, it must be judged illogical or contradictory.

All of these objections, except perhaps (a), become inapplicable if one adopts the ‘neoclassical’ version of ‘none greater (is conceivable)’, taking it to mean, ‘none greater—except itself’, ‘Exists necessarily’ then means the same as is ‘somehow actualized in any possible state of affairs’. The particular how of actualization, or the particular actuality concretizing the abstract essence formulated in the definition, is contingent. The necessity that the essence be actualized is due to the absolutely infinite

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range of variability in its possible hows of actualization, or (the same thing) to this range’s being strictly coordinate to that of possible states of affairs. Since no such state would exclude God, He exists ‘no matter what'—in other words, absolutely necessarily. This neoclassical interpretation not only dissolves the Findlay paradox—for the affirmation that divinity is somehow concrete implies nothing whatever as to how it, or anything else, is concrete, and hence is a purely abstract statement—but also removes many other, and more familiar, antinomies of religious metaphysics. It implies neither a greatest possible quantity nor a reality without quantity; the God it describes can receive value from, be relative to, and know and love the world. He need not be ‘immutable, yet active’, free yet wholly necessary. Such antinomies are no longer inescapable.

Whether or not new logical difficulties may be expected to arise from the new doctrine, so that objection (a) remains perhaps in force, is the residual question, upon which historical controversies concerning Anselm (or Descartes) throw no direct or obvious light. For in these controversies the possibility of a neoclassical point of view was entirely overlooked, as it was by Anselm himself. But since the old difficulties disappear, the fair initial presumption in favor of there being some intelligible religious truth justifies a new inquiry into the possibility of a tenable theism. In particular, Kant's rejection of the other theistic proofs calls for radical re-examination.

Finally, the possibility of arriving at a correct estimate of the status and content of metaphysics in general depends in substantial degree upon a proper understanding of Anselm’s discovery that the character of being not conceivably surpassed (by another) must be one of the three: nonsensical, contradictory, or necessarily (somehow) actualized. Between a theism

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which can solve the abstract-concrete paradox inherent in *necessary being’, as traditionally conceived, and a positivistic rejection of the logical possibility of any theism at all, a philosopher must, it seems, make his choice. And since every basic categorial question is connected with this one, Anselm has thus defined our task, in some respects, more sharply than anyone before him and almost everyone after him. Does he not therefore deserve at long last to be paid the minimal compliment of supposing that when he took a number of pages to state his case he needed those pages and had not said all he knew in the first two paragraphs? Granted that in this opening passage, about which so much has been said, there appears to be a notable fallacy, we have but one way to find out whether or not this initial fallacy is essential to the Proof as set forth in subsequent passages. That one way is to read—and reflect upon—those additional passages.

How painfully the fragility of human ‘reason’ is illustrated in this history! However, the hopeful side of the story is that the one right way is now open before us.

In a thesis written at Harvard in 1923 I termed the Ontological Argument invented by Anselm “an incomparably brilliant and cogent course of reasoning.” I was already familiar with Kant's famous refutation. Since that time frequent re reading of Kant and examination of scores of other refutations have failed to convince me that the Argument is a mere fallacy. However, I now think that both the standard criticisms and the older defences, including mine of forty years ago, are all seriously—even disgracefully—defective. In 1923 I had, like so many others, failed to read Anselm with scholarly care; and I certainly took my self-appointed task of rebutting Kant far too casually. Today, instead of brashly asserting, as I recall doing in another student essay, that the Argument “sums up what is most sound in philosophy,” I should make a qualified statement. I still hold that there is no shorter way to an under standing of essential metaphysical issues than the careful consideration of the challenge that Anselm issued to his contemporaries and successors. However, I have come to see that the simple acceptance of the reasoning as Anselm left it (were this today still possible) is no better calculated than its simple

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rejection to give us this understanding. There are ambigui ties to be removed and issues to be weighed which have been almost unnoticed by both sides in the long dispute. In this present work I have tried to specify these ambiguities and issues with precision, and to show how, as I believe, they are to be most reasonably overcome or resolved, and with what philosophical consequences.

In Part One a view of the Proof will be presented that is neither simply Anselm’s nor that of any of his better-known defenders, but which claims to be a higher synthesis of doctrines, assigning an element of validity to each of the principal attitudes which have been taken on the subject. Whatever its defects, this discussion does take Anselm’s proposal seriously and does try to criticize it, partly at least, on grounds which he might conceivably have found pertinent and cogent—as he manifestly did not find Gaunilo’s (and probably would not have found most of Kant’s). The analysis also takes ancient and modern criticisms seriously in just those respects that are left standing when it is what Anselm wrote and the whole of what he wrote on the subject which forms the target of the criticism. In order to meet these relevant criticisms, it is found necessary to revise, not so much the Argument as the precise ‘Idea of God’ from which it sets out. This revision Anselm might have rejected, but he could scarcely have found it so inconsequential as he (in part rightly) found the counterarguments of Gaunilo. An important point of the analysis is the inadequacy of the dichotomy essence-existence. A third term is needed, ‘actuality’. An essence exists if there is some con crete reality exemplifying it; ‘existence’ is only that an essence is concretized, ‘actuality’ is how, or in what particular form, it is concretized. The particular form, the actuality, is always

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contingent—here opponents of the Proof have been right—but it does not follow—and here they have been in error—that the existence is contingent. For existence only requires the non emptiness of the appropriate class of actualities, and a class can be necessarily nonempty even though it has only contingent members. How this applies to God can hardly be obvious to the reader, unless his training in philosophy has been very unusual. But I hold that it does apply. (See Part One, Sections 8, 11, 23; and Part Two, Section 17.) Essence, existence, actuality—this triad is the minimum of complexity which must be considered if the famous Proof is to be correctly evaluated. As Peirce said, the thinker in mere dichotomies is a crude fellow, trying to make delicate dissections with an ax. So long as philosophers persist in confusing existence and actuality, just so long will they be but bumbling amateurs in a matter in which they have long been claiming competence. It is hoped that the reader will be brought to a realization of the depth of the issues and the unworthiness of any simple short cut to a definitive conclusion. He will be encouraged to think his way through the Anselmian problem, and not (as is customary) around it, as though the Saint’s little book had been lost just after Gaunilo saw it, and we had been de pendent upon this one careless expositor for all of our knowledge of the Anselmian idea.

Part Two surveys, partly through substantial quotations, the history of important or representative reactions to the Argument, from Gaunilo’s to those of some of our contemporaries, and evaluates these from the standpoint of Part One. The reader of these discussions will have at his command, in outline, something like the entire historical context of a fundamental technical problem in philosophy and theology.

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Among other results, it will be shown that most of those who have attacked, and many who have defended, the reasoning of the Proslogium have literally “not known what they were talking about” since, according to all probability, they were reacting to a document they had not read, even in 2 competent paraphrase.

Concerning the length and complexity of my treatment of a well-worn and seemingly restricted topic, some remarks may be in order. I see myself as combating nine centuries of error piled upon error about Anselm, and among these errors is the notion that the problem which he posed is a simple one. In my view it is, like all metaphysical questions, the metaphysical question put from a particular standpoint. The defenders of the Proof, if they have understood themselves, have had a metaphysics; and so have its attackers. However, my own stand point in speculative philosophy has not been expressed in any treatment of Anselm (by others than myself) with which I am acquainted. It is not any of the better-known theistic or nontheistic positions. Several of the more traditional types of metaphysics have been presented a hundred times; students of philosophy are familiar with and influenced by them, whether they know they are or not, and whether by way of rejection or of acceptance. To make headway simultaneously against so many prejudices, some of them reinforced by almost endless repetitions, I have felt forced to put my understanding of what Anselm discovered (and of what he failed to discover) in similarly many ways, and to defend it against many objec tions. This does not mean that the reader is given but one way of looking at Anselm. Allowing for the greater familiarity, and also greater simplicity, of other views, I venture to think that the main possibilities are here made available.

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I am grateful to Dr. Eugene Freeman, Editor-in-chief of the Open Court Publishing Company, for having suggested this commentary, and for his patience as it outgrew the volume for which it was originally designed, The Basic Writings of Saint Anselm. For that a much briefer version had to be written. I have also profited by discussions with my son-in-law, Nicolas D. Goodman, which have helped me to mitigate the consequences of my insufficient training and skill in formal logic. I suspect that the future of the ontological problem lies largely in rather technical developments in formal logic (including modal logic or, perhaps I should say, metalogic) or in such studies in the philosophy of logic as only those who know the logic can promote or adequately judge. The stage of mere ‘talkietalk’ about this matter is probably nearing its close. Those who wish to add something may have to be better equipped than I to explore in a formal manner the logical niceties of the problem of existential contingency and necessity.

C. H.

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS

Necessarily Somehow Actualized: Anselm's Proof in New Perspective

1. Blunder or Discovery?
2. The Overestimation of Gaunilo
3. What the Proof Claims to Prove
4. The Definition of God: a Dilemma
5. Neoclassical Resolution of the Dilemma
6. Existence a Predicate?
7. The Second or Strong Form of the Proof
8. Malcolm and Findlay: a Fresh Start?
9. The Necessary is Abstract
10. In What Sense the Proof is Inconclusive
11. Predicates, Individuals, and States
12. The Role of Faith
13. Is the Proof Platonic?
14. A Theory of Modality
15. Contingency and Observability
16. The Proof and Logical Rules
17. Anselm's Appeal to Rules
18. Refutation of Some Refutations
19. The Argument of Proslogium III
20. Proslogium II, III, and Anselm’s Principle
21. Definite Thought Is about Something
22. The Proof and Pantheism
23. Some Recent Criticisms of the Proof
24. The Proof and the Other Theistic Arguments

1. Blunder or Discovery?

Did Anselm, in his ‘Ontological Argument’—about the year 1070—make one of the greatest intellectual discoveries of all time, or did he merely fall into an interesting blunder? Or was there, in this case as in so many others, a combination of discovery and error? We shall see reason to think that there was indeed a discovery, and a great one, but that Anselm was in part mistaken as to its nature. His critics have clarified certain aspects of the problem to which he pointed, but, alas, have also generally obscured the discovery itself. Nor have his best-known defenders understood it much better.

What was this discovery? In crude anticipatory outline, it was the following: Assuming certain ‘meaning postulates’ (to use Carnap’s helpful phrase) concerning the import of ‘God’ and certain related terms, it follows that the existence of God is a logical or analytic cruth. The meaning postulates can be rejected, but the position then taken is not atheism, as commonly understood (or agnosticism either) but positivism (as I shall use this label), the view that the divine existence is logically impossible. The sole alternative to the necessary truth

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of theism is its logical impossibility. No question of contingent or empirical fact is at stake. Empirical atheism (I shall usually call it simply atheism), holding that there is no objection to the idea of God except that factual evidence concerning it happens to be lacking or negative, is genuinely refuted by ‘the Proof’ (as I shall call it for short); but equally refuted is empirical theism, holding that although atheism is logically unobjectionable the factual evidence favors theism. Unless Anselm made (as so many, but not this writer, believe he made) a mere mistake, empirical theism and empirical atheism are alike logical blunders. If belief in the divine existence even makes sense, unbelief does not, and if unbelief makes sense, belief does not. The issue between them is not one of fact or contingent truth but of meaning. One side or the other is confused. Obviously this resule, if correct, is of great importance for philosophy and religion.

The connection between the idea of God and the inconceivability of nonexistence can be brought out in many ways. Anselm hit upon some of these. For instance, to exist with nonexistence as a conceivable alternative is an inferior manner of existing, compared to existing without such alternative, and hence only the latter mode of existing is compatible with the Unsurpassability (such that “none greater can be conceived”) which defines deity. One can read a hundred standard or important philosophical works in which the Proof is discussed and scarcely find even an unclear statement of this point. Yet Anselm himself expresses it plainly more than once and implies it many times. A grosser failure of scholarship will not, I think, be found, considering that it went without effective challenge for centuries.

Anselm assumed as meaning postulate that belief is logically

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possible, that his idea of deity was consistent. Granted this, he did prove the divine existence. However, should it be granted? Over a thousand years before, Carneades had given impressive reasons for regarding the idea of God as selfinconsistent. Anselm did not refute this contention. Insofar, he did not prove the divine existence.

Here we note another failure of scholarship—or of intellectual perspicacity. To argue cogently for a position is to show the falsity of at least some of its plausible theoretical compettors. A complete demonstration must disprove all of these. Because Anselm failed to accomplish this, it is concluded that he accomplished nothing. But he did accomplish something. He disproved not only atheism but empirical theism as well, and thereby reduced the central religious issue to the forced option, positivism or theism, in either case as logically true or analytic. That he did not resolve this final issue detracts no whit from the accomplishment just stated. One task at a time, if we are serious in our pretensions to sober analysis! The complete justification of theism would require a further argument, that against positivism; but the elimination of two out of four logically possible positions is sheer gain nonetheless.

Since the publication of my Logic of Perfection, in which I present several forms of ontological proof, one of the few attempts at rebuttal amounted to this: a premise from which I reason would not be self-evident to philosophers of all persuasions (i.e., positivists would reject it). Is there any piece of philosophical reasoning for an important position which does not depend upon premises similarly open to challenge from some philosophical school? It is an unwitting compliment to Anselm that he is asked to submit to criteria which perhaps no philosopher could afford to accept. An argument

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is more than a mere mistake if it is cogent against some important philosophical position. It is nice to dream of an argument which would be cogent against every such position except one, but we may have to settle for less than this, or give up the attempt to apply reason to basic issues and turn over the field to Zen Buddhism, or some other form of radical intuitionism, fideism, or no less irrational antifideism.

A common method of seeking to trivialize Anselm’s claim is to hold that ‘necessarily existing’ (to use a non-Anselmian phrase) means only, ‘existing necessarily if it exists at all’. ‘Divinity exists’ is perhaps necessary if true; however, it may be false. Obviously, if a proposition p is not true, it is not necessarily true; so there is a sense in which we may sometimes say, ‘necessary if true’. But what is the meaning of the ‘if . .. then’ in such a case? Can it be: If it is contingently true that divinity exists then it is also necessarily true? No, for this is contradictory. But a proposition which could not be contingently true also could not be contingently false; hence the sole sensible meaning of, ‘if true then necessarily true’, must be, if not necessarily false, then necessarily true. And only of divinity, among distinct kinds of individuals, is there reason to admit that the sole alternative to necessary truth for the assertion of existence is necessary falsity. Moreover, the decision between necessary truth and necessary falsity cannot be empirical or factual but must be logical. So on this interpretation Anselm made a momentous discovery, that one existential question is logical or a priori, not empirical. If this is not important philosophically, what would be?

As an example of this importance, consider the classical argument against theism from the observed facts of evil. If

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the issue is purely logical, no such facts can be relevant. As we shall see, David Hume conceded this relationship between the Proof and the said facts, though he rejected the Proof itself.

There is, however, another possible interpretation of, ‘if true then necessary’: ‘If it is contingently true that God exists, then it is also contingently true that He exists necessarily’. Since ‘contingently’ here refers to logical and ‘necessarily’ to ontological modality, there is no overt contradiction. The one is modality de dictu or in language, the other de re. Nevertheless, we still have not got rid of Anselm’s discovery. For (a) the antitheist has at least been forced to commit himself to a radical disconnectedness between the two kinds of modality (and there are, as we shall see, grave objections to this assumption); and also (b) Anselm himself does not employ the terms ‘necessary’ and ‘contingent’, nor is the distinction between de re and de dictu obviously applicable to his actual procedure. He compares beings whose nonexistence is not conceivable to those whose nonexistence is conceivable and holds that the former must be superior to the lacter, from which he infers that ‘not conceivably surpassable’ must connote ‘not conceivably nonexistent’. And since questions of conceivability are logical not factual, Anselm’s discovery, as I have stated it, still stands. Atheism is ruled out and only positivism survives as competitor to theism.

The effort to trivialize the great discovery has failed. It must be rejected outright, or its importance conceded. Can it reasonably be rejected outright?

This depends upon what is meant by the Proof. If the standard version, given in countless works of reference and other writings, is the essential content of the reasoning, then

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I grant that outright rejection is reasonable. But the reasoning sketched above, which I and others find in Prosl. III and later passages, is in no obvious way (I believe in no legitimate way) reducible to the standard version. Therefore, the standard criticisms fail to justify rejection. Generations of philosophers have deceived themselves in this regard. What they disproved was not Anselm’s complete Argument, but the simplification and corruption which this suffered in Descartes (especially in the Meditations). This corruption was at least threefold. First, Prosl. II was taken as the basic text (known to Descartes perhaps only at second or third hand), not the incomparably supetior Prosl. III. Second, Descartes, by introducing the term ‘necessary’, raised by implication the issue between logical and real modality which Anselm had avoided. Third, by substituting terms like ‘perfect’ for the by no means equivalent conception of unsurpassability, Descartes lost one of the best features of Anselm’s terminology. The supposition that ‘perfect’ and ‘not conceivably surpassable’ are equivalent springs from an illicit conversion. To be absolutely complete or maximal, or to exhaust possible value, is certainly inconsistent with being surpassable. But is being unsurpassable necessarily inconsistent with no¢ being maximal or complete? ‘What is complete is unsurpassable’ may not be convertible. Suppose (we shall see good reason for the supposition) that possible value is in principle inexhaustible, so that the idea of exhausting it is logically absurd. It would follow that either Unsurpassability is likewise logically absurd (and positivism correct) or else Unsurpassability is logically independent of completeness. An advertising slogan quaintly suggests how this might be. “When better cars are built Buick will build them.” Insofar as this is

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taken as absolutely valid for all possible circumstances, Buick cars must as such be unsurpassable, though not maximally good or ‘perfect’. Of course absolute validity could not be imagined for a slogan of this sort. Absolutes of this kind cannot qualify ordinary nondivine things. But some such absolute might very well apply to God. It might even be the sensible meaning of ‘unsurpassable’. I shall argue that it is precisely that. Clearly ‘perfect’ is a poor word to suggest this idea.

Anselm himself, it is true, in effect accepted the equivalence of completeness and unsurpassability. It remains a significant fact that his language was wiser than he knew, and that Descartes’s language was not wiser than Descartes knew.

I have said that the usual reasons do not justify the rejection of Anselm’s Proof. Could better reasons be given? To this my answer is, yes—and no. If by unsurpassable is meant complete, exhaustive of possible value, then it can be cogently argued that neither this nor any other proof is capable of establishing the doctrine. Here I join the critics: Anselm failed to furnish a valid reason supporting his own form of theism. For while atheism cannot fairly defend itself against Anselm, neither can Anselm fairly defend himself against the atheist. Each can point to a fatal flaw in the other’s position. Moreover, Descartes and Leibniz were in no better case. Nevertheless, Anselm made a great discovery, and one which can lend valuable support to theism of a different type, not only against atheism, but against Anselm'’s theism itself. This is the point which has been missed by previous commentators, of no matter what philosophical persuasion, the blind spot for which only the passing of thirty-five generations has brought a cure. Anselm’s reasoning, when its logic is sufficiently care-

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fully attended to, illuminates not only the existence but the nature of God. It requires us to reconceive the import of ‘divine’.

‘Necessary’ is sometimes used to mean, upon certain conditdons which might or might not be fulfilled. This is conditional necessity, the necessity of p, given q. But there is also unconditional necessity, necessity of p, given q or not q—or as von Wright puts it, “upon tautological conditions.” With this latter meaning, it is contradictory to assume that the existence of the thing itself (or the existence of anything else) is condition of its necessary existence, taking ‘condition’ to mean a requirement capable of being unrealized. It is, from his text, quite clear that the necessity Anselm is talking about is unconditional necessity, and hence considerations which require the necessity to be conditional are not relevant. We have nothing to do here with a necessity obtaining only if the requirement that the thing exists is satisfied (whatever such ‘necessity’, surely a very odd or tenuous one, could mean).

Any criticism of the argument, to be enlightening, must be more carefully formulated.

Nor is it admissible to settle the question by fiat, that is, by declaring that existence can in no case be inferred a priori. To reply to a man who argues: whereas all other things can be conceived not to exist, divinity, for certain specified reasons, cannot be so conceived, “My dear sir, not only can all other things be conceived not to exist, but—as you simply must admit—even divinity can be so conceived,” is childish—or if one prefers, remarkably obtuse. It is mere stubbornness, the method of tenacity. We shall have to do better if we would deserve to be called philosophers. The specific

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reasons just referred to must be evaluated before we could have a right to assert the universal contingency of existential assertions.

Anselm’s presentation and defence of his argument occupy slightly over twenty pages, three and one-half in the Proslogsum (Chapters II-V) and seventeen in the reply to Gaunilo (Which I shall call ‘the Reply’). Of those who claim to demonstrate that the argument is a mere sophistry, the majority appear to have read the first page or so (Chapter II), or at least a paraphrase of it in some history, but one would be hard put to it in most cases to furnish evidence that they had read more. Some have perhaps read Gaunilo’s reply at first hand, but if they know that and how Anselm replied, namely with care and (in my opinion) lucidity, as well as serene confidence, to the monk’s criticisms, they have kept this knowledge to themselves. Even when the Reply (he called it his ‘apology’) is referred to, it is usually the least essential portions which are cited. As Koyré and Barth say, the philosophical world has for the most part simply adopted Gaunilo’s point of view, including all its oversights and inability to grasp the subtleties of Anselm.

Does the reader not see a difference which is more than rthetorical between (1) ‘that which exists in reality as well as in the mind is greater than that which exists in the mind alone’, and (2) ‘that whose nonexistence cannot be conceived is greater than that whose nonexistence can be conceived’? This is the point of difference between the reasoning of Chapter II and that of Chapter III. In both cases the writing is almost as lucid as writing well can be; yet one hundred philosophical authors, many of them very famous ones, have proceeded as though it had been beyond their

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capacity to notice the distinction, although it occurs practically within one page! If a difference between a modal statement (as to what can be conceived) and a simple categorical statement is not important in philosophy, what could be? Had the authors attempted to show that the reasoning of the Chapters (II, III) reduces by recognized logical principles to one and the same, then we might still disagree with them, but at least we should know that they had read the work they professed to criticize. As it is we do not know this, and I personally do not believe it. Or, if the glance of these authors did fall upon the pages in question, then, as Dewey once said of one of his critics, they must have been “suffering from never having been able to learn to read.”

Only recently, after Professor Malcolm had called the attention of English-speaking philosophers to the great difference between the logic of Prosl. II and that of Prosl. III, or between Anselm’s ‘first’ and ‘second’ ontological arguments, has one begun to meet the contention that the two arguments must stand or fall together. (See below, Sec. 23, and Malcolm in the Bibliography.) But how odd to take nine centuries even to discuss the question! And why is it that specialists in Anselm do not usually take this position? In the effort to show that an obvious textual problem, with which critics should all along have reckoned, is really no problem at all, is there nothing of the ‘method of tenacity’? Or, if you prefer, of what may be termed ‘the method of convenient ignorance’? It is so much handier to have a fictitious (conveniently simplified and drastically weakened) Anselm to refute than the real one.

If the reader is surprised at my severity, let him hear from

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two distinguished scholarly specialists on Anselm (Koyré and Karl Barth):

Gaunilo seems to have understood the corrections which Saint Anselm addressed to him; at least, he did not reply. The moderns have neglected this highly instructive polemic, and this is why we have seen them repeating since Gassendi, since Kant, and down to our own time (1923 ) the same objections, the same efrors, as thase of the monk of Marmoutiers.¹

Only fools and their theological and philosophical advocates, the Gaunilos, are capable of supposing that the measure of existence in general is the measure of God's existence, or of either remaining simply entangled in the dialectic of Prosl. II, or else of taking Prosl. Il to be conditioned by Prosl. II. But it is altogether otherwise: the existence of God is the measure of Existence in general, and if either of the Anselmian chapters ultimately and decisively conditions the other, it is Prosl. III which conditions Prosl. II, not vice versa.²

To repeat, anyone has the right to argue against this thesis of the logical priority of Prosl. IIl (and many subsequent passages) over Prosi. II. But to assume the contrary thesis without argument is what no one who claimed to be a scholar has ever had the right to do. Yet Gaunilo did it, and apparently nearly all followed suit. And they admired Gaunilo for having made things so easy for them!

Perhaps the most astonishing thing of all about this fantastic history is that not only did Aquinas, and many others who rejected the Proof, follow Gaunilo in taking Prosl. II as definitive, but so did Leibniz, Hegel, and many others who were sympathetic to it. Rarely does even a friend of the argument clearly appreciate the content of Chapter III; usually he

¹ Koyré, (see Bibliography I), p. 225.
² Barth (see Bibliography I), p. 178. See also pp. 147, 153.

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takes as primary the formula of the previous chapter, and makes no mention of the wide difference between the two forms of reasoning. And Descartes himself seemed to get to his version of the second form only as a sort of afterthought. (Kant, I suspect, did not know this second form in Descartes.) With such minds leading the way, it is perhaps not too hard to understand how an almost rigid fashion became established. The assumption that only Prosl. II matters was ‘settled’ for centuries.

Here is a sample of what has been going on. In a friend’s office is a row of sixteen books, some rather old, some recent, dealing with the philosophy of religion. Eleven of these undertake to explain and evaluate the ontological argument, in all but one case mentioning Anselm. These eleven discussions vary greatly in quality, but one thing they have in common: they pay no attention to the chief points Anselm makes in Prosl. III-IV and repeats often in the Reply. Only the argument of Prosl. II is dealt with. One author, W. R. Sorley,³ terms that argument, ‘the sum and substance’—which recalls an old German work in which it was called ‘the nerve’ —of the Proof. One could hardly imagine more inappropriate phrases. As we shall see in Sections 19 and 20, Prosl. II is but a blundering preamble or unlucky false start in the development of the Proof. Its major premise is not even a first approximation to the nerve or substance of the eventual argument, still less its sum. Until such notions are dropped, the philosophical world will not have begun to assume the task laid upon it so long ago, to achieve a collective rational

³ W. R. Sorley, Moral Values and the ldea of God (London: Cambridge University Press, 1921).

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evaluation of Anselm’s claim. It is worth adding that where Descartes is brought into the discussions above referred to he is treated in a similarly—though less obviously—truncated way, ignoring the second form of the Proof given in the Replies.

How far can the fallacies of ‘straw man’ and ‘irrelevant conclusion’ be carried and still leave a possibility of significant debate? One hundred philosophers (or should I say ten thousand?) collaborate to show that Prosl. II does not, without amplification or supplementation, provide a satisfactory account of a valid demonstration. What of that? Was it intended to do this? If so, why did its author hurry on, in the second sentence of the next chapter, to introduce two additional principles from which he reinfers the conclusion that God (necessarily) exists? And why did he repeat the major premise of Prosl. II in one short chapter only of the Reply Il but the principles of Prosl. III in the longish Reply I, V, IX? And why, whereas Reply II merely twice reiterates in perfunctory fashion the all-too-simple notion of Prosl. II, do the other three chapters of the Reply referred to offer many ingenious variations upon the more complex theme of Prosl. 11I? The intellectual energy which went into the composition of Prosl. II and Reply II cannot remotely compare with that manifested in the other four chapters. And what have the hundred philosophers to say about the principles so energetically and resourcefully explicated in Prosl. III and Reply 1, V, IX? As a rarely-broken rule, not a single word! For these authors, the chapters might as well have been in invisible ink.

On one conceivable condition the procedure might have been, not justifiable, but excusable: if Anselm had said explicitly that the reasoning of Prosl. III required, among its premises, the conclusion of that of Prosl. II. For then the two

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together would prove something only if the earlier chapter proved its point. To be entirely fair, it is possible, on hasty reading, to take the first sentence of Prosl. III in this sense. However, closer examination shows that no such thing is unambiguously asserted and that if it had been Anselm would have been mistaken about the logical relations of his two arguments. It should be part of a critic’s job to check his judgment on this. Also, and in any case, the intricate, vigorous reasoning of Prosl. Il (and the portions of the Reply which continue its theme) would be interesting in its own right. Unlike that of Prosl. II, it turns upon conceptions of modal logic, and deals explicitly with two kinds of existence, contingent and necessary, rather than with existence versus nonexistence, or merely subjective versus objective (as well as subjective) existence.

When a man takes twenty pages to explain an idea (on which immense issues hang), what rule of textual criticism says that the idea must stand or fall by what is said on the first two of these pages? And who could have imagined that seven centuries might pass before the practice of acting as though there were such a rule would even be emphatically called into question? Perhaps, instead of ‘emphatically’, I should have said ‘rudely’. But can one be altogether polite when gentler admonitions are ignored and people persist in acting as though under a spell whose power has scarcely weakened in all this time, or when almost everyone talks confidently about the import of a text the actual reading of which he has obviously left to some other scholar—who has in fact no more accomplished it than he? How is one who sees all this to act? And suppose he has been at least dimly aware of the situation for forty years, and can count

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on far fewer additional years to convey the message to which, until now, few have been willing to attend. Is not such a one driven to become a bit insistent and dramatic, and not always considerate of everyone’s dignity, or of his own reputadon for modesty? But indeed, it sets up no claim to extraordinary brightness or painstakingness to have escaped, by some lucky set of circumstances, from a strange fashion, almost like a collective hypnosis, of being, in respect to one subject, exceedingly careless or dull-witted. Or is it, perhaps, naively trusting in relying upon other people to read the book which all discuss, but one does not oneself trouble to read?

If this and similar charges are repeated in this commentary a number of times, let the reader not forget that the practices inveighed against have been repeated tens of thousands of times, until they have come to seem beyond the reach of criticism or change. They must be reached and they must change.

It is staggering to think of the five hundred or more works of reference and aids to students in who knows how many languages which more or less grossly misstate the history of so central a matter as the leading proposal ever made to establish a logical connection between conceptual and real existence, and also, by the most direct route, to show the rationality of the central religious belief! How long will these works continue to misinform their readers? Think of the vested interests favoring such continuance. To repeat, the situation staggers the imagination.

Perhaps the whole modern rejection of metaphysics—or the study seeking necessary truths about existence—rests upon similarly shaky foundations. It ought to be, and it is, dangetous in intellectual matters to attack theories we disagree

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with only in their weakest form. In that way, we “play the confidence game upon ourselves” (Peirce)—reinforcing our prejudices over and over with never a chance of escaping from them, even when we encounter those who have thought more deeply than we.

[Return to Part One Contents]

2. The Overestimation of Gaunilo

Anselm was a great mind beside whom Gaunilo was not an intellectual giant. Barth will, I think, convince any patient reader that Gaunilo made certain blunders. Indeed, a patient reader of Anselm will also be convinced of this. Yet to many authors Gaunilo was the real hero of the ancient debate. Consider the following:

This argument . . . found an opponent worthy of Anselmus in Gaunilo, & monk of Marmoutiers in Touraine. Gaunilo emphasizes the difference between thought and being, and points out the fact that we may conceive and imagine a being, and yet that being may not exist. We have as much right to conclude from our idea of an enchanted island in the middle of the ocean that such an island actually exists. The critcism is just. ⁴

In this summary of Gaunilo’s objections, three points are made: the first is compatible with all that Anselm says; the second disagrees with what he says only if it is intended to apply, not to ordinary ideas alone, but to that of God as well, in which case it begs the question; the third is a loose argument by analogy, which will not stand examination. And so the historian, departing from his reasonable schol-

⁴ Alfred Weber, History of Philosopby, trans. Frank Thilly (New York: Scribner’s, 1896, 1925), pp. 169-70.

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arly role, presumes—with the barest pretence of argument— to set at naught the chief idea of a great man. And this is a not unusual sample of the treatment Anselm’s Proslogium has received for nine centuries. It depends partly upon the reader how much longer this state of affairs is to continue. Has it ever been shown that ‘perfect island’ and ‘perfect being’ are logically equivalent, for the purpose of Anselm’s argument? Suppose, for the moment, ‘perfect’—or greatest conceivable—does, as Anselm thinks, imply the necessity of existing; it is also true, according not only to Anselm but to almost everyone, that ‘island’ implies contingency. So ‘perfect island’ implies the contradiction, ‘something both necessary and not necessary’. Conclusion: no island could conceivably be perfect in that theological sense (if there be such a sense) which entails existence. And who, indeed, except to win an argument, would ever have pretended to know what could make an island the ‘greatest conceivable’? Can it, then, be maintained that the noncommittal term ‘being’ in ‘perfect being’ connotes contingency and imperfecdon as manifestly as does ‘island’ in ‘perfect island’? Hardly, for whereas nearly everyone expects islands to be contingent and in many ways other than perfect, the great majority of theologians have thought that God must be the perfect and necessary being. So, to assume that this is as plainly absurd as ‘perfect and necessary island’ is to assume that theism itself, as usually understood, is an obvious absurdity. And thus Gaunilo’s much admired reductio ad absurdum reduces to a transparent begging of the question!

The brave historian, continuing to condescend to a dead man long considered fair game, concludes:

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Indeed, the ontological argument would be conclusive, only in case the idea of God and the existence of God in the human mind were identical. If our idea of God is God himself, it is evident that this idea is the immediate and incontrovertible proof of the existence of God. But what the theologian sims to prove is not the existence of the GodIdea of Plato and Hegel, but the existence of the personal God. However that may be, we hardly know what to admire most—St. Anselmus'’s broad and profound conception, or the sagacity of his opponent who, in the seclusion of his cell, anticipates the Transcendental Dialectic of Kant.⁵

Here we have a fourth criticism, borrowed from Kant As we shall see, what must be inseparable from the idea of God is not His full actuality, but only His bare existence, which is a very different thing.

Weber’s admiration for Gaunilo is another echo of a dubious tradition. No one who has ever studied Anselm with care has failed to be impressed with his greatness of intellect and character; but in what sizable group of educated persons will there not be a Gaunilo or two, that is to say, a well-meaning, bright, but rather conventionally-minded fellow, who tends to greet any subtle and unusual idea with a certain commonsense (‘empirical’) skepticism, and who starts ingenious objections, more or less plausible and more or less relevant, in part understanding the view he is attacking, but in greater part distorting, simplifying, or missing the main point. Every few years, at least, a teacher has a student of this kind. If there is much more in Gaunilo than this, I am not the only reader of Anselm who is unable to see it. To compare such a clever, but essentially commonplace mind with a man of genius seems shocking. And what effort can

⁵ 1bid.

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Weber possibly have made to learn from Anselm’s text how the Saint would—nay, did—answer his critic? Clearly he made virtually no such effortt And why? Because Kant, Hume, Thomas—and Gaunilo (writing before he saw the answer) — had told him to expect nothing valuable there. And so it becomes the historian’s job, not to find meanings, but to impute their absence a priori!

Gaunilo’s substantial contributions, errors and irrelevancies aside, are: (1) his espousal of what we may today term the ‘positivistic’ view (largely anticipated by Carneades) that the initial claim with which Anselm sets out, the availability of an at least logically possible ‘idea of God’, is controversial; (2) his refutation (vaguely anticipatory of Gassendi and Kant) of Anselm’s first or preliminary formulation of his proof (in Chapter II), resting as this apparently does on a dubious conception of ‘existence’ in general; (3) his posing of the quite pertinent question whether the form of the argument, when applied to other topics than the divine existence, would not lead to absurd consequences. What Gaunilo did no# do (but is generally credited with having done) was to justify the affirmative answer to this, in itself, quite proper question. His attempted reductio ad absurdum is easily rebutted. And above all (as Barth remarks) Gaunilo nowhere gives evidence of having got into his head the ultimate form of the argument, which is reached in Chapter III, after a page or two of preliminary skirmishing in the previous chapter. In this oversight his disciples are legion. In view of this long record of haste and carelessness, it behooves all of us to proceed cautiously.

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[Return to Part One Contents]

3. What the Proof Claims to Prove

First, what did Anselm claim to have accomplished by his Proof? Was it to have demonstrated the existence of God to anyone, no matter what his assumptions? But all proofs, as Anselm knew, have premises; whence the premises? A common answer is, from faith. But in that case, it secems, the proof must be unavailing, except to those who already believe, and for them it should be superfluous! And iondeed, if the proof merely derives the existence of God from faith that He exists, it is simply question-begging or circular. Was the thrill of discovery expressed in the Preface to the book concerned with so trivial a matter as that from the premise God exists, one can deduce the conclusion, He exists?

Anselm’s discovery was more subtle and complex than any of the above notions. It amounts to this: there are persons who believe in the divine existence, and these, if they understand their faith, are the only omes who do understand i¢; the others, whether they are believers lacking understanding or ‘unbelievers’, are all people who do not clearly know the meaning of ‘belief in God’. They may, if they are ‘positivists’ (to use a modern word), excuse themselves on the ground that they shrewdly suspect no one else knows the meaning either, because indeed ‘God’ or ‘divinity’ has no clear meaning. (However, the understanding believer may think that he knows better.) But if (like the ‘fool’ of the Psalms) they are atheists, that is, persons who admit that they do find a clear meaning in the central religious question, but yet deny the necessity for an affirmative answer, then, Anselm claims to have shown—and some of us

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find much additional evidence that he is right—they deceive themselves. What they mean by ‘God’ cannot be what the self-understanding believer means by the term.

Alas, this is not quite the whole story. Anselm and most believers who have tried to understand their faith have met— like so many human endeavorers—with only qualified success. It can be shown from the Saint’s writings that he is partially inconsistent—or else much less clear than he means to be—in what he says about God. But it remains nonetheless true that confusion in ideas is the key difficulty, not the mere failure to consult appropriate facts, or the mere presence or absence of faith. No facts can answer an ill-defined question; especially if, as in this case, when adequately understood, it is a self-answering question. So far as it is self-answering, to answer it is a pure matter of logical insight, not of faith. Also, as Anselm in various places tries to show, logical insight can do something toward showing the propriety and logical validity of the question.

Since Anselm’s claim is that only lack of understanding of theistic belief makes possible its rejection, one might have supposed that his critics would have attempted to show that Anselm’s own understanding of belief was faulty and would have realized that to do this they must at least understand his understanding, to which a reasonable first step would have been to read what he had written with some care and thoroughness. Is this what happened? Ah, no. From Gaunilo down through a long list of more illustrious names (including Russell, who was evidently misled by Leibniz) the attitude was: on the basis of the first seven lines of Anselm’s statement of his reasoning, and our own assumed equal or superior grasp of the meaning of the religious term ‘God’, let us reach a de-

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finitive conclusion as to his claim concerning this meaning.

Some readers will be saying: for philosophy, the important thing is whether or not the argument is valid or useful for unbelievers; and this it cannot be if one must first be a believer in order to understand it. But (1) to take this way out is to renounce philosophy’s most important function, which is to clarify the religious question. Science and practical common sense almost take care of themselves, but in facing life, death, and the everlasting, the first and last or strictly cosmic things, man is in great danger of fanatical faith, on the one hand, and cynical despair, on the other. He needs to think about these topics as wisely as he can, and to do this he must cooperate with others, whatever their beliefs, in mutual criticism. This free mutual criticism is the central task of philosophy. So Anselm’s challenge is indeed one which ought not to be brushed aside.

Moreover, (2) it is obvious enough that if, as Anselm holds, the central religious question is self-answering, our whole theory of knowledge must be affected by this truth. We can then no longer assume that the only self-answering questions are trivial or merely linguistic. The general issue of the possibility of metaphysics is here involved. Metaphysical questions are those which, when properly put, are self-answering—and yet are not simply logical or mathematical, at least as logic and mathematics are usually understood and delimited. (Whether they ought to be so understood and delimited is a related and important subject for inquiry.) Metaphysical questions are indeed logical questions, questions essentially about ideas; but since an idea about nothing is not an idea, unless the very idea of ‘nothing’ itself, to say that logical questions are ‘merely’ logical, and therefore

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‘not about existence’, is an antimetaphysical dogma, not a self-evident truth. If Anselm is right, it can be shown to be incorrect. All logical questions (and indeed all questions) are about existence, though not all are equally directly and significantly so. Those logical or self-answering questions which most directly and significantly concern existence are at the same time ‘metaphysical’ questions. Anselm discovered one of the most important of these—does divinity exist? What Anselm proved was the contradictoriness of the negative answer. To reject the positive answer therefore amounts to rejecting the question itself. But the believer is likely to remain serenely confident in his realization that the question is inevitable—on some level of consciousness. It can only be repressed, not rejected.

Such was Anselm’s gift to faith—and not only to faith, to philosophy, which cannot evade its responsibility to deal with faith. That the gift has rarely been accepted proves little, so long as it remains equally true that it has rarely been examined in anything much like the form in which it was offered.

Let us proceed with our own examination.

[Return to Part One Contents]

4. The Definition of God: a Dilemma

The next point to be clarified is the way in which the term God is being used. For a premise of the argument is that even the ‘fool’ who denies God knows, or thinks he knows, the meaning of the word. He is to be confuted by this very meaning. But what is the meaning? Anselm replied with great simplicity: to be God is to be such that ‘none greater can be conceived’. And if you ask about the import of ‘greater’, the reply is, x is greater than y insofar as x is, and

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y is not, something ‘which it is better to be than not to be’. Greater thus means superior, more excellent, more worthy of admiration and respect. Why does our Saint choose this definition? I suppose because he takes it for granted that by ‘God’ is meant the universal object of worship, and if God could have a superior, then only the ignorant or superstitious could worship Him—not all creatures, nor any reasonable creatures. They might fear or admire Him, but not rightly love Him in the unstinted way which is worship.

But now, if a whole system of thought—and Anselm intends no less—is to rest upon a single definition, expressive of faith, ought not the definition to be scrutinized with great care to ascertain if possible whether or not it is (a) really expressive of faith, (b) free from ambiguity, and (c) free from contradiction? Anselm does not seem to think of the matter in this way. Worship requires the unqualified exaltation of its object beyond all possible rivalry, and just this and only this (he thinks) is the content of the definition. How could there be any difhiculty? And if there were contradiction, faith must be simply absurd, which itself, he would think, is absurd. Yet there are difficulties: both serious danger of ambiguity or contradiction and equally serious danger of failing to express faith,

If Anselm largely overlooked these dangers, his critics— those who were in such pell-mell hurry to refute him that they could scarcely pause to read even the four pages of Prosl. II-IV in which the argument was originally presented—these fast-moving critics were not the ones to see the dangers clearly either. Rather it was Leibniz, a defender of the argument (in its Cartesian form, however, or perhaps as reported by Thomas from Prosl. 1I) who brought out the likelihood of

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contradiction in ‘greatest conceivable’, and who also made the best start toward clarifying the ambiguity.

Take any conceivable number. A greater can be conceived. How do we know this is not true of ‘beings’? So much for the possibility of contradiction. The conclusion Leibniz drew was that ‘greatest’ must be taken to mean a purely qualitative, not a quantitative, maximum. Or, as he put it, only those properties can be attributed to God which (unlike quantity) admit a maximal case. The others simply do not apply. Hence the ambiguity in ‘Great’ is to be resolved by the sheer exclusion of quantity. It was, after all, commonplace among the followers of Plato, beginning with Aristotle, and going on through Philo, Plotinus, and Augustine, that deity transcends magnitude altogether. Anselm takes this for granted. God is Great in that He is “whatever it is better to be than not to be.” And better than any size, or number of parts, is being immaterial, simple, and immutable .

What is insufficiently noted here is that quantity may, after all, have a value which is not attainable without it. This consideration is simply ignored, not disproved, in Proslogium, Chapter XVIII, last three paragraphs. The Greek habit (so apparent in Plotinus) of glorying in mere unity (as though absence of contrast were not in principle as deadly as confusion!) is perfectly apparent here. The contention that all having of parts must mean corruptibility is of a piece with certain antitheistic arguments, which Anselm has to combat, against the divine necessity. All existing, his critics say, is contingent existing; similarly, all complexity is disruptible complexity. In both cases, Anselm should have said, the true rule is less simple. It depends upon the kind of thing and its appropriate manner of existing, or of having

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parts. If there can be an eminent, necessary manner of existing, why not an eminent manner of having parts? And we shall see that, in one sense, God may have absolutely no parts while in another sense having more of them than any other being. The old sledgehammer methods in metaphysics need improving. There are ways and ways of having parts, as of existing. So far from its being obvious that the absence of parts is a merit, one of the normal procedures in estimating value is to compare degrees of complexity arising from parts. Beauty of all kinds is unity in variety, and the greater the variety, the greater the value of the unity. A musical chord is as unified as a symphony, but its lack of complexity, its poverty of parts, limits its value most severely. Yet, on the other hand, what could be meant by ‘greatest conceivable variety’? It must mean, all possible variety; and if this is to be unified to constitute a ‘beauty than which none greater is conceivable’, we run into trouble. ‘All possible variety’ is no definite variety at all, but confusion, full of mutual incompatibilities. For, as Leibniz put it, “not all possibles are compossible.” So ‘absolute beauty’—the great Platonic vision—is to all appearances a contradiction.

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5. Neoclassical Resolution of the Dilemma

Is there any escape from the dilemma that ‘greatest conceivable quantity’ is impossible and greatest conceivable quality devoid of quantity is, for all we can see, likewise impossible? Fortunately there is, and to find it we need not abandon Anselm’s definition of deity. We need only note the following ambiguity: ‘None greater can be conceived’ may mean, ‘no greater individual’ or it may mean, ‘no

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greater thing or entity’. If the latter, then not only can no other individual be conceived superior; the same individual cannot be conceived superior to itself—that is, all increase is, by definition, excluded from deity. This was indeed the old Platonic argument: the perfect, being complete or maximal in its value, could change only for the worse; but the capacity for such change being a defect, the perfect cannot change at all. This argument, and others like it, all characteristically Greek, became almost the real deity of Christian philosophers. Anselm accepts this Greek doctrine. But therewith the guarantee that the definition expresses faith is gone. We are then interpreting Greek philosophy, not faith. To worship God is indeed to exalt Him above all possible rivalry on the part of other individuals; they must not be able conceivably to surpass Him. (It is unnecessary to say, ‘must not be able to equal Him’, for ‘two equal but not conceivably surpassable beings’ leads to contradictions.) On this condition all may look up to God and worship Him. But if God surpasses God, that does not of itself imply that another individual can surpass Him.

If God is surpassable, even though only by Himself, then He can include quantity in His quality, without the quantity being that presumably impossible thing, an unsurpassable quantity. The divine quantity will be surpassable, but only by God Himself. Now we have none of the contradictions we have been worrying about. God need not be that apparent impossibility, a quality wholly independent of quantity, nor that other impossibility, an unsurpassable quantity. Nor need He actualize all possible value. Yet He can still fully deserve worship by surpassing all conceivable rivals to Himself.

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This resolution of the double ambiguity inherent in the definiion of Greatness is what I call ‘neoclassical theism’ (since as a technical doctrine, it is largely a creation of the last four centuries), while Anselm’s (or Augustine’s or Philo’s) essentially Greek way of resolving it fits the label ‘classical theism’. I believe that the issues Anselm raised cannot be clarified except in terms of the contrast between these two kinds of theism.

Which form of theism best expresses faith? The classical form is certainly intensely Greek. At least, its authors were all saturated with Platonism. This alone does not show the theory to be incompatible with faith, but it suggests that it might be. And there are strong reasons for accepting the suggestion. A God unsurpassable, even by Himself, is a pure ‘absolute’, wholly unreceptive or insensitive toward the world. He is anything else than a God of love, if the word has even a glimmer of meaning in this usage. We shall see the unfortunate consequences, for all his doctrine, of Anselm’s Hellenism, his substitution of the philosophical absolute for the God of religion. Here, not in the Proof, was the essential flaw. True enough, Philo and Anselm developed Greek theology beyond Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, but only by going further in a direction already set. What was needed was a new direction.

Our Saint’s bold invention in his Argument had two aspects. (1) He would be the first to deduce, from the definition of the God of faith, not simply God’s existence, which would be trivial enough (for of course, faith means by the all-worshipful, all-important being an at least existing being), but to demonstrate rather his necessary and therefore unique mode of existence (Prosl. III), his inconceivability as monexistent. But (2) Anselm intended also

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to deduce all the knowable attributes of God from the same definition. No philosophical theist ever had a more original and brilliant project. (Beside it—oh well, let us not praise one man by disparaging another!) The trouble is that the definition’s ambiguity—and the implicit contradiction of Anselm’s Greek way of resolving the ambiguity—must dog his steps from beginning to end. However, in that age, one had to philosophize in largely Greek fashion. Anselm did what he could. And his very formulae, interpreted by philosophers not under that compulsion, can, with few changes, be made to express a view less Greek, more Christian, and—so far as has yet been shown—more consistent.

The sources of classical theism are well known: in Anselm’s case, primarily Augustine, back of him Plotinus, back of Plotinus, Philo, and back of all, Plato. The negative theology (from which classical theism cannot consistently distinguish itself) is reasonably complete in Philo. With him the pattern was approximately fixed for a long time to come; the submission of religion to the Greek mode of mysticism lasted unbroken for over a millennium. True, Philo put into the tradition religious feelings which were not Greek, and even an idea of divine and human freedom which was rather new. But the logical pattern is still Greek. The exclusion of quantity and becoming from God is decisive. The technical issues are thereby mostly settled; the rest is mainly an emotive difference. Also Augustine had a more nearly Greek theory of the will than Philo, whose great vision of creativity in God and man paled rather than grew brighter in the Christian. A ‘process philosophy’ of universal creativity had to wait a millennium and a half for its opportunity.

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In considering the relation of the Argument to the two forms of theism it is important to realize that these are not simply different or opposed; they have an area of overlap in which they entirely agree. For, as Leibniz said—and the neoclassicists can say no less—those attributes which are capable of maximization must be maximally present in God (otherwise he would not be unsurpassably Great). However, the newer form of theism asserts, and the older denies, that the attributes incapable of maximization must also be in God, provided they are capable of a form which is self-surpassable only, in which form they too describe God. God is, then, absolutely unsurpassable in whatever respects this is possible. Here there is agreement. He is (He is not) surpassable exclusively by self in whatever respects such exclusive selfsurpassability is possible—here is the sole disagreement.

We shall see that the area of ‘overlap’ spoken of suffices to justify Anselm’s claim that necessity of existence inheres in the definition of Greatness; while the admission of nonmaximal but uniquely self-surpassable properties in God removes the ground from under the strongest of the criticisms of the Argument, the objecdon that a mere concept cannot entail concrete existence.

It is also important to note that in the ‘overlap area’ of the two theisms nearly all of Anselm’s descriptions of God hold. He has indeed no parts, accidents, changes, or passions—in His unsurpassable aspects; but for all that He can have them in His self-surpassable ones. Thus we can honor our forefathers’ wisdom, while not being chained forever to the barren abstractions or negations of Greek philosophical mystcism, which they thought must apply to God through and through.

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6. Existence a Predicate?

Our next point concerns the logical status of ‘exist’. Is ‘existing’, in general, part of the description of a thing, one of its ‘predicates’, or is it something quite different from a predicate? If it is a predicate, then hypothetical descriptions are incomplete. “There is a man on this island.” *“What kind of man, an existing, or a nonexisting man?” No, we do not ordinarily think thus of existing things as a special kind. Any consistently-conceived kind of thing might conceivably exist, no matter what else was true of it. Yet, as Anselm first presents his argument, it appears that he takes existing things to be a different, and superior, kind of thing: hence that which is without conceivable superior must exist. This is the form of the argument which so many, for so long, have triumphantly refuted, on the assumption that it was the essential one. The procedure has this excuse, that not only did Anselm, in his first formulation of the argument (Chapter II), seem to reason in the way just specified, but so did Descartes in his first formulation. (He escaped from it only in dealing with objections in his Replies.)

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7.The Second or Strong Form of the Proof

In both Anselm and Descartes, however, the argument is given a second form which need not assume that existence is, in general, a ‘real predicate’; moreover, the existence which in the sole case of God is taken as a predicate is not simply existence in general, but a unique and superior form or manner of existing. This superior form is necessary existence, or existence without conceivable alternative of failing to exist. It may also (Prosl. XII, XXII) be termed self-

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existence, or existence through self—or as Philo had put it, ‘according to essence’. In the Saint’s words: “Thou dost exist so truly that thou canst not be conceived not to exist.” Or again, “Thou art through nothing else than thyself.” In other words, ordinary existence is an inferior or comparatively ‘untrue’ form of existing, existence not through self but through another, always with the threat, the conceivable alternative, of not existing or of never having existed. The existence of all save God is precarious, accidental; and thus to exist is to be inferior to what exists essentially, in its existence beyond the reach of chance or circumstance. This is the Anselmian argument par excellence! The evidence for this is that it is reiterated in a variety of ways (see Prosl. IlI, IV; Reply I, V, IX) all incompatible with the customary interpretation that Anselm must appeal to a general principle of existing things being a special kind. The point is rather this: If God cowuld conceivably fail to exist, He must be something which, "even if it existed” would be less than “that than which none greater can be conceived”’; for we can (it is claimed) conceive of something such that & cannos be concetved mnot to exist, and to be thus is better than to be such that the nonexistence of the thing is conceivable; hence that to which no supersor is to be concesvable must be conceived as such that its nonexistence is inconceivable. He who says be concesves this but believes that it does not, or may not, exist contradicts himself; for be says that he conceives as possible what he also says mo ome can concesve as possible.

The gist of this argument—a stroke of genius if ever there was one—is in the second, third, and fourth sentences of Prosl. III, seven lucid lines. Refutations of Anselm which fail—and

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how many do fail—to quote, paraphrase, or take some account of this short passage (or one of its several equivalents which occur later) may be interesting exercises; they are not, properly speaking, refutations of Anselm!

Our author of so long ago finds it evident—as does this writer—that conceivable nonexistence must be ruled out a priori with respect to Supreme Greatness (we shall sometimes simply say, ‘Greatness’). He tries in various ways (customarily ignored, one need hardly add) to communicate this intuition. A Greatest conceivable which existed merely in fact, or so that its nonexistence might conceivably have obtained instead, would not be Greatest, for thus to exist, confronted with the specter of one’s own conceivable nothingness, is the abysmal weakness which infects, for example, our own existence. It implies ultimate dispensability: existence might not have included me; I am thus absolutely derivative, owing my existence to a happy chance, or to the choice of another. Thus to exist is a defect or limitation. The superior manner of existing would be ‘without conceivable alternative’. So we see that contingency is qualitative, a genuine predicate, even though contingent exsstence, as compared to contingent nonexistence, is (in a sense, and for the purposes of this discussion) qualitatively neutral.

Among the supplementary arguments by which the Saint tries to support his insight are the following. Where nonexistence and existence are alike conceivable, a transition from the first to the second must also, he thinks, be conceivable. (Reply 1, IV, VIL) But any existence resulting from such a transition would be incompatible with the status of Greatest. It would imply a beginning in time, dependence upon causes, circumstances, and the like, all of which are deficiencies.

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Also, what exists contingently is assembled from elements which previously existed, perhaps, in another combination or arrangement.

Again, Greatness, unlike all other predicates, does not exist by virtue of Being or Goodness taking on some accidental form, called Greatness. God is not merely a particulacly good thing but the principle of Good. Were He (per impossibile) not to exist, no good thing could either. And as Anselm’s teacher, Augustine, said, God is Truth itself; without Him nothing could be true. Hence, ‘without Him’ cannot express a possible state of affairs.

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8. Malcolm and Findlay: a Fresh Start?

It is almost miraculous that for so many centuries no one, apparently, was really clear that Anselm had presented at least two ontological arguments, rather than one, and that Descartes had followed him in this. The present writer was perhaps the first to insist upon this distinction as close to the surface in the writings of the two authors mentioned.⁶ However, Flint had suggested it with respect to Descartes, and Barth had fully seen it with respect to Anselm. Recently Norman Malcolm (see Bibliography I) has also arrived at it and has presented it so skilfully as to arouse a good deal of interest. (See Sec. 23.)

A few years before Malcolm’s essay, Findlay (see Part Two, Sec. 17, and Bibliography I) set forth the following position. Anselm was indeed right in holding that deity

⁶ C. Hartshorne, “The Formal Validity and Real Significance of the Ontological Argument,” Philosophscal Review, 53 (1944), 225-45, esp. p. 234 n.

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must be supposed (if supposed at all) to exist necessarily; for a being worthy of worship could not have the defect that its very existence was contingent or had a conceivable alternative. However, said Findlay, so far from proving the divine existence, by pointing to this requirement, Anselm had really disproved it. For modern logical analysis shows that no existence can be necessary. Concrete or actual existence cannot follow from a mere predicate or abstract definition. Hence divine perfection is impossible.

In my opinion, this criticism was more penetrating than all the classical ones. A merely contingent being would not deserve worship, for we should be revering at most a big and wonderful accident; yet, on the other hand, that a mere abstraction like ‘all-worshipful’ could necessitate a concrete actuality is a logical absurdity. I call this the Findlay paradox or dilemma. Both horns of the dilemma seem unacceptable. However, as often, it may be a trilemma: there may be a third horn. Must one choose between taking divinity as a candidate for contingent existence and supposing that ‘necessary existence’ means the necessity of a particular or concrete actuality? Anselm, so far as I can see, overlooks the dilemma and can offer us no escape from it. This was his major error, resulting as we shall see from his Neoplatonism. But his critics seem to have shared his oversight. They have never focused on the real point, the assumption that the existence of an individual must be concrete or particular and can in no case be abstract and universal.

There is another, more commonly-noted difficulty: if divine or necessary existence is a superior kind of existence, what does it have in common with the inferior forms? For if it has nothing, then we merely equivocate when we speak of God’s

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existing. And what can contingent, and absolutely necessary ‘existence’ have in common? Anselm does not tell us in any satisfactory or clear way.

Is it not evident that an existence which is deducible from an abstract definition—such as that used by Anselm—must itself be abstract? An abstract idea is always neutral as to the particular concrete reality in which it is or may be actualized, and this is inherent in the very meaning of ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’. Either, then, God’s reality is wholly abstract, or He has a particular concrete actualization which is contingent. But if the concrete reality which actualizes divinity is contingent, what can it mean to say that God’s existence is necessary? The answer, which cannot be found in Anselm or any of his best-known critics, is as follows: to exist is always, and this is the universal meaning, to be somehow actualized in a suitable concrete (and contingent) reality; but whereas in ordinary cases of existence not only is the particular concrete reality contingent, but also it is contingent that there is any concrete reality embodying the predicate. In the divine case, however, the predicate is to be thought of as inevitably actualized somehow, that is, in some suitable concrete reality. Thus contingency has two forms: either (1) both that and how the predicate is actualized or concretized are accidental; or (2) only the how is accidental, while the that is necessary. Existence in general and always means, somehow actualized in a contingent concrete form, just what form, or how actualized, never being necessary. Existence in the superior, or divine form, accordingly, means that the abstract essence (worshipfulness or the impossibility of a superior) is somehow actualized in a suitable contingent concrete form; but here only the how of actualization,

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the particular concrete reality, not that there is some suitable actualization, is contingent.

Of course this ‘neoclassical’ solution implies (what the whole scholastic tradition denied) ‘accidents’ or contingent properties, as well as essental ones, in God. Yet it is not hard to see that Anselm really needs this distinction, not only for his argument, but for other purposes. Thus he says (Prosl. VI, VIII) that God must be a compassionate God, for it is better to be compassionate than not compassionate, Lie., cruel or indifferent to the creatures’ sufferings. On the other hand, since there must be nothing contingent, hence no true ‘passion’, in God, He cannot really be changed by what happens to us. Anselm’s solution was that only in His effects upon His creatures is God compassionate, not in His own reality. We receive the benefits which might be expected to flow from His caring about us and being moved to sorrow by our miseries, but really He remains quite unmoved, literally indifferent, or in an identical state of bliss whatever happens to any creature. This is a form of ‘as if’ doctrine; it is as if God loved us in an intelligible sense, but really all that can be said is that benefits flow from Him to us. We may call this the ‘benefit-machine’ view of divine love. The sun produces crops, as though it cared about our hunger and its appeasement; in reality it cares not. So with God. Is this satisfactory?

If the distinction between the necessarily ‘somehow actualized’ and the contingent ‘how’ of actualization is accepted, then the necessarily existing God can be genuinely compassionate; and the two paradoxes of a necessary yet concrete actuality and the merely ‘as if’ compassionate deity are removed at one stroke.

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From the foregoing it follows that most of a millennium was allowed to go by before the logic of Anselm’s proposal was propetly explored. No one was sufficiently willing to admit that his previous views might have been radically mistaken to undertake a free exploration of Anselm’s problem. Everyone wanted, in some simple way, to accept or reject the argument, and then go on philosophizing as before in other respects. But Anselm's discovery was too fundamental to make such trivial adjustments finally tenable. What Anselm had discovered, or almost discovered, was that existence and actuality (or concreteness) are in principle distinct, and that two kinds of individuals may be conceived, those whose existence and actuality, although distinct, are both contingent and those—or that one—whose actuality but not existence is contingent, this second kind being superior to all others. According to this view, any individual, no matter how superior, exists by virtue of contingent concrete states; but whereas with you or me it is always possible that there should be no such states at all, with God, though any such state is contingent, that there is some such state is necessary.

If God has contingent states, could we not conceive a greater than He by supposing that His contingent state or states had been greater? But this would merely have been God Himself, in a greater state. That God can surpass Himself does not open up a possibility that someone not God could surpass (or equal) God; and only this possibility conflicts with worshipfulness. God may rival Himself, but that justifies no conceit in anyone else.

It may be objected that a greater than God, as we have defined Him, could still be conceived, namely, a being so great that it could not be surpassed even by itself. But this

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idea leads, as we have seen, to paradox and insoluble dilemmas, to absurdity. Absurdity cannot define ‘x greater than any conceivable y’, for absurdity does not define anything.

If the foregoing reasoning is sound, Anselm made a very great discovery, though as so often happens, he only partly understood its nature. His critics saw something of what he overlooked, usually, however, at the cost of missing part of what he had discovered. They realized that nothing concrete, or in that sense actual, can be necessary. Malcolm, to be sure, denies this, saying that it is valid only if by ‘concrete’ we simply mean ‘contingent’. But this will not do. For by necessary we must mean abstract. Let us see more definitely why.

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9. The Necessary Is Abstract

A necessary proposition is one whose truth is included in that of any other proposition whatever. For, were this not so, it must be possible for the other proposition to be true while the necessary proposition was false. But the hypothesis is that the proposition cannot be false under any circumstances, since what it affirms is necessary. In this sense, then, as C. I. Lewis has pointed out, a necessary proposition is entailed by any proposition.⁷ This has been termed a paradox. What has ‘it rained here today’ to do with ‘2 and 2 are four’?

⁷ For an interesting discussion of problems connected with this, see N. R. Hanson, “A Budget of Cross-Type Inferences,” The Journal of Philosophy, 58 (1961), 449-70. [I do not see that the Argument is cross-type; neither premises nor conclusion are contingent. Yet Hanson implies that he has refuted the Argument.] For C. I. Lewis's view, see A Survey of Symbolic Logic (Berkeley, 1918), pp. 336-339; also Symbolic Logic by Lewis and C. H. Langford (New York: Dover Publications, 1932, 1959), pp. 492-514, esp. 511-514.

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More troublesome still, perhaps, is the consideration that many very complex questions of arithmetic are so difficult that prolonged efforts by many mathematicians have failed to furnish answers. If so simple a premise as the one quoted above entails the answer to all questions of necessary truth it is odd that we cannot simply deduce these answers. But then no one will contend that deducible consequences are always easy actually to deduce. Moreover, all deduction involves logical rules or principles, and ‘finitary’ arithmetic, at least, seems to be inherent in these rules. What follows from a premise is what a person with unrestricted logical powers can arrive at by virtue of understanding the premise. Now from a proposition, say p, a sufficiently logical person can derive p V ¢; hence he can also derive p V~p. In similar though usually less obvious ways any necessary truth, however complex, should be attainable. All one has to do is to weaken or neutralize the elements of irrelevant logical strength in the initial proposition and reason logically about the results. Two difficulties must be overcome in the process. We must be able to abstract from irrelevancies, adequately neutralize contingent alternatives, and still keep our attention upon the extremely attenuated remainder; and in some cases we must perform very complex logical operations (as in the more difficult problems in theory of numbers).

The sense of paradox connected with Lewis's principle arises mainly from this, that in an inference to the necessary, one does not really utilize the distinctive meaning of a contingent premise, but only its nondistinctive kernel. It is a mere illustration, where any illustration we are able to think clearly about would do. Note, however, that even in ordinary inferences we usually discard part of the distinctive mean-

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ing of our premises. Thus the full or unweakened conclusion from ‘Socrates is a man, all men are mortal’ would not be, ‘Socrates is mortal’, but rather, ‘All men, including Socrates, are mortal’, or ‘Socrates, like all other men, is mortal’. Inference to the necessary is simply the completion of the normal weakening or attenuating process of discarding notwanted aspects of assumptions. Only rather trivial inferences fail to exhibit such weakening. For instance, in ‘x is equal to y therefore y is equal to x’ the conclusion is indeed as strong as the premises; but this is exceptional. I submit, therefore, that Lewis is essentially right, and that, just as the necessary is what all possible states of reality have in common, so necessary propositions affirm the neutral universally common element of meaning in ordinary propositions, and accordingly, inferring this element is merely the extreme or limiting case of the attenuation of commitment ordinarily involved in drawing conclusions.

We may here suggest by anticipation how the familiar objection to Anselm that necessity is a matter of propositions not of things, or is de dict» not de re, is going to be dealt with in this book. If reality is essentially creative process, with an aspect of futurity or partial indeterminacy (as Socinus, Lequier, Fechner, Bergson, Peirce, Montague, and some other ‘neoclassical’ philosophers have thought), then objective necessity is merely what all real possibilities have in common, their neutral element, which will be actualized ‘no matter what’ course the creative process may take. This neutral element is creativity in its essential or irreducible aspect, which is inseparable from the necessary aspect of deity. That Anselm had an adequate grasp of this theory of modality can

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certainly not be maintained. No Neoplatonist could have had such a grasp. But his Proof leads us to it if we follow out its implications sufficiently resolutely.

The reader may well be thinking that the assertion of God'’s existence cannot be comparable to such necessities as ‘p V~p’, since, in the latter but not the former, only ‘logical constants’ appear, and since what is not a formality of logic must be empirical, only to be justiied a posteriort. If contemporary logic were a complete system, with a clearly demarcated boundary, and if it were proved that the principle of this boundary coincided with that between a priori and a posteriori, then all would be in order. But who would dare assert that such is the case? How far even set theory is purely ‘logical’ is a moot question, but more than that, the a priori theory of rational inference should, I hold, include some elucidation of two things, the ultimate or completely general theory of concrete entities as such (from which all abstract entities in some fashion derive) and the ultimate or completely general theory of knowing, experience, or awareness, including a theory of givenness, of what it is to experience something. How can the theory of reasoning be complete until these two conditions are met? Logic, as Peirce said (we might mention Husserl here), should include a general or nonpsychological Erkenntnistheorse, theory of knowledge as such. But this is impossible without a theory of reality as such, of what it is to be something knowable. When we have such a completed logic, or theory of the a priori, the idea of God will, I argue, be integral to it. For that idea can be defined with no other equipment than the generalized notion of reality as knowable. God is the X who is not conceivably surpassed, in any categorial way, by another; these categorial ways are all equiv-

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alent, so that any one of them suffices to define God. Thus that God’s knowledge cannot be surpassed (by another) is enough to distinguish Him from all else. If A knows that p and B does not know that p, then A surpasses B cognitively in this respect; hence the unsurpassability of 4 by another means that A knows all there is to be known, or that ‘p entails A knows that p’. So we have defined deity in purely generic or a priori terms. For what empirical fact would be needed in order to form the idea of knowing itself? One would only have to know something, anything at all, and know that it was known, to have the idea. But then one has only to quantify universally in order to distinguish God from all else. Only God has a wnmiversal relation of knowing to things. Ordinary individuals differ from one another in that, while (if they are conscious) they know some things and are ignorant of others, it is impossible to define the distinctive line in each case between the knowledge and the ignorance without mentioning particular empirical facts. But where 4/l is known and there is no ignorance, one needs only a universal statement: No matter what the facts may be, God is the unique X who knows them all. Thus, perhaps: 1 x (z) Kxz. This formula has no special empirical content. Yet it defines deity. (Probably, to be adequate, the formula should be in modal, not extensional, logic.)

Again, take the category of causal influence. Without this idea no statement has a complete meaning, for (to give only one of the reasons) an assertion is what might be believed, and belief with no relation to action, causal influencing, is an empty word. But nothing is easier than to state a definitive characteristic of deity in terms of influencing. If A influences C and B does not influence C, then insofar A surpasses B in causal power. Hence the only way to construe causal unsurpassability

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is to state as minimum that, for any x, 4 influences x. It is not hard to show that only God can meet this condition.

Since ‘God exists necessarily’ means (by Lewis’s principle) that the assertion of His existence must be knowable from any fact whatever, or the denial of any fact, it follows that, not only is it definitive of God that He knows all thete is to know, but also that He is knowable by all minds with sufficient powers of reflection to interpret their experiences adequately. He is in this sense wniversal subject and umsversal object of knowing. The same conversion can be effected with causal influence: not only is God the unique A influencing all things, but God is also the unique A influenced by all things. Thus we have already given four ways of distinguishing God in purely generic or a priori terms. And others are possible. Hence I return to the assertion that the divine existence is entailed by any fact or truth whatever, being as a priori as ‘p V~p’. And indeed, the notion of infallibility means that p entails, God knows that p, and that ~p entails, God knows that ~p, so that ‘p V~p’ and ‘God knows that p or God knows that ~p° are equivalent. They are equally nonempirical or ‘formal’, in the most basic sense. To suppose otherwise is to confuse creaturely knowledge, subject for its degree of truth to chance, circumstance, contingency, with the Creator’s knowledge, whose truth is infallibly guaranteed.

We see then that the idea of God, ‘extralogical’ as, by some current criteria, it is, need not for all that be empirical, unless in a Pickwickian or misleading sense. The same result ensues if we adopt Popper’s criterion of ‘empirical’, namely ‘conceivably falsifiable’. I have shown in a previous work that theism, by its very meaning, is rigorously unfalsifiable. (Positivistically inclined philosophers will then argue that

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it can have no existential import. But as an inference this merely begs the question.)

The term ‘logic’, or ‘formal logic’, can of course be used in the narrow sense now frequently given to it, and this may be advisable. But then the word ‘empirical’ should also be defined sharply, and not be used so widely and vaguely as to coincide with ‘extralogical’. For it is at least as important to have a clear meaning for ‘empirical’ as for ‘formal’, and Popper if anyone has explicated the first of these two meanings. But as so explicated it fails to coincide with ‘extralogical’, taking ‘logical’ in the current strict sense. Moreover, until various questions concerning modal and deontological logics (and contrary-to-fact conditionals), at the very least, are much better settled than they are now, it is dogmatism if not obscurantism to identify what can be known a priori with any currently available view of formal analyticity.

I now call attention to a widely—I am tempted to say universally—neglected consequence of the foregoing. That ‘any proposition entails the necessary truths® itself entails that any proposition no matter how abstract entails such truths. Moreover, since the concrete elements all drop out in the inference to the necessary, one might as well or better start with an abstract premise. Thus instead of arguing, ‘this world exists, therefore God, the necessary being, exists’, one may take as premise, ‘something exists’. For if the conclusion is to be strictly necessary (and if not, the necessary being will be but conditionally necessary and not what the argument seeks), the conclusion must follow just as well from the more abstract premise. And so, ‘divinity exists necessarily’, if true, must follow from ‘something exists’—yes, even from ‘either something exists or nothing exists’. (This is the proper

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form of the cosmological argument, which, as we now see, must be valid if the ontological is so.) But, as is logically selfevident, from an abstract proposition alone only abstract propositions can follow. For the more concrete a proposition is, the logically stronger it is, or the more it asserts; and from the logically weaker, the logically stronger cannot follow. Moreover, a proposition can scarcely be weaker than ‘something exists’. Hence ‘divinity exists’, which follows from it, as from any proposition, must be similarly abstract or weak in what it commits us to. In addition, any necessary proposition whatever that is true of God must be on the same level of abstractness. Take, then, the proposition, ‘God knows that you and I exist’. This proposition has concrete reference and so cannot be necessary; nor can it follow from the proposition, ‘God, an omniscient being, exists’. For this might be true though it were also true that you and I did not exist, and obviously what was false would not be known to be true, even—or especially—by God. Thus Anselm, had his mind been free to reflect without fear or favor on the meaning of God’s necessity, should have seen that God’s necessary existence must be very different indeed from His total concrete or factual reality. The divine necessity is #hat such abstract traits or ‘perfections’ as ‘knowing all there is to know’ must be realized in some concrete form, with respect to some concrete world of knowable things, but not necessarily in the form and with respect to the world which actually obtain.

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10. In What Sense the Proof Is 

Suppose that what we have said so far is correct; would it follow that God has been proved to exist? Not quite. The

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reason was given by Thomas Aquinas and, more clearly, by

Leibniz: we have not shown that our definition of divine perfection is more than verbal, or as Leibniz puts it, nominal. Consider the definition: ‘necessarily-existing round-square’. To deny its existence is contradictory, for we should be saying that the necessarily true is yet false. However, to assert its existence is also contradictory, for we should be saying that what is round is in the same respect not round. The way out of the maze is to reject the proposed definition as an ill-formed expression, incapable of either truth or falsity. Anselm presents us with this question, Is his definition of God capable of describing anything thinkable? And since, as we have seen, the definition is ambiguous, meaning either ‘none greater except itself’, or ‘none greater simpliciter’, our question becomes a double one. That Anselm’s own meaning, the one last mentioned in the previous sentence, is paradoxical we have pointed out. A paradoxical concept cannot furnish the basis of a cogent argument for the truth of that concept. Whether the alternative construction of the definition can evade the paradoxes, without falling into others of its own, is a question which lies outside the present essay. That it does not face the same paradoxes we have seen.

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11. Predicates, Individuals, and States

Modern logic has made a point of the distinction between ‘predicates’, which individual cases may ‘instantiate’ or ‘embody’, and the individual cases themselves. The latter ‘exist’ only in a tautological sense. To be an individual is to exist in the only sense in which an individual can exist. A predicate, in contrast, may have a sort of thinkable reality,

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and yet not exist, that is, not be instantiated. We are told, accordingly, that we should not say, ‘God, or the such and such, exists’, for this is empty tautology, but only, ‘something is divine’, or, ‘there is a divine individual’. But here logicians are in danger of confusing two issues. If in the formula ‘(3x)Dx’ (‘for some x, x is divine’) the values of the variable ‘x' are taken to be individuals, in the usual sense of thing or person, then ‘for some x’ is misleading, since only one individual could be divine. In other words, ‘(3x) Dx & (3y) Dy’ strictly implies ‘(x = y)’. Moreover, the individuality of ‘x’ must here be as abstract as the predicate ‘D’. Thus the mere formula ‘(3x)Dx’ is adequate to state the meaning of the divine existence in its concrete aspect only if the values of ‘x’ are not individuals but rather events or states of individuals. The formula then means, ‘there are individual states which are divine’. This still does not say what is meant by ‘God exists’, unless we further understand that any such state x, and any other y, are necessarily ‘genidentical’ with each other. (Genetic identity is the relaton holding between diverse states of the same individual.) This relationship holds because any divine state must be all-knowing and therefore two such states can have different content only on the assumption that when one, say x, exists, the other, y, does not yet exist, and hence even the all-knowing will not know it; but when y does exist, it must fully know x, and for this and other reasons x and y must constitute successive states of one and the same all-knowing individual.

In addition, we must regard ‘(3x)Dx’ as necessarily, not merely factually, true. Not that the particular value of x is necessary, but that there must be some value or other. The class of ‘values of x’, say a,b,c, etc, cannot be empty,

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though the members of this class might have been other than a,b,c, . . Absolute necessity is always the impossibility that a certain class be empty. This is the same as saying that necessity is always abstract. The class of divine states cannot be empty; moreover, every such state must be in a relation of genidentity with every other, and thus all are states of one and the same necessarily-existing individual. That the states might all have been different does not mean that another individual God might have existed but only that the same God might have existed in other concrete forms.

In a philosophy which, like that of the Buddhists or of Whitehead, takes events or states to be the ultimate units of concrete reality and regards enduring individuals as somewhat abstractly conceived sequences of events, with certain relations to one another, the ultimate values of variables are, of course, events. Moreover, in this sort of philosophy it is rather easy to see that the existence of an individual is always more abstract than the actuality of events. The same individual can exist in a variety of events, and these are never wholly determined by the mere individuality of the sequence. We can know this man as such long before we know all of his states, which indeed could not be known undl he had died. Yet we must know something concrete to identify this man. God, however, is unique in that any state with a certain abstract property of divinity will belong to just the one divine personal sequence and no other. This is the only self-individuating yet radically-abstract property. All other individuals are individuated by something specific or relatively concrete. It follows at once that they cannot exist necessarily. By the same token, God can and indeed must so exist.

So again we see what deep implications are involved in

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Anselm'’s supremely great insight, that God and only God exists by necessity of His (abstract) nature. The abstractness as such escaped Anselm, but the terms of his definition make it quite plain. Nothing but extreme abstractions eater into ‘that than which none greater can be conceived’. This abstractness is the reason why the similarly abstract truth that the defined predicate is ‘somehow embodied’ is necessary and also the reason why this necessary existence cannot be the concrete or total reality of God. But little in scholastic philosophy, or in Kant’s, was favorable to a clear grasp of these two aspects of the Anselmian principle. This principle, in its implications, bursts the bonds of scholasticism. No wonder Thomas rejected the Proof.

The principle, to state it once more, is the necessary noncontingency of the divine existence. What could not be contingent is either necessary or impossible. Anselm assumed that even the foolish atheist would not take God to be impossible (or ‘meaningless’). So he inferred necessary existence. Yet Gaunilo rightly urges (it was not a new contention) the reasonableness, from an unbeliever’s point of view, of the positivistic position, as we might today call it. And it is here, as we have seen, that the real issue lies. The Saint’s attempt (Reply, VIII, IX) to show that his idea of God is produced by quite intelligible procedures, and so cannot be absurd, is insufficient to convince very many of us. Leibniz’s efforts in the same direction were also not successful. This is the main unfinished business, I suggest, in this whole matter. Could God exist, is any idea of his nature intelligible? is the great question. Atheism is no longer a valid issue; but positivism certainly is.

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12. The Role of Faith

Koyré, Karl Barth, and others remind us that Anselm was arguing not with infidels but with believers. Barth admits that the Saint at times seems to forget or deny that there are or can be any true infidels, and to talk as though his argument should convince anyone. Insofar as it does not convince, it follows—even, I think, from Barth’s own exposition—that either the argument has been poorly understood, or the lack of conviction means retreat into the positivistic position, the denial that there is, strictly speaking, an idea of God or a cognitive meaning for ‘God’. To dispel doubt on this score an element of faith is perhaps needed.

Before Barth, Koyré had put into full relief the precise sense in which Anselm’s argument appeals to faith, and is inconclusive against unbelievers.⁸ The atheist, the man who says that we can conceive God but cannot know that He exists, will be “silenced” by the argument, sf he attends carefully to its structure. For—as Anselm discovered, to his lasting glory—to conceive divinity and 4now that we do so is logically equivalent to knowing that divinity or God exists. But, though the atheist as such is silenced, the unbeliever as such need not be. He has only to shift his ground to the positivistic position: "I do not know that I—or anyone—can conceive God (without falling into contradiction or nonsense).” The moment this happens, the theist must either himself lapse into silence or else enlarge his procedure; he must give some reason other than his faith for supposing that divinity is conceivable. Anselm’s other theistic proofs (in the Monologium) can be used for this purpose, but none too cogently. Like his

⁸ Koyté, op. cit., pp. 210 ff.

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Proslogium proof they suffer from the classical confusion between concrete and abstract, and they have other defects.

But though the Proof does not refute unbelief of the positivistic variety, it does force the unbeliever to take the radical ground of denying coherent meaning to the religious idea. If the believer in God is sure he understands himself, and does not contradict himself or talk nonsense, he is immune to further attack. This clarifies and focuses the entire problem. And at the same time, it disposes of the claim of sheer empiricism (fairly well represented by Gaunilo) to be an adequate method of dealing with ultimate philosophical issues. Carnap and Wittgenstein are right: the basic philosophical questions are not factual, but semantic. It was Anselm who first clearly revealed this truth. For, as Anselm also knew, divinity is the first principle of metaphysics or ontology: if it is not an empirical topic, neither is anything else that is philosophically essential. When Wittgenstein says, “theology is grammar,” he is really agreeing, insofar, with Anselm. The remaining issue is, how correct is the grammar? Here is where an element of intuition, faith, insight, what you will beyond mere formal reasoning, is inescapable. But so is it in mathematics itself (consider Godel’s discovery).

Koyré speaks of the ‘fact’ that divinity is conceivable. But this is no mere fact, but a necessary truth—or else an impossibility or absurdity. Nothing can merely happen to be conceivable. Conceivability is modal, and all modal classifications (on the purely abstract level here in question) are a priori, not factual in the proper sense. What can be said is rather that the truth or validity of the claim to conceive God is controversial, as between believers and unbelievers. After all, there are controversial topics even in mathematics, in the present

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state of that science; but they are not questions of ‘fact’, save in a dubiously extended meaning of that word. They are questons of logic, or of linguistic rules and their propriety. Or, they are questions of what the eternal Mind, merely as eternal, does or does not see to be valid independently of all factual circumstances. They are not questions of what happens to exist, or come into existence. They are not things ‘made’, hence not facts in the etymological, which is also the systematically most clear and useful, sense.

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13. Is the Proof Platonic?

Just as the truth that Anselm’s argument ‘presupposes faith’ is made untrue by being taken too simply, as though the Proof had no secular philosophical importance, so the truth that he was a Platonist is made into an error unless construed with caution. It does not mean that if we are not Platonists we can with impunity ignore the Proof. It does not even mean that the strongest version of the Proof is one with a ‘Platonic’ setting, if that term is interpreted in the most usual way.

Classical theists are, indeed, all ‘Platonists’ in a certain sense even if, like Thomas, they are also Aristotelians. They all think that the universal principle of being can be a sort of superconcrete yet eternal reality; an ‘actus purus’, immune to change and becoming, and yet not an empty abstraction, inferior in value to concrete manifestations of, or creations by, the principle. They think that ‘goodness itself’ must be the most good thing, or the absolute measure of beauty must be the supremely beautiful thing. They commit thus a sort of ‘homological’ fallacy. The eternal and necessary principle

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is, they imply, in no way abstract or inferior to concrete contingent actualities. Anselm’s unawareness of the abstract-concrete paradox was merely one form of this ‘Platonic’ attitude. (Whether or not Plato knew better we need not here inquire. It is important that many of his followers did not.)

Against this ‘Platonizing’ procedure, we may argue: if, as seems reasonable, contingency is in the step from universal to particular, or from more to less universal forms, then it is also (for this is the same) in the step from the more abstract to the more nearly concrete. But then the necessary should be looked for in the opposite direction, facing toward the most abstract!

Does this form of anti-Platonism (or moderate Platonism) invalidate the Argument? Only if one assumes the extreme neo-Platonic or Classical form of Theism as its conclusion. But then the argument is invalid anyway (Findlay paradox). Suppose, however, we take what is often termed the Aristotelian view of universals or forms, that they are not ultimately and absolutely separable from concrete instances, what then becomes of the Proof? Answer: it takes on a neoclassical form. Universals must have some embodiment (if in nothing else, in some mind thinking them). It follows that contingency cannot have its ground in the mere contrast between ‘predicates’ and ‘exemplified predicates’. For some predicates must be exemplified, or there would be nothing to talk about, whether universal or particular. The ground of contingency is rather in the distinction between specific and generic predicates, or between more and less determinate ideas. Specific predicates always involve mutual exclusiveness. They are competitive ways of specializing more general notions, alternative 'determinates’ under higher ‘determinables’; but the

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bare ‘somehow specialized, somehow concretized’, when applied to the highest determinables, is not competitive with anything positive whatever, but only with the ultra-Platonic negation, ‘mere form not specialized, not concretized at all’.

It is one thing to say that each step toward particularity, each increase in the logical strength of our assertions, must involve contingency; it is another, often strangely confused with it, to say that there might be no particularizadon at all “The most general universal is somehow particularized’ is a completely general statement, affirming no definite particular whatever. The contingency of each definite step toward particularity only means that, instead of this or that step, other equally definite steps might have been taken; it does not mean that no definite step might have been taken. To affirm this last as possible is to attribute complete self-sufficiency to the abstract or universal, as I believe not even Plato did.

Applying these considerations to the Proof, we see that the ontological argument is valid if, and only if, the individuality of God is conceivable as a pure determinable, which, like all pure determinables, by the Aristotelian principle (implied by the extensional assumptions of modern logic?) must be particularized and concretized somehow. Although divinity is truly individual, incapable of coexisting with another in its class, yet (as we are about to see) its bare existence, its being ‘somehow actualized’, is quite as abstract (in the here relevant sense), quite as nonspecific or noncompetitive, as ‘reality as such’. It has the same absolutely infinite range of variations, the same unrestricted flexibility. (This does not make the actuality of deity a flabby characterless thing; for the actuality is the contingent bow of em-

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bodiment, not the bare necessary truth ‘embodied somehow’. While God, merely by existing, is not required to forbid this or that nondivine form of existence, by free contingent decision He can do so.) Deity is individual but, according to the neoclassical view, precisely the individual whose definitive functions are strictly universal—such as, knowing everything, influencing and being influenced by everything, related actually to all actual things, potentially to all possible things, coextensive thus with modality itself, and so bound to be instanced no matter what more special abstractions are or are not instanced. None of Anselm’s critics, nor yet his most recent defender Malcolm, seems to have considered this notion of modal coextensiveness as intrinsic to perfection.

The equivalence of modal coextensiveness with Unsurpassability (by others) is manifest: any supposedly rival actuality must be included in the actuality of Greatness (otherwise God would be but a constituent of the total actuality), and what any other individual could be is only a fragment of all that the Unsurpassable could and would be if the other individual were actual. Thus the necessary aspect of deity is simply the ultimate determinable as bound to be embodied in some concrete determinate form. To affirm this inevitability of embodiment as conclusion of the Proof is not to exceed the logical strength of the premises, for the conclusion (and, we shall argue, the whole of metaphysics and pure logic) is already implicit in the minor premise, ‘God is conceivable as not conceivably surpassed’, alone. ‘Somehow-actualized Greatness’ is quite as abstract or ‘weak’ as simple ‘Greatness’ —the concreteness being here wholly in the how of actualization. It is different with ‘somehow-actualized black swans’. For here the kind of thing is itself restrictive or competitive,

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an hypothetical or threatened limitation upon the realization of other possibilities; ‘somehow actualized’ simply affirms the realizaton of this threat. But Greatness does not, of itself, threaten any possibility whatsoever. On the contrary, it is to be thought of as the very being of possibility in general, the power which any possibility would express if actualized.

The reader may be wondering how an ultimate determinable could issue in determinations: there is the old query, can a thing give what it lacks? Here we have exactly the mistake of Platonism (in the bad sense), the notion that all beauty of beautiful concrete things must preexist, or eternally exist, in the Principle or Source of beauty. The notion that creation consists in the mere parceling out of an already completed value is exactly what philosophies somewhat lacking in religious vision might be expected to have. It is the denial of any intelligible creativity, divine or creaturely. To be creative is to add positive determinations to reality, to enrich the totality of things by new values. The ultimate determinable is the supreme creativity; it produces the values, it does not simply pass them out, or down, to the creatures from its Own prior possession.

We seem to have shown that in the neoclassical, or ‘moderately Platonic’ use, the Argument can escape the traditional charges of formal fallacy. True, the acceptance or rejection of either the minor premise (that deity is conceivable) or the Anselmian Principle (existential contingency is a defect, because necessary existence is conceivable and better) will, for each individual, involve, directly or indirectly, an element of intuitive judgment. Is there any argument which will not somewhere require such judgment? Not for nothing is ‘counterintuitive’ used by logicians. Unfortunately, on some

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topics the available supply of intuitive comprehension is today not great. Perhaps it never can be great, but it might be increased.

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14. A Theory of Modality

That ordinary predicates neither exist necessarily nor necessarily fail to exist is inherent in their meanings. For they describe a conceivable sort of world which excludes other sorts likewise conceivable, and to do this belongs to their very function as predicates of the usual type. Similarly, self-contradictory predicates, by their mere meanings, necessarily do not exist. In these two cases modal status inheres in the predicate itself. What then is incongruous in there being a third form of predication which, by its very meaning, neither (1) excludes existence nor (2) is neutral to it (existing if this possibility, but not if that possibility, is actualized), but rather (3) requires existence (exists no matter what possibility is actualized)? No impartial person can, | think, deny that there is a certain completeness about this view which has an intellectual appeal. Modal status, it says, is always a priori or logical; but, of the three forms of modality, contingency alone makes existence a question of extralogical facts. The others make it an a priori necessity, positive or negative.

It might be thought that there are four forms of modal status: contingent nonexistence, contingent existence, necessary nonexistence, necessary existence. But the distincton between positive and negative contingency is not, like that between positive and negative necessity, an affair of meaning alone. It belongs thus to a different logical level. Con-

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tradiction requires rejection, and the necessary is that whose contradictory is self-contradictory; thus only the distinction between ‘contingently exists’ and ‘contingently does not exist’ is left open by meaning, or ‘the rules of our language’. It is a radically different sort of distinction, therefore. This corresponds to the logic of the notion of possibility: a predicate which describes no possibility cannot exist, one which describes a factor in every possibility must exist, and only a predicate which describes a factor in some possibilities, but not in others, may or may not exist. These are the relations to possibility as such which a predicate can have. Hence there are three and only three modalities. And all of them are a priori. Only the nonmodal distinction between contingently existent and contingently nonexistent is extralogical or merely factual. It is ‘existence’ in this sense only which is ‘not a predicate’, and it is not a predicate precisely because it is this sort of existence. Also the logical structure which explains its extralogical status equally explains the intralogical status of necessary existence.

Why has this straightforward analysis not long ago become commonplace? One reason seems to be this: ‘possibilities’ are taken to include purely negative ones, like ‘the nonexistence of birds’. So, analogously, ‘the nonexistence of deity’. And then even ‘deity exists’ excludes a possibility, is restrictive or competitive. What is overlooked here is that a negative possibility, if genuine, is not a single definite sort of possibility, but rather an infinite system of possibilities which differ positively as well as negatively among themselves. The ‘nonexistence of birds’ would mean that every part of the world of relevant size and condition was occupied by something other than a feathered, warmblooded vertebrate. The varieties of cases here are unfathomable. This consid-

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eration, that negative possibilities are only an aspect of positive ones taken wholesale, gives us a criterion for distinguishing genuine from merely verbal negations. The nonexistence of a predicate, H, either does or does not imply the disjunction of various positive forms of possibility any one of which would exclude the existence of H. If for H we put divine perfection, no such forms can be specified. It is the same with all comparably abstract properties, e.g., ‘something particular’. No positive possibility is excluded by the bare ‘existence of particulars’, their nature being not further specified. Universals are not crowded out of reality by there being particulars; on the contrary it is only in particulars of some sort, for instance, particular minds, that universals can be met at all. And there being particulars of a kind not further specified sets no restrictions upon the truth or untruth of more specifically defined sorts of particulars. This absence of exclusive particularization in ‘particularization’ itself, taken merely as such, is entirely matched by the absolutely infinite tolerance of ‘divine perfection exists somehow, in some particular concrete form’. Any imaginable being besides God is quite free to exist, so far as this statement is concerned. To say otherwise is to say that something could exist which God could not know existed, and this is to make the idea of His cognitive perfection contradictory.

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15. Contingency and Observability

If it be thought arbitrary to take positive possibilities as forming the entirety of possibility, then I appeal to Popper’s invaluable if simple lesson, that the useful meaning of ‘contingent’ or ‘empirical’ is, “capable of being contradicted

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by some, but not all, conceivable observation statements, these being always positive—'here is such and such’.” True, Popper, for his purpose of clarifying the role of science, limits falsi- fying observation to the sort that human beings could make, and thus he excludes such a statement as, ‘Here is a uni- verse everywhere otherwise occupied than by a four-legged feathered creature’ (ie., there are no such creatures). A human being could not observe this, and so it could not falsify, ‘There is somewhere a four-legged feathered crea- ture’. But we can conceive a superhuman mind doing this. It is very different with the statement, ‘Here is a universe everywhere occupied otherwise than by a divine being’. For a divine being could occupy no place and perform no func- tion that anything else could occupy or perform. Hence one would have to observe the bare absence of deity, and this no sort of mind could conceivably do. (All observation is of a presence, not of a mere absence.) If, for instance, one observed a disorderly or ‘badly-ordered’ universe, how, with- out being divine, could one know that a certain degree of dis- order or of evil was more than was compatible with divine rule of a universe of free creatures? Or that creatures should or could wholly lack freedom? (And the disorder and evil must be relative only, or no mind could exist to know it.) Thus the Proof is concerned with a statement which is not, even in an extended Popperian sense, empirical or contingent. Anselm’s *Thou canst not be conceived not to exist’ is correct, if to conceive a negative fact is to conceive a positive one incom- patible with a given hypothesis.

How could any conceivable experience exemplify ‘God does not exist’? God's own experience certainly could not exemplify it. Could any other experience? No, for from the

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very definidon of Greatness, as implying existential self- sufficiency, it follows that God must be able to exist no matter what appears in any experience other than His own. Could such an appearance contradict the existence of God, God would owe His existence, should He exist, to the ab- sence of the hypothetical experience containing this appear- ance. This contradicts His independence of existence from all special conditions. So we have rigorously shown that the nonexistence of God has no conceivable experiential meaning, in terms of divine or nondivine experience. Either then ‘conceivability’ has no essential relation whatever to the testimony of possible experience, or the ‘nonexistence of God’ is inconceivable.

Has the ‘existence of God’ an experiential meaning? (‘Ex- periential’ is not the same as ‘empirical’: the latter con- notes, ‘compatible with some, but not 4/, conceivable experi- ences’; the former, ‘confirmed or manifested at least by some, perhaps by all, conceivable experiences’.) Clearly, God could experience His own existence, if He could do or be anything. And also, in principle, nondivine experience could imply, and hence know, God. For, just as it follows from the idea of Greatness that its existence must depend upon nothing else, so it follows also that the existence of other things must de- pend upon Greatness; and, if all things require God's existence for their own, the occurrence of anything whatever—and so of any nondivine experience—implies the divine existence. Ac- cordingly, whether or not in such experiences there is con- sciousness that God exists depends only upon the level of self- understanding of the experiences. The logical basis for the con- sciousness is given in the definition of Greatness. So, while the nonexistence of God cannot be experientally significant or

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genuinely conceivable, his existence very well can be. Hence, the impossibility of significantly denying ‘Greatness exists’ appears not to be nullified by any comparable difficulty in asserting it. And of course many mystics claim to experience God. Since their claim is compatible with the conception of God, and the claim of falsification is not thus compatible, Anselm’s Principle seems to be vindicated. Greatness is conceivable only as existent, by the very criteria which allow us to conceive either the existence or the nonexistence of any island, dollar, devil, you please.

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16. The Proof and Logical Rules

The basic pattern of attacks upon the Argument is this: however exceptional God may be, He cannot be an exception to the ultimate rules of language or of meaning. But this is also the pattern of many positivistic attacks, not simply on the Argument, but on the idea of God itself. Thus God could not be infallible, for to perceive or know is to experience things in a perspective which is bound to put some things in clearer light than others: He could not be both perfect and ‘living’, for to live is to have an environment whose features set limits to the actions of living organisms. In short, God cannot be a sheer exception to the rules governing the meaning of the terms applied to Him. Just so, the antiAnselmian is sure that God could not be an exception to the rule governing ‘exist’—that it is always an arbitrary or contingent determination of the disjunction: to exist or not to exist. So sure is he of this that he does not even need to read and rarely does read—or at least remember—even the four pages of Prosl. II-IV in order to know how wrong they must be. And what is the critic so sure of? Unwittingly or wittingly,

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of this: God is logically impossible. For His very definition requires Him to be an exception to the alleged rule. That this discredits the idea is a conclusion capable of plausible defence—if the critics would but defend it and not confuse the issue by pretence of neutrality concerning God’s logical possibility.

God is by definition an infinite exception! Undl this is seen and admitted by all parties, debate concerning theism is essentially in the dark, and about no one knows what.

But the subtlety of the matter lies of course in this: that if God’s existence simply violates rules, there can be no rational approach to it whatever. Indeed, either there is a sense in which ‘God’ fulfills, rather than violates, the normal logical rules, or the positivist is right and the idea is nonsense. The function of the idea of God must be to ‘fulfill, not destroy’, to constitute the meaning or rationale of things, to establish universal sense, not universal nonsense. Either there must be a more truly universal Rule, which illuminates the lesser rules, and explains why they not only admit but demand an Exception, or else the idea of the Exception is against all logic.

Here again is where classical theism fails. It does not exhibit such a Rule, in appropriate relations to the lesser rules. For instance, it does not clearly say why and how existence is generally but not in the supreme case contingent; or why and how life is generally but not in the supreme case dependent upon an external environment. Yet a rule which does this is nonetheless conceivable. We have indicated it in various ways. To exist competitively is indeed to exist contingently; hence to exist noncontingently is to exist noncompetitively. Again, to exist with but limited capacity

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to respond or ‘adjust’ to things is to be able to achieve clarity and coherence only by responding more to some things and less to others in a graded perspective, and this is precisely what it means to be ‘localized’. But localized beings are competitive; where one is another cannot be. By the same token, to exist with infinite capacity to respond is to have no external environment and no limiting perspective or competitive locus. The rules which set the limitations also prescribe the rule for the absence of limitation. Thus, for instance, to be completely ‘adaptable’ is to be able to exist in any state of affairs; hence to exist wholly noncompetitively or all-tolerantly, i.e. (by the very rule which explains ordinary contingency), noncontingently.

In classical theism one cannot proceed in this way. Not infinite or perfect power of adaptation belongs to God, but simply the absence of any need or capacity to adapt or respond to things (‘impassibility’—an Anselmian doctrine); not perfect love or compassion, but only an ‘as if’ simulation of this, so far as effects upon others are concerned. Here the exception to the rule is not, as in neoclassical theism, built into the rules—it is a sheer violation. Rather than positing infinite adaptability in God, one says rather that God has no need to adapt at all and that what world exists simply makes no difference to His actual state. Thus, one by one, the concepts in terms of which something might be said about God are discarded. He is not the Exceptional fulfillment of the concepts, rather He is their exceptional—indeed absolute—unfulfillment. That this is the way to lose the game of talking with meaning about deity appears especially in this, that one rule which is as surely logical as any, the rule that the necessary must be abstract, empty, entailed by all

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concrete or actual details of existence, but entailing none, is set aside in classical theism by a mere fiat. God must be actual, not a mere abstraction, and yet also wholly necessary. For this exception no rule is possible, and by it no lesser rule is illuminated. This is the real flaw in the Argument as used by nearly all who have employed it.

However, this flaw was not accurately seen by any of the critics either! Or, at least, it was not seen (by Findlay, for example) in conjunction with the relevant consideration that perhaps God need not be taken as simply identical with ‘necessary being’; for while His individuality or essence must be thought of as necessary, how the essence is actualized in actual states of experience or consciousness may yet be contingent. This conjunction of ideas—which preserves as without exception the grand rule that the actual or nonabstract is contingent—was overlooked by nearly all parties alike. Why? Because their approach was unwittingly dogmatic. They had a rigid element of belief that was not subject to revision: e.g., that no form of existence could be necessary, or that no aspect of the divine existence could be contingent; or that theism could not be rationally known as true in any form; or that it was known (or should be believed) to be true in some classical form (including classical pantheism or its equivocal derivative, Hegelianism). The parties scarcely open to conviction on one or other of these points divided the field. They still do largely divide it. But the rigidity seems to be giving way. This is the promise of the present situation.

The promise will be fulfilled only if we become aware of the devices to which tenacity resorts when its beliefs are threatened. We shall be told (probably by some nontheists

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as well as theists) that neoclassical theism is ‘anthropomorphic’. As though infinite adaptability to all possible worlds were not separated by a literally infinite gulf from human adaptability to some things in this world! To put man (and any other mere creature) in his proper place there is no need to allow him to usurp and exhaust categories like adaptation, passibility, change; this is just the way to give man undue importance. For then all that is left as God's province is the emptiness of eternal necessity, void of true freedom and all concreteness! The negative theology was not nearly so modest as it appeared to be. It put God behind the beyond, where He could do nothing and be nothing intelligible to us. All the more freedom for us to attend to our affairs, without relating them positively to God!

If Anselm’s formula, ‘God is whatever it is better to be than not to be’, had been strictly conformed to the negative theology, it would have run, ‘God is not what it is worse to be than not to be’. Would this have improved it? I submit: we do not worship God because of the defects which He does not have. We worship Him for His positive and allencompassing love and beauty.

The use of the Argument by proponents of the negative or classical theology has not been a grand success. The proposal to empiricists that they should use the Argument has caused them to be unable to read. Perhaps another possible use is worth looking into, that by neoclassical theists, those who admit knowable and positive—though extremely abstract—divine properties, as well as largely unknowable concrete divine actualities.

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17. Anselm’s Appeal to Rules

Suppose we can without contradiction conceive that there is a unique x which is unsurpassable, and suppose we can also without contradiction conceive the negation of this. Then either supposition is the notion of an asbsolutely inexplicable brute fact. Ordinary facts may in a relative sense be inexplicable, but in a relative sense at least they are always explicable. They have causes which at least partly explain them. Even if determinism is, as I confidently believe, a false doctrine, still, every existing thing of ordinary kinds has come into existence thanks to causes which made the emergence of some such thing when and where it did, if not inevitable, at least more or less probable. But to be unsurpassable a being must exist thanks to no cause whatever, and without ever coming into existence or being capable of ceasing to exist. An uncaused being such that it might have failed to exist, yet incapable of coming into or going out of existence could only be, in the most absolute sense, inexplicable, a wholly and simply irrational contingent fact. No antecedent fact would illuminate it, and by hypothesis no abstract principle of logical necessity would either. It would just be so. Unlike ordinary ideas of chance, such as those of Peirce and others, which always set limits to the inexplicable aspects of things, we would here have an existence through and through pure chance, in the strict logical sense of having no aspect derivable either from necessity (as in pure mathematics) or from antecedent fact or cause. All else, then, would exist as at least partly explicable, but the inexplicability of this existence would be infinite and total. God exists, He might not have; He does not exist, He might

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have—whichever is true, there can (according to the thoroughgoing empiricist) be no aspect whatever of reason in its being true. It just is.

Thus, whereas the usual view is that Anselm is breaking all rules to establish his case, it is from some points of view his critics who break rules, among them the notion that a contingently existing thing should have some explanation for its existence. Everywhere else mere chance, as entire account of a being’s existence, is ruled out; here it is admitted! Anselm commits no such violation of ordinary principles. He rejects the contingency hypothesis as applicable to this case, holding that in the existence of God there is neither cause nor chance, but the impossibility, inconceivability, of an alternative. God is states the only possible truth about the divine existence; hence there can be no question of why, or how it came about, that God does, rather than does not, exist—except in much the sense in which we may ask why five and seven are twelve, rather than some other number. The sole and sufficient reason is that it must be so; there being no possible alternative, the nonrealization of any such alternative calls for no explanation. How different with contingent facts!

In final metaphysical analysis: that acts occur for which there is no complete causal derivation is not ‘irrational’ if the essential function of reason is to explicate and serve cretivity (rather than to foresee its results); deity, however, cannot be conceived as a mere product of creativity, but only as its supreme and indispensable aspect, whose flexibility is coincident with possibility itself, and is thus on both sides of every contingent alternative, hence itself not contingent but necessary.

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Anselm’s critics, we see, have not been the only philosophers who appeal to the opponent to acknowledge rules and abide by them. Anselm himself made such an appeal. Thus it is a rule that contingent things (generally admitted to be such) go into and out of existence, have parts, depend upon causes, and suffer limitations of capacity inherent in the circumstances of their coming to be, or in the particular parts and causes involved. Adhering to these rules, the Greatest thing, which must at least exist always and could not require for its existence any particular set of parts (for a Greatest set has no meaning) or depend upon any cause for existence, since to depend for existence upon something else is a defect— such a Greatest thing cannot be contingent. Here it is the critics who want to waive the rules. They want to regard one concept, lacking in any of the features found in all the things whose logical contingency is noncontroversial, as nevertheless purely contingent in its actualization.

Moreover, it is no mere inductive generalization that all contingent things have the features specified (and still others of the kind); there seems to be an intelligible connection between these features and their contingency. So, approximately, Anselm thought—and wrote. His arguments on this point have been ignored in more than nine-tenths of the refutations and but carelessly criticized in the others. This is all part of the great master lesson in how not to criticize a philosopher.

And yet, inefhicient as the process has been, it has—after quite a while!—produced some results. It is now possible to see a good way around the situation that Anselm brought about, to relate it not only to Anselm’s form of theism but to the chief logically possible forms, to remove the ambiguity

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in ‘none greater’ and compare the two ways of doing this, to see clearly the distinction between atheism and positivism as alternatives to theism, to generalize the problem of contingency with respect to alternative criteria for the division between necessary and contingent propositions and to relate these to various language systems and their rules. We are, in short, in a position to inquire in this area, rather than merely to debate. So, on the whole, we may after all be at least mildly grateful to those whom we have been viewing with such severity. And certainly we should be grateful to Anselm. He did for us not exactly what he hoped to do, but in some ways far more than he could have dreamt of doing.

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18. Refutation of Some Refutations

Gilbert Ryle tells us that the Argument rests upon the use of a ‘systematically misleading expression’. In ‘x exists’, existence is only a ‘bogus predicate’ and that of which it is asserted only a ‘bogus subject’”. And “if existence is not a quality it is not the sort of thing that can be entailed by a quality.”⁹ Another author says that the verb fo exist “takes us right out of the purely conceptual world,” and therefore “there can never be any logical contradiction in denying that God exists.” ¹⁰

In these charges I find unwitting instances of the ‘bad

⁹ G. Ryle, "Systematically Misleading Expressions,” Proceedings of she Aristotelian Society (1931-32); also in Logic and Language, eds. A GN. Flew and A. Macintyre (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951), pp. 15, 17.

¹⁰ New Essays in Philosopbical Theology, eds. A. G. N. Flew and A. Macintyre (London: SCM Press, 1955), p. 34.

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grammar’ or bad logic of which Anselm is accused. First, the notion that ‘existing deity’ is formally analogous, say, to ‘existing tiger’ violates the grammar or logic of the character ‘divine’. Multitudes of theologians have for centuries given reasons for denying that the nature of God can consistently be viewed as a universal ‘predicate’ capable of embodiment in this or that ‘individual’. Thus for instance it was said over and over that God “does not have but is his being or his goodness.” In other words, the unique excellence of God implies a logical-type difference from all other individuals, actual or possible. How often (in old-fashioned language) this sort of thing was repeated! Second, the notion that even the divine existence is entirely extraconceptual is the very one that the Argument, fully understood, purports to disprove; and thus the quoted objection is merely the unsupported denial that the reasoning is valid. Likewise, to suppose that it makes sense to speak of a ‘purely conceptual world’, in the application which the phrase must here have, begs the question.

Ryle analogizes ‘God exists’ to ‘Satan exists’. Thereby he misuses either ‘God’ or ‘Satan’.¹¹ For, though ‘Satan’ is indeed “not the proper name of anything,” what the Argument shows is that ‘God’, by its whole meaning, either stands for no logically possible conception at all, or is the name of an existing individual. It is no proof to the contrary that there is a verbal analogy between ‘Satan exists’ and ‘God exists’. The question of the logical propriety of the analogy is merely one of many ways to put the Anselmian issue. If Anselm is correct, the verbal affinity is indeed ‘systematically

11 Ryle, op. cit.,, p. 16.

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misleading’. The phrases, ‘Nothing is both devilish and alone in being devilish’¹² and ‘Nothing is both divine and alone in being divine’, are not logically akin, for all their verbal similarity! For, whereas only one conceivable individual could be divine, its individual uniqueness being thus specifiable by a pure concept, there is no correspondingly definite and selfindividuating concept of devilishness. For instance, only one being could know or love all things; but ‘hater of all beings’ has no clear, coherent, and unique meaning. Without some selflove or love of others there is no self at all.

When Professor Wisdom entitled his essay on the divine existence “Gods,” he was exhibiting very bad grammar indeed.¹³ Only an idol, not God, could be one among a variety of conceivable gods. It is comic—and also sad—to see how easily prejudice, rather than an alleged principle of method, in itself not unreasonable, may tilt the balance in philosophy. Let us by all means talk grammatically or logically about deity. But who that has read much in the history of religious metaphysics will suppose that this is among the easier tasks of ‘analysis’, to be accomplished by selecting logical devices which have been arrived at in dealing with nondivine things, and blandly applying them to deity as merely one more topic of discourse? This is exactly what Anselm and many others have claimed to show it cannot be!

Do any of the authors discussed in this section show the least inkling of the content of Prosl. III? Or of the Reply to Gaunilo? Or even of the corresponding passages in Descartes

¹² Ryle, loc. cis.

¹³ John Wisdom, “Gods,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Sociesy (1944); also in Pbilosopby and Psycho-Analysis, pp. 149-68.

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(or Bonaventura)? Must I answer? They do not. The point that, whereas ordinary contingent existence is not a predicate, contingency as such and its negative, necessity as such, are predicates is simply omitted from the discussion.

The admirable clarity of much contemporary British philosophy makes it no great trick to show exactly where it misses the Anselmian point. Using Ryle’s excellent phrase, we may admit that it is a ‘category mistake’ to treat ordinary existence as a quality, deducible from a quality. But has he never heard the saying, virtually as old and persistent as theism itself, that God “transcends the categories,” that they do not apply ‘univocally’ to God? What categories, then, are being mistakenly applied? If it is a category mistake to treat ‘existence’ (in the ordinary contingent sense) as a ‘quality’ (again, in the ordinary restrictive or competitive sense), how does it follow that existence in the ostensibly extraordsnary sense appropriate only to God is not a quality, in an equally extraordinary and uniquely appropriate sense? The contrary might very well follow: it might very well be a category mistake not to treat divine (necessary) existence as a divine (nonrestrictive) quality.

The reasonable questions are, can there be such an extraordinary sense of the categories as theism requires and can this sense be reasonably related to the ordinary senses? But these questions concern primarily, not any argument for theism, but its logical possibility. Why has Findlay been almost the only critic of the Proof who has seen this and has put his cards on the table?

He who attacks the argument can do one of two things, but not reasonably both at once: he can grant, at least for the sake of argument, that ‘God’ means what theists say it means,

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that is, ‘an individual’ who yet is not simply an individual, whose ‘nature’ or quality is not simply a quality, and who ‘exists’, but not simply as other things exist (Tillich overstates this by holding that ‘God exists’ is an inadmissible, atheistic expression); or second, he can refuse to grant all this, and can even contend that an idea which thus violates or ‘transcends’ the basic categories of thought cannot have a rational content. But then he must not say that the argument is illogical because it applies categories in violation of their rules. For the categories, in their usual meaning, with their usual rules, have been explicitly set aside. They are not being applied and hence are not being misapplied either! The words may still be used, but with a frankly distinct meaning. To take God to be simply an individual, simply having a nature or quality, simply existing, is certainly a category mistake, if ever there was one! Deity must itself be a sort of category, and the supreme category, and until #s rules have been investigated, there can be no demonstration that any relevant rules have been violated.

From the above the critic may plausibly draw the conclusion: ‘God’ is an illogical term. He cannot, however, prove this from the assumption that it claims, but fails, to be a case under the ordinary categorial rules. For it makes no such claim. Rather the critic must attack the legitimacy of the pretension (inherent in theism as such) that each category has two levels of possible meaning, the ordinary one and the extraordinary one applicable only to God. And to reject this pretension is to reject theism, rather than just the Argument. Except for Findlay, critics have been playing a game without specifying its rules, and the fact that the game has been played for nine centuries does not provide it with rules,

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nor make it any the less in violation of reason. (Rather, the offence against reason is made the worse by this exhibition of tenacity.) If the usual categorial meanings have their rules, the unusual ones may have theirs. (See above, Secs. 16, 17.)

Another illustration. Wisdom says that the question about the divine mind has two components, a metaphysical, “Can we know other minds than our own?” and a factual, “Is there a special sort of other mind, the divine? (analogous to, Is there a special sort of mind, that of plants?).”¹⁴ Now this is a category mistake. For ‘divine mind’ cannot be a special sort of mind, a factual, competitive particularization of ‘other mind’ in general. It is the supposedly universal medium, creator, sustainer of all minds whatever and all things whatever, the transfactual source and bearer of fact as such. Is the “creator of all things, visible and invisible,” in other words, the ground of the possibility of whatever is possible, but one special sort of possible thing? The whole point of what Anselm discovered, if anything, was that the mere ‘existence’ of God is entirely metaphysical, not factual. Findlay draws the plausible conclusion that God is therefore no conceivable actuality, but only an empty or absurd abstraction. Classical theism cannot, I hold, fairly rebut this charge. Neoclassical theism, however, distinguishes existence and actuality, and does this in reference not only to God but to all things. What is exceptional about God is that in Him alone is it possible to treat existence as not only different, but different modally, from actuality, i.e., so that the one is necessary, the other contingent. The ‘actualized somehow’ here covers such an abso-

¹⁴ Wisdom, op. cs., pp. 151 £.

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lute infinity of variability in the particular possible hows of actualization that all possibility is included, and hence there can be no possibility that the divine existence will be simply unactualized. This may or may not be a defensible position, but if it is defensible then the usual criticisms of the argument are woefully, ludicrously, beside the point.

The appropriate question is, What categories, if any, apply to God? or How, in what extraordinary manner, do categories apply? not, What follows from the assumption that ordinary categories apply in the ordinary manner? For this assumption renders contradictory the theism supposed (for the sake of argument at least) to form a logically possible position. An atheistic attack on the Argument is one thing—there are rules for dealing with it. A positivistic attack is quite another, and the rules cannot be wholly the same. An attack which hides its affiliations is appealing to no appropriate rules at all. No wonder the debate has lasted so long and has had so little to do with what Anselm actually wrote!

(It is to be noted that atheism has two forms, (1) dogmatic and (2) agnostic: (1) God does not exist, (2) for all we know, God does not exist. Both are excluded by Anselm’s discovery. But there remain two forms of positivism: (1) ‘God’ lacks consistent, cognitive meaning; (2) for all we know, ‘God’ lacks such meaning. Both remain open so far as the argument, taken by itself, and at least as used against unbelievers, is concerned. )

A favorite attack on the Proof is the pronouncement, ‘only propositions, not things, can be necessary’. Very well, but still, what about the proposition, ‘Greatness exists’? If that is necessary, then the proof is granted; if not, it cannot be on the ground that only propositions can be necessary. For this

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is a proposition! And moreover, why not define necessary thing as ‘that the existence of which is affirmable in a necessarily true proposition’? But there is still another weakness in the objection. If a necessary proposition is one which is entailed by any and every proposition, then, since this implies that the meaning of the necessary proposition is included in that of every proposition, we may by legitimate analogy define necessary thing as that which is contained in any and every thing, actual or possible. True, a universal constituent of everything can only be something very abstract, but, as we have seen repeatedly, although Anselm could not have conceded this, in a different type of philosophy from his the implication of abstractness can be accepted.

Another familiar but weak objection is that necessity is always relative to premises or conditions and has no meaning when taken as unconditioned, as it must be taken for the Proof. The objection is weak because the proper meaning of ‘unconditioned’ is, on any conditions you please, or on no matter what conditions, ie., on ‘tautological conditions’ (von Wright). It is neutrality as between all possible alternative premises or conditions. God’s existence follows necessarily—from what? From any statement, or the denial of any statement. Just so ‘2 and 2 are 4’ follows, not from nothing, but from any assumption whatever. The statement is true if it is raining and also if it is not raining. Absolute necessity is that which requires no special assumptions or conditions rather than any others. Thus the notion that ‘necessary’ means necessitated by something in particular is groundless. To be necessary is merely to be common to all possibilities, hence neutral as to which possibility may be actualized. Of course some possibility will be actualized in any case, and so,

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therefore, will the common factor in all possibilities. The notion of something special behind the necessary pulling it invincibly into existence, or holding it there, is an inept analysis. There is no constraint upon possibilities in ensuring the necessary, for the latter is the principle of possibility itself, the creative ground of alternativeness in reality by virtue of which alone there is any contingency. It is not an iron control, but an infinite flexibility, which can stretch as far as possibility itself, without losing self-identity.

No matter what world exists, or what other world instead, God exists, unsurpassably knowing that world. He can accept any world into His knowledge. He can know any truth; hence His own nonexistence is not a possible truth.

Among the anti-Anselmian fallacies which usually go unchallenged is the bold transition from Greatest (or Perfect) entity or individual to Greatest or Perfect ‘of its kind’, as though what followed from the first must also follow from the second! (I am quoting from conversation with a well-known logician. ) This nicely misses the point of the Argument, which is that, for the inference to hold, Greatness itself must be the kind. Otherwise, we have specialization or restrictive limitation, which is always competitive with alternative specializations or restrictions, hence contingent. The very absence of ‘kind’ in the usual sense is what distinguishes Greatness. The necessity that Greatness itself must be the kind rules out, not only ‘greatest island’, but also (in spite of Bertrand Russell, in one of his reckless moments) ‘greatest devil’. Anselm generally chose his words carefully: he said, not greatest god, but greatest something (‘that’). (He should perhaps have said greatest individual or being, but this is still not to specialize or restrict.) Divine capacity can take a form corresponding to

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any conceivable restriction, and therefore is itself unrestricted. What else could ‘infinite’ cognitive or creative capacity mean?

Special kinds of individuals have special capacities and special limitations of capacity; Greatness is ommnicapacity, in whatever sense this is conceivable, ability to experience, know, or deal adequately with quite literally anything—in a uniquely strict sense, ‘a heart for any fate’. Obviously the individual’s own nonexistence is not included in the possible fates, since one can deal with or know that only in restricted ways. Thus, once more, the idea of the ‘nonexistence of the omanicapable’ is not consistent.

Perhaps someone will persist in urging: even an individual of a certain kind would, by Anselm’s reasoning, be better if existing necessarily than otherwise, and hence the ‘best conceivable individual of each kind’ must exist. What this shows is simply that ‘best conceivable of a certain kind’ (no matter what kind, if it is different from Greatness as such) is without consistent meaning. A self-contradictory thing is not a better thing than something else, for it is not a thing. There is, in truth, no absolute ideal for any special kind of thing that one individual could unsurpassably realize. What could be meant by ‘human being than which none could conceivably in any respect be greater’? By contrast, God could and as conceived would possess every positive value which anyone possessed, and hence His capacity for value is not conceivably surpassable. He would unfailingly participate in all joy, all knowledge, and all reality; and thus His actual feeling and knowledge would include and surpass that of every other individual, and be conceivably surpassable only by Himself, ie, it would meet the requirements of neoclassical Great-

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ness. But that the requirements should be conceivable, also the least infringement of them inconceivable, and yet the very nonexistence of the being meeting the requirements should be conceivable, this is a jumble of ideas with no intelligible coherence. Nothing could explain or reduce to logical rules such a combination of absolute accident and absolute necessity. Is it not the opponents of Anselm who, at least as much as anyone defending him, lack respect for ‘rules’? Seemingly they do not care how anarchic thought about God may be, so long only as it is not to be taken as more than a dubious proposal with little or no chance of finding rational support. They perhaps do not want thought about God to be intelligible; the less so the better. By this method, one may be certain of never learning how far intelligibility can go in a given subject.

Still another refutation echoed from book to book is that the Argument establishes only conceptual existence, not real existence. But what either Prosl. II or III proves, if anything at all, is that, supposing Greatness to be conceivable, its failure to have existence in the fullest sense is inconceivable. Not merely that when we think Greatness it must be an object of our thought, as ‘fairies’ are objects when we happen to think about fairies; but that we must think Greatness, if at all, as somehow actualized or really existent. The Argument proves this, or nothing! And when some persist: but still, do we need to think Greatness, existent or not? part of the answer (the full answer would be all the theistic proofs put together) is: at least, no one can be an atheist who does not think about God, so at any rate we are rid of trouble from that quarter! As for positivism, or the denial that we can genuinely think divine perfection, this remains a plausible

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contention, which Anselm does not very seriously try to refute. Here he relies chiefly upon his faith. Sdll, not exclusively, and with subsidiary arguments one can make a good case against positivism. Granted that, as Kant held, the other theistic proofs need help from the ontological, the reverse relation may also obtain, and this without vicious circularity. If the ontological proof by itself refutes atheism, another argument might refute positivism, without leaning on the ontological for that particular accomplishment.

It is a merit of Neoclassicism that, while accepting the Proof, it can nevertheless admit an element of truth in the distinction between merely conceptual and real existence. Here, as everywhere, it softens the clash of extremely opposing opinions by a more moderate or balanced view. It holds that for an idea or essence to exist is for it to be actualized somehow; but that the actual how is never capturable in a concept. The how is the particular actuality; only percepts can exhibit it, never mere concepts. And, except in the case of Greatness, neither a kind of individual nor an individual can be subject to the requirement, ‘necessarily actualized somehow’. But this is because ordinary kinds of individuals involve restrictive or competitive characteristics; they are not all-tolerant in their requirements for existence. Only the nonrestrictive essence can be ‘necessarily actualized somehow’, since any positive state of affairs will do (and a merely negative state is a pseudoconception). But the particular actuality which does the actualizing is indeed a ‘real existence’ which no concept can specify. It is restrictive and contingent. Fortunately, to know that the actualizing must in any case be done somebow is all that we need for knowledge that God Exists.

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In the foregoing we have vindicated, but not on his classical ground, Anselm’s proposition: we can conceive that God is greater than we can conceive. Any concrete reality whatever is greater than we can exhaustively conceive. This is S0, in a radically unique sense, with the divine actuality, for it is the adequate integration of all actuality as so far actualized. Thus we need not leave it to the classical theist to stress how little we can comprehend God.

It has been said that Anselm’s proof takes existence to be an attribute, “whereas it is the bearer of all attributes.” ‘This, however, not only does not refute, it can be used to express, the Anselmian principle. For the character or status, ‘bearer of all attributes’, must itself be an attribute, at least if it could describe an individual. And God or Greatness can be conceived only as this very individual. Any realized predicate whatever must be describable as a predicate of deity, in the form: God knowing that S is P. God is thus the universally presupposed subject of all predication, and his own nonexistence is therefore an impossible predication, or if you prefer, an impossible state of affairs. His mere existence is the essential element in all existence (and nonexistence) whatever. Hence his existence is not possibly unreal.

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19. The Argument of Proslogium III

Everyone who has attempted to analyze the logic of informal arguments knows that the explicit premises from which a conclusion is alleged to follow are often insufficient to establish it, but that additional premises which may have been intuitively or confusedly intended can sometimes be supplied from which the conclusion does follow. If, then, a

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man of integrity and keen intellect claims to have proved something, ought we not to make some effort to discover all the premises which he was in a position to appeal to, whether or not he stated them in the very paragraph or two in which he first introduced his proof? And if the man wrote several additional pages, further explicating his thought, and later a few more in reply to objections to his argument (an argument which, if valid, must be highly important), is it a great deal to ask that his reasoning be taken to have at its disposal any additional premises introduced and shown to be reasonable in these two sets of pages?

Suppose, however, that the first commentator does not follow these sound principles, but makes everything depend upon the initial statement given in the first page or so. And suppose his report as to the structure of the entire argument is widely accepted, a structure which fails to supply clear and, upon careful examination, credible premises from which the conclusion logically follows, what is likely to happen? Obviously many will treat the reasoning as a mere sophistry. Thus we can understand Gaunilo’s myriad followers. But then there may also be those who greatly respect the man who made the original claim, or who feel (as mathematicians often do) that some such proof should be possible. They will grope about until with luck they may find the missing premises, or something like them, or at least intuitively supply them without quite knowing that they are doing so. Thus perhaps Descartes and many others who accepted the Proof but show no signs of knowing Prosl. III. Then after many centuries comes another and far greater Gaunilo, David Hume, and still another—whose name needs no telling—of extraordinary intellectual, personal, and literary power, who points out once

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more the gap in the argument, as it is presumed to stand, and having—at this stage in his career—no feeling that such a proof should be possible, rather very much the opposite attitude, he drops, and virtually forbids for all time, the effort to find any missing premises; instead, he drives through the ‘gap’ with all possible energy and éclat. After him come the tens of thousands of Gaunilos in nth degree, and how triumphantly they march through the now—as they feel— comfortably widened breach.

Finally, at long last, more than a century later, the secret begins to emerge (a few had known it long before; for instance, Bonaventura) ;: there were additional premises all along, and not unreasonable ones at that. They were actually stated— briefly but with considerable clarity—in the second sentence of Chapter III, and brilliantly elucidated thereafter, best of all in Reply I and V.

This approximately is the story of Anselm’s argument. One thing is left out in the above account: the reason which made some think that an ontological proof should be possible. My view is this: the more fully one understands the great Definition, or any reasonably equivalent explication of the religious idea, the more one is put in possession of all metaphysical axioms. The more powerfully intuitive the mind, the shorter the step to the ‘missing premises’ in question, indeed to any metaphysical premise whatever.¹⁵ The premise, ‘God is conceivable as not conceivably surpassed (by others)’, is implicitly the whole of metaphysics. This is what Anselm proved, when all the implications of his reasoning are thought

¹⁵ C. Harwshorne, The Logic of Perfection (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Co., 1962), chapters 3-4.

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out. So of course some minds would in effect bridge the gap in the argument of Proslogium II, a gap which is greater the more purely verbal one’s understanding of the Definition happens to be. And, equally of course, others would not bridge it. Anselm bridged the gap easily enough; he knew that there were not two conceivable states, existence and nonexistence, to be considered for Greatness, but only the one conceivable state. But if Anselm bridged the gap, he also sensed it; and that is why, after having, virtually in the next breath, supplied a new premise (two premises really: that we can conceive of necessary existence, and that this is superior to nonnecessary existence) which bridges it explicitly, he gives perhaps nine subsequent formulations of his Argument, only two of which are of the Prosl. II form, all the others being of a form either identical with, or closely related to, that of Prosl. III. Does this account not make sense out of the textual and historical facts? Has the reader one which makes better sense? If so, I hope that I shall learn what it is.

The principle of Prosl. Il is, as all know: to exist is better than not to exist. Let us call this the ‘false’ Anselmian Principle. Of course it is indeed somehow ‘better to exist than not to exist’ (unless Schopenhauer is metaphysically right); but to define the ‘best possible’ being, and therewith assert its existence, is apparently to make optimism true by definition, not a very impressive procedure. “If God is God, He, being best, must at least exist.” But if God does not exist, then ‘He’ is neither God nor anything else, for there is no ‘He’.

The true Anselmian Principle, which so few know, that of Prosl. III, is, To exist without concesvable alternative of not existing is better than to exist with such alternative;

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hence Greatness is incapable of the latter. Since contingent nonexistence (or ‘merely mental existence’) is here simply excluded, the comparison of it with objective existence— apparently the very basis of the Palse—is actually ruled out by the True Principle. The comparison is not only irrelevant, it is inconceivable. And one has not, in this version, put ‘existence’, in the usual sense, inside a definition. One has rather described a different kind of existence, a kind which resolves no such disjunction as ‘to exist or not to exist’, but transcends it as here inapplicable.

Will any man of sound mind ask us to admit that the False formula is an adequate version of this True one? With a touch of genius, with some luck, and more than a touch of good will, one may possibly succeed in reconstructing or guessing the True from the False Principle; and accordingly, the latter can perhaps be viewed as a crude, distorted simplification of the former. But this is about the most which can be said for it. Yet practically the entire learned world has taken—and takes—the False Principle for the essential form! With what authorization? (a) Gaunilo & Co. so took it; (b) Prosl. II comes before Prosl. III; (c) the False Principle is much handier to refute; yet (d) in refuting it we also refute the ‘True’, since if ‘existing’ cannot be a predicate neither can ‘necessarily existing’, which includes it. These are the reasons that I can imagine for neglecting Chapter III. They are all poor ones. Only (d) even deserves further consideration, and it is fallacious. The ‘existing’ which can be proved not to be a predicate is ‘contingently existing’, the ordinary mode of existence, and that this cannot be a predicate (in the sense required for an ontological inference) is a simple tautology, from the meaning of ‘contingently’. (It is a more subtle,

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implicit tautology from the meaning of ‘ordinary’ or ‘imperfect’.) But this mode of existence is certainly not included in necessary existence. Hence (d) is a fallacy of ambiguity. (See below, Sec. 23, (a) and (n).)

To have prefaced his great third by his so inferior second chapter was indeed a sad blunder of Anselm’s; but need it deprive us of our intelligence or our scholarly conscience? A man who discovers a basic logical principle involved in the most important of all ideas can be allowed some initial groping, one would think, without all the world groping with him forever, merely saying ‘no’ where he said ‘yes’.

In Ueberweg's History of Philosophy (the most learned, ot at least detailed, of all), the two Principles appear in their Latin texts; so far so good. But THE FALSE PRINCIPLE IS PUT IN LARGE LETTERS, thus delicately showing that the point of neither had been grasped, and that the editor was thinking with other peoples’ minds rather than his own—or Anselm’s. [ am asking scholars to laugh, for it seems hopeless to try to be merely solemn about so ludicrous a collective mistake. “This king is naked”—the king being Gaunilo, enthroned in majesty for an amazingly long reign to which his original title was decidedly doubtful—if not wholly ‘illegitimate’. If the true title, that of the author of Prosl. III and the Reply, were at last recognized, we might begin to understand that most brilliant philosophical product of the Middle Ages, the Proslogium!

In fairness to countless people it should also be said that a combination of bad management and very bad luck built a trap for human nature in the Anselm case. It was bad management of Anselm to make his opening and most dubious step in the exposition of the argument appear to be the

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argument itself, or at least, an element upon which the whole must depend: when in truth, if Prosl. II has any point at all, it is only as a loose analogy to the definitive and independent reasoning of the next chapter. (Doubtless Anselm partly deceived himself, as well as others here; he did repeat the Prosl. II reasoning twice in the Reply, where, however, that of Prosl. III or some related argument occurs seven times! and he never seemed clearly to see its weakness—or its triviality, if it only means that, of course, the worshiper cannot take what he worships to be a mere fancy.) It was very bad luck that the first critic should have been so careless a man that he could virtually ignore two-thirds of the very short text he commented upon and that the prejudices of this critic should have been just the ones which would make him seem an oracle to those who had not yet learned the very lesson Anselm wanted to teach. So they did not check his scholarship and forgot to exert any of their own. The lesson was thus cut off at the root, as it were. After a few more reiterations, scarcely anyone suspected there could be doubt, at least as to the main outline of the argument.

Add to all this that Anselm could not well have broken the hold of Greek thought upon his own thinking sufficiently to solve the abstract-concrete paradox by which the credibility of his reasoning was menaced. Here was more than a ‘gap’, to be filled in perhaps by adding a premise; here—unless one took great care in how he resolved the ambiguity in ‘none greater’—was a contradiction, beyond remedy by any mere addition. The critics were not wrong in thinking there was a grave error or danger of error somewhere, but they were too Greek themselves to guess accurately what it might be. When they were not Greek metaphysicians, they were (like Hume)

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Greek skeptics; whereas Anselm’s discovery called for something different from either form of classical thought. The last one hundred years have brought it about. It is the conscious emergence of a theism which can admit the abstractness or inactuality of the merely necessary or eternal, without giving up the notion of the all-surpassing and necessarily (somehow) actualized God.

Anselm’s argument, in Proslogium III and thereafter, has (if the implicit is made explicit) something like the following structure. One and only one of four views must be correct:

A) The property G, of being such that none greater is conceivable, is itself inconceivable (There is no ‘idea of God’).

B) The property G is conceivable, but only as not existing.

C) The property G is conceivable as existing, and also as not existing.

D) The property G is conceivable, but only as existing.

Since A), B), and C) are absurd, D) must be true. A) may be called ‘positivism’, B) seems to have no name, C) is ‘empiricism’, D) is ‘a priori theism’, (in contrast to A) and B), which are the two forms of ‘a priori antitheism’).

Anselm took A) to be counterintuitive; he also had an argument against it (in the Reply).

B) apparently did not occur to him. It might perhaps be illustrated by Kant’s doctrine of the merely regulative use of the Ideal of Reason. Anselm’s main effort was to refute C) as absurd. He has two lines of reasoning, at least, to which we add a third (still others are possible) :

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1) Since ‘inconceivability of nonexistence’ (necessary existence) is conceivable and must exalt what has it above all else, G must imply it.

2) If inconceivability of nonexistence were not conceivable, neither would G be conceivable (to Anselm it seemed evident that both are conceivable).

Conclusion from 1, 2: C) is absurd, whether inconceivability of nonexistence (necessity of existence) is or is not conceivable, hence in any case;

3) Besides, the nonexistence of G has no empirical meaning; yet, by C), it has no a priori meaning either; hence again C) is absurd.

As to 1). Inconceivability of nonexistence guarantees eternity, indestructibility, self-sufficiency, independence of causes of existing; whereas conceivability of nonexistence (contngency) makes any such guarantee unintelligible; hence such contingency is a defect and contradicts G. Therefore, if the nonexistence of G is conceivable, whatever hypothetically may be supposed to exemplify G must at the same time, and contradictorily, be thought not to exemplify it. This point is made over and over again in the Reply, Chapter I, and Chapter V (4th and 5th paragraphs). What is conceivable as nonexistent would be surpassable ‘even if it existed’; for the conceivability of nonexistence must remain, and could not be altered by the fact of existing. Facts do not determine conceivability, modal status is independent of them. Thus, as Aristotle in effect argued long ago, such status can only be necessary. This is the anticipatory rejection, and legitimate rejection, of the stock anti-Anselmian phrase, ‘exists necessarilyif it exists’. The ‘if’, as such, implies the very conceivability

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which one resolution of the alleged alternative must contradict; accordingly, as Malcolm correctly says, the phrase contradicts itself. True, six times in the paragraphs referred to Anselm uses an equivalent of ‘if it exists’; but always, note well, as a step in a reductio ad absurdum argument against the notion that an sf can here properly apply. The fifth paragraph sums it up with lucidity. It is not Greatness to whose existence the ‘if’ is relevant, but a fake substitute, some inferior sort of being whose nonexistence may indeed be conceivable, but whose existence as petfect would be contradictory. It is Anselm who seems to me to have thought clearly at this point, not his critics.

As to 2). G must at least entail eternity, indestructibility, self-sufficiency, and these, the inconceivability of nonexistence; hence if this inconceivability is not conceivable, neither is G.

Therefore, be the inconceivability of nonexistence conceivable or not, G cannot be conceived as in C).

As to 3). To conceive something as existent is to have some idea of an experienceable state of affairs in which it would exhibit itself as existent; to conceive something as nonexistent is to have some idea of an experienceable state of affairs in which its nonexistence would be exhibited. But no experience could establish even the slightest probability of the nonexistence of God, because, since any state of affairs which would amount to the nonexistence of God would be a possibility which must be prevented from realization for God to exist, his existence would thus be made in conception to depend upon the nonrealization of this possibility, a dependence which contradicts the existential self-sufficiency entailed by G. Thus to admit such a possibility is to admit that G's existence is impossible, contrary to C).

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As to B). In spite of Kant, I do not believe an ideal can have a clear and consistent meaning, yet be (for all we can know) incapable of existing. I believe that there are ambiguities or inconsistencies even in the regulative use of the classical idea of God which cannot be overcome without at the same time removing the grounds for denying a constitutive use also. And in fact neither science nor philosophy has found much regulative use for Kant’s version of the idea of God.

A version of B) is the notion of a ‘limiting concept’ (like ‘perfect lever’), an approachable but unreachable limit of thought or action. But the divine perfection, as Anselm defines it, cannot even be approached. There remains always an infinite gulf.

I submit: D) is the most intelligible of the four ways of classifying the property G.

A common objection is, Yes, if we think God, we must think Him as existing, but must we think Him? Well, if we are like the animals and do not even raise the question of God, then of course we need not answer this question; but if we are philosophers, we will raise the question, and then only one answer is logically tenable, the affirmative one. In addition, even the animals, though they cannot explicitly ‘think’ God, must in some way (this follows from the definition of G) relate themselves to Him, and they cannot relate themselves to G as nonexistent, for this is nonsense. So this objection, which Windelband, for example, seems to plume himself upon, is not so very cogent, after all. It is obvious from reading them that both Anselm and Descartes were in a position to deal with it.

Anselm'’s greatest weakness is his failure to dispose of positivism, A), in satisfactory fashion. And with his Neoplaton-

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ic view of the meaning of G, he could not have been cogent at this point.

Here is another version:

(1) It is possible consistently to conceive of an individual (‘God’) as such that none greater can be conceived.

(2) It is possible to conceive of an individual which could not conceivably have failed to exist.

(3) Such an individual (as in 2) must be greater than one which could conceivably have failed to exist (Anselm’s Principle).

(4) It is conceivable that no God (defined as in 1) exists.

(5) Hence the idea of God (defined as in 1) becomes the contradiction, an individual such that (1) none greater can be conceived, and yet (2, 3, 4) such that a greater can be conceived. But according to (1) the idea is consistent. Hence the four premises cannot all be correct.

(6) To escape contradiction, at least one of the premises must be negated.

Negation of (1) and/or (2) constitutes positivism; negation of (3) conflicts with the intuitive discrepancy between contingent existence and unsurpassable excellence. On this intuition there has been, through the ages, a large measure of agreement among theologians. Thus negation of (3) is implicitly positivistic also. Negation of (4) is a priori theism. It removes the contradiction. Premises (1) and (2) are theistic ‘meaning postulates’; they postulate only conceivability. Premise (3) is a corollary of a metaphysical meaning postulate explicating part of the content of ‘contingent existence’, that it connotes dependence, insecurity, surpassability.

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To insist upon (4) is to render theism unintelligible. Meaning postulates in this unique case cannot be neutral to all individual existence; they make the divine existence either necessary or impossible. (4), though atheistic, implicitly begs the question against the conceivability of God, and thus the distinction between positivism and atheism cannot be maintained, except in this sense: atheism is the naive or unwitting form of positivism, positivism the sophisticated form of atheism. The most crucial phase of the argument is what I call ‘Anselm’s Principle’, the incompatibility of Greatness with conceivability of nonexistence, i.e., with contingency. This may be symbolized as

N(p*—>Np*) or N~ (P* & ~Np*)

The proposition affirming the existence of the unique x which is Unsurpassable strictly implies its own necessity; it cannot be merely contingently true.

This principle is affirmed and justiied in the first two sentences of the great third chapter. The point is not simply, “Thou dost in fact exist, and therefore also necessarily,” but rather “since the only form of existence appropriate to thy definition is necessary existence, therefore [barring an irrational, though in our time fashionable, assumption that necessity de re and de dicts are radically independent, an assumption which makes sense at most where conditional, and not as here unconditional, necessity is in question] the only kind of truth which the central religious belief could have is necessary truth.” From this it follows that necessary falsity is the only way in which it could fail to be true if it has any meaning at all.

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It has been asked whether N(p*—>Np*) means that the necessity of p is deducible from p. It is certainly deducible with suitable meaning postulates, and without some such postulates one has no determinate proposition to deal with. To explicate the meaning of ‘Greatness exists’ is to rule out the notion that its nonexistence is conceivable. A proposition whose denial is not consistently conceivable is a necessary proposition, and no proposition is consistently conceivable if what it asserts is inconceivable.

Another, more modern, way, less close to Anselm, of putting the point is this: the statement, Deity exists, implies that we are all God’s creatures, and even possible worlds are merely His possible creatures; hence the statement, Deity does not exist, implies that we—and possible worlds—neither are nor could be anything of the kind. These, therefore, are not two factual hypotheses—they are two languages, two systems of metaphysics, two competitors for the task of elucidating what we can and cannot mean by any of our basic conceptions. They concern, not ‘what are the facts?’, but ‘what is it to be a fact?’. They concern what Heidegger calls Being, the ‘ontological’, not the merely ‘ontic’. The category of fact, not any particular application of the category, is the issue. Prosl. II is a poor text for this reasoning. I even think it difficult to imagine a much worse one. A greater blunder by so great a man might be hard to find.

It is worth noting, as Koyré remarks, that we have no knowledge whatever of Gaunilo’s judgment after he received the Reply. (How many textbooks and histories fail even to tell us that there was a reply!) For all we know, Gaunilo changed his mind concerning the force of his objections.

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[Return to Part One Contents]

20. Proslogium II, III, and Anselm’s Principle

Of all the men of genius who have tried to divine Anselm’s essential point from Prosl. II alone, not one, it seems, has ever arrived at the true formula, the genuine Anselmian Principle, that what is conceivable as nonexistent is inferior to what is not thus conceivable. The derivation might run as follows. If one accepts Prosi. Il as valid, i.e., admits that what exists is greater than what does not, and that therefore absolute Greatness must exist, one may then go on to argue that an existence which is thus deducible must be necessary existence, since otherwise one would have something both logically necessary and logically contingent, a contradiction. To suppose the validity of Prosl. II is therefore to admit that the existence, lack of which would contradict Greatness, is not simple, but necessary, existence. Hence ‘the existent is better than the nonexistent’ must in this case become, ‘the necessarily existent is better than the nonexistent’. However, Greatness must equally be better than the contingently existent, since contingency of existence is a defect. So what we really have is that the necessarily existent is better than the contingent, whether existent or not, and also, as is obvious, better than the impossible, or necessarily nonexistent, since anything is better than the last. Thus the distinctive point about Greatness is that it is better than anything contingent can possibly be. This is the principle of Prosl. III, the essential principle of the Proof. It is derivable from Prosl. II only on the supposition that the reasoning of Prosl. II is valid; and yet to see this validity one needs the Principle. Until we know that God’s existence is deducible, we do not know, from anything said in Prosl. II, that it must be necessary existence which is in question; and until we know this

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we cannot know that it is deducible. Deducibility and necessity come to the same thing. Hence we must have necessary existence in mind throughout. This, however, is the procedure of Prosl. 111

If the preceding paragraph is correct, the historical procedure of making Prosl. II the definitive statement of the Proof was an excellent way to make reasonably sure that the main point of the two chapters taken together would be missed! To refute Prosl. II, taken by itself, is easy enough, since so taken it seems to misuse the idea of existence; yet this does not refute Prosl. III, which turns not upon ordinary or contingent existence, but upon a contrasting modality of existence. And no parade of ordinary things, as existing nondeducibly or contingently, has any direct relevance, save by contrast, to the question of the extraordinary thing of which it is known that it could not exist merely contingently, because we can see, directly and indirectly (and in many ways), that this is a defective and limiting mode of existing, incompatible with Greatness.

Was there any justification or excuse for the implied claim of nearly all the Argument’s opponents that by refuting Prosl. II, they had disposed of Prosl. III? They might defend themselves as follows: “You seem to say above that Prosl. II is valid if and only if Prosl. III is so; but then their validity is equivalent, and to disprove one is to disprove the other.” My answer: I am not speaking in both cases of formal validity but, with respect to Prosl. II, of cogency relative to the meanings which key terms are likely to be given. If existence means general existence, it cannot as a universal rule be taken as a conceptual predicate. One must discern in ‘divinity’ the requirement for a formally, i.e., modally, unique

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type of existence in order to grasp the unique deducibility of existence in this case. It is not that God is conceived as too good to be nonexistent, but that He is conceived as too good to be conceivably nonexistent, to be capable of failing to exist. With all other individual things this impossibility of failure to exist does not come into question at all; only with God. It does indeed follow that if one adequately understands the meaning of Greatness, one understands that God is conceived, if at all, as too good not to exist, but only because He is conceived as too good to be even possibly nonexistent, and what could not be so is not so. However, all this is contained in Prosl. II only through an aspect of the meaning of Unsurpassable Greatness which is not in that chapter explicated for the purpose in hand. Prosl. II, therefore, could have put the critics in touch with the points they had to refute only if they were already aware of all that Prosl. III makes explicit (even then, not fully explicit, since the Reply carries the explication further). But if the critics had seen all that, they would also have seen the irrelevance of their contention about (ordinary or simple) existence not being a deducible predicate. Of course it is not; Anselm in effect not only admits but insists upon this.

As someone has remarked, the reasoning of Prosl. II suffers from the ambiguity in ‘X is thinking of something Unsurpassable’. Does this mean, he is thinking of something which is Unsurpassable—in which case, is not existence presupposed rather than proved? Does it mean, he is thinking of something which would, were it to exist, be Unsurpassable? In that case, that the something does not exist seems no contradiction—at least, not for the mere reason that the something lacks a certain merit attaching to existence in its

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merely ordinary meaning. For why not take the Unsurpassability as hypothetical, a characteristic which something might have were there to be such a something? If there is no such something, then indeed nothing ¢ Unsurpassable, but still we have, it may be claimed, the consistent idea of what it would amount to if something were of this kind. Prosl. III, however, shows that this hypothetical way of dealing with Greatness is illogical, since even the bare conceivability of not existing is a defect, and one which could not be removed by existence, for what is conceivable remains so, no matter what exists. Thus the modal argument of Prosl. III protects the apparently nonmodal reasoning of Prosl. II, but only by showing that it is implicitly modal.

Even an admirer of Anselm ought, I think, to admit that Prosl. II was, at best, a highly misleading first presentation of his case. Contingency is a weakness in a much clearer sense than is mere nonexistence. Unless a thing exists, there are no properties of the thing; and while we may say that at least the idea is there, and that the nonexistence of its object is a weakness of the idea, the trouble is that we seem then to be talking about the properties of the idea rather than of its object. We seem to be committing the ‘homological fallacy’, making the universal an instance of itself. (However, see Part Two, Sec. 21.) But taking contingency as the defect, we can then compare in thought a necessarily-existing and a contingently-existing thing, and decide which must be greater; then, seeing that the former is greater, since (among many reasons) its existence involves no dependence upon anything but its own essential nature, we deduce that if the Supreme is conceived as existent at all, it must be conceived as necessarily existent, ie., as not conceivably nonexistent. But if

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we try to add, ‘yet perhaps it does not exist’ we are simply saying, “perhaps the inconceivable is true.” And then indeed we are talking nonsense, or at least we are using ‘inconceivable’ in a loose sense, whereas the strict sense is what the reasoning requires. For the merit which the Supreme must be conceived to have is strict impossibility of nonexistence, not some fake substitute. Anything with less than this strict impossibility will be inferior to anything with it, and so its denial is incompatible with Greatness.

Thus the reasoning of Prosl. Il is incomparably more powerful—though less simple—than that of Prosl. II, and, therefore, the ‘locus classicus’ for the Argument (to speak with one of the many reference works whose miserable treatment of this topic I have had the misfortune to read) is precisely not the earlier but the later chapter.

Detached from its context, Prosl. Il seems at best no more than an inconsequential truism. The God of religion cannot by the worshiper as such be taken as nonexistent: for to worship something and yet recognize it as a mere fancy is not possible. But this by itself is trivial enough, for perhaps one need not and if intellectually honest will not worship at all! It is quite another thing to discover that not simply the supposition of the actual nonexistence of ‘God’ contradicts the religious use of the term, but even the supposition of the conceivability of this nonexistence does so. For then, not only can the person with faith not conceive the unreality of the object of faith, no one can do so, with or without faith. What a world of difference! (And think of taking nine centuries to arrive at what Anselm had said plainly enough.) The worshiper can know that unbelievers cannot be discussing the idea of God at all. They may be using the word,

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but they cannot have the idea. For the idea forbids the value false and admits only the value necessarily true. One may deny that there is any such idea, may—with Gaunilo— say that there is perhaps but a word (or an emotive meaning only), but the moment one goes beyond that, and tries to separate the idea, admitted as such, from the truth of the idea, one is in Anselm'’s grip, so long as logical rules are obeyed and one understands his definition.

Moreover, since the existence of God is the existence of a universal power, infinitely important to all that is or can be, the discovery that this existence is either necessary or inconceivable means that an entire system of metaphysics is the one or the other. Any corollary of the existence of God is also necessarily true, or else necessarily false (or nonsensical). But these corollaries are the whole of metaphysics, the basic axioms of philosophy. This, too, the magnificent doctor saw, or partly saw.

The notion that we can find God, or the absence of God, by picking among the stones of particular facts, is on the face of it foolish; but Anselm found the precise logical reason: God is not conceivably a fact at all (so far as the bare necessary truth that he exists is concerned). The facts are by definition neutral to this—as to any—necessary truth. (Only the actuality of God is factual. But it we could not expect to prove or disprove since it is incomparably richer than all we can distinctly perceive or imagine.) The evidence for God's existence is then wholly intellectual and spiritual, not sensory. Anselm proved that it must be so, and that, in consequence, the whole of metaphysics must derive its logical structure from this necessity. Has there ever been a greater discovery?

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If there be a way of rescuing Prosl. II from the charge of grave ineptness, if not sheer fallacy, I have not in almost a lifetime of reflection been able to find it. Here I agree with Malcolm. But the modal argument of Prosl. III seems to stand entirely on its own feet, and to need no help from the previous chapter. Here also one may agree with Malcolm. There remains, however, the Findlay paradox, and the necessity of resolving the ambiguity between ‘none greater’ and ‘nothing greater’.

The best that one can do with the Prosl. II version (taken by itself) seems to be as follows: to think of Greatness is to think of something as at least as superior to any unactualized possibility as the corresponding actualized one is. However, this is but a rough analogy, since the sense in which a contingent actuality can be superior to its unactualized possibility is not at all the same as the sense in which the necessary existence of deity is superior to any unrealized possibility, whether that of deity (which would be contradictory) or of anything else. Rather, deity surpasses all other things by the very sense in which its logical ‘possibility’ is to be taken—namely, as equivalent to its necessity. And the reason, not quite seen by Anselm, is that this individual existence is expressible purely conceptually or abstractly. Only God could ‘adequately know all things’, for example. In this abstract idea, the uniqueness of the divine existence is already contained.

But, on that basis, we cannot well deny that either (Findlay paradox) the divine reality is itself abstract (logically empty) or else (solution overlooked by Pindlay) it is not exhausted by its mere individual existence, but has a further definiteness which is genuinely additional to its logical possibility and is therefore contingent. And so it appears once more that

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Anselm’s main mistake is in his idea of God itself, not in his proof.

Moreover, Anselm cannot escape the difficulties of his Neoplatonic idea so easily as Barth seems to imply when he argues that Greatness is not a description of deity but a mere rule for our way of thinking about deity, a mere negation that anything could conceivably be greater. For the positive nature of God which escapes us not only cannot be known by us to be necessary, it cannot even be necessary. The only rules that make sense about ‘necessary’ imply that its referent must be abstract, so that even the ‘description’ which God Himself could give of His ‘essence’ must be logically weak. Hence the admission of divine accidents is obligatory.

There is another consequence of these rules: if God, merely as such, merely as omniscient and the like, can be necessary because—though only because—of His extreme abstractness, then so can ‘world as such’, as merely ‘whatever, other than Himself, God knows’. For this is equally abstract. Thus the ‘contingency of the world’ would become that of this world, not of there being some world or other.

The question of the ontological proof is simply this: what way of thinking about contingency should we adopt, and what are the consequences of this adoption? Our decision will implicitly determine an entire metaphysics. Neither Anselm’s way, nor that of most of his critics, has much to commend it, so far as this writer can see. We need a fresh start.

[Return to Part One Contents]

21. Definite Thought Is about Something

If a man is thinking about fairies and upon being asked what he has in mind replies, “a mere idea,” he may be further

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asked, of what is it the idea? The man could, however, reply: “I am thinking of the world process as productive of all sorts of things, and of the legends of fairies as views about what this process could be imagined to turn up.” The Unsurpassable, however, could not conceivably be turned up, and therefore there can be no factual failure to turn it up, either. There is nothing at all to think about, under the name of God, unless just God Himself. It is a unique case, in which to think (consistently and more than verbally) about a certain kind of individual, and to be in real relation to the one possible such individual, as really existent, is a distinction without a difference. All attempts to find an intelligible difference fail. Few indeed even try to tell us what the intelligible difference might be; they content themselves with repeating the bare words, “God may not exist.” In all other cases, we can explain the sort of thing we mean by a negation of existence; here we cannot.

We can, however, explain, in innumerable ways, what we mean by ‘God exists’. It means, for one thing, that we are fully known, and cannot in the everlasting future ever be unknown, hence that our previous lives are registered where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt and where thieves do not break through nor steal. To say that this is not so, however, has no intelligible meaning, since we cannot conceivably experience the noneverlastingness of the factual content of existence. We have to live and think as though the past were indestructibly real, for otherwise ‘fact’ would have no definite meaning. ‘God’ merely makes this necessary idea more intelligible, that is all. And so with other ideas which we must have: they are all summed up, focused, united, made sense out of, by the idea of God. What is ‘added’ is only the

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more complete intelligibility. God is not (except in the how of His actualization) a fact among facts, but any fact as differing from nothing only through a love which sways and registers all occurrences.

It is to be noted that the only Faith that Anselm’s Proof justifies is faith in God as greatest conceivable being. People’s judgment as to what exalts God over all others may differ at many points. Our task is to distinguish much more carefully than the Saint did between the truly self-answering religious questions and all others. His glory is to have discovered that there are those of the former type, and that they are all corollaries of two questions: What does ‘Unsurpassable’ imply? Are the implications consistent and definite enough to be capable of truth?

[Return to Part One Contents]

22. The Proof and Pantheism

Is Anselm’s argument, as Weber alleges, ‘pantheistic’? This much-abused word has a wide spectrum of meanings. If it connotes the Stoic-Spinozistic view that all things follow necessarily from the eternal divine nature, then the relations to the Argument are as follows. If the necessary reality we prove is taken to be God in His concrete actuality, for instance, God as knowing that you and I exist, then so are we (and all things) necessary. For if we could have failed to exist, then God could have failed to know our existence, since one cannot know as existing what does not exist. As Husik has shown, this is why Spinoza, following Crescas, was a Spinozist. The only escape from such Spinozism, while using the Argument, is via the frank recognition of the Findlay paradox, and the acceptance of its resolution in neoclassicism. The

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Argument, by deducing existence from an abstract definition, proves that the necessary in God must be but an abstraction from His total reality.

Of course we shall still have another kind of ‘pantheism’, if the word is used very broadly. God, as knowing all things, includes them somehow as contents of His knowledge. In addition, if things were simply ‘outside’ God, there would be a greater reality than God, God and the world. (Deny that this is in some way greater and you merely deny that the world has any value whatever. And on that basis you could not know what ‘value’ means.) Pantheism in this sense is simply theism aware of its implications. But obviously the very point of ‘God exists necessarily’ is that other things exist contingently; therefore, when Spinoza denies contingency altogether he is not improving upon Anselm, but is merely cutting off the branch of meaning on which the Anselmian idea must perch. However, the abstract-concrete paradox shows that classicism (the denial of contingent states to God) is a logical blunder equally whether it takes the pantheistic or the theistic form. Apart from that blunder, there is indeed no real issue between theism and pantheism. We all exist in the divine being, as St Paul said. What more could a pantheist want, if he renounces necessitarianism (and determinism)? We are in the free, partly-contingent divine life with our own contingency and freedom. (That this is possible means that the divine life does not consist in mere ‘power’, mere control, but has also a passive aspect, as all life indeed must have. Lequier, Fechner, Varisco, W. P. Montague, E. S. Brightman, and Whitehead are among those who have defended this view.)

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[Return to Part One Contents]

23. Some Recent Criticisms of the Proof

The validity of our position may be tested by considering some recent criticisms of the Anselmian argument, particularly as the argument is presented by Malcolm.¹⁶

(a) The ‘second argument’ (from necessary existence as a predicate) is held (Allen, Abelson, Penelhum) to imply the principle of the ‘first argument’, that existence is a predicate, which, as Malcolm himself says, is invalid. Yet that existence in the one case of Perfection is a genuine predicate is quite compatible, as we have seen, with its not being so elsewhere. The critics are indeed right in holding that existence must always have a contingent aspect, for it implies a step from the abstract to a particular concrete case and thus a passage from one logical type to another—a passage, moreover, in the direction of greater definiteness, since the concrete instance must have further qualities not specified in the predicate that is being considered. That such a step in its particularity should be entirely necessary would be sheer contradiction. But the ontological Proof, when employed in a neoclassical system, need not take this step to be necessary. Consider any predicate, H: if it is actualized in a certain way, or by a certain concrete instance, it is always possible to conceive it as actualized in another way, by another instance. If H means human, or ‘rational animal living on the earth’, there might have been such animals different in each case from any which have actually existed. There might also have been no human animals at all; but this is a further

¹⁶ See The Phslosophical Review, 70 (1961), for articles by R. E. Allen (pp. 55-66), R. Abelson (pp. 67-84), T. Penelhum (pp. 85-92), P. Henle (pp. 93-101), and G. B. Matthews (pp. 102-3).

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point which, if we abstract from the sort of predicate being considered, and let H stand for predicates in general, is not deducible from the mere contingency of particular instances.

Thus we have:

(1) H is actualized somehow, it might have been actualized otherwise; also it might have been unactualized.

(2) H is actualized somehow, it might have been actualized otherwise; but it is not true that it might have been unactualized.

What contradiction or absurdity is there in (2)? There are propositions whose denial is inadmissible; how do we know that none of these is existential? It cannot be merely because of the type difference between predicate and instance; for we have just shown that this difference is compatible with necessary existential statements, provided that they limit themselves to saying that their predicates are actualized somehow, without specifying how, or in what particular instances.

That divinity is a predicate with no more than one possible concrete instance, so that the necessity of the divine existence refers to a unique concrete actuality, is indeed logical nonsense. No actuality can be necessary. Findlay is here correct, the conclusion aimed at in the classical proof was in reality disproved. But suppose that ‘divine actuality’ means a kind, not a unique instance, of actuality. Would it follow that God is not individual? Yes, if individual means a single determinate actuality. And this is precisely what is at issue between those who hold a substance theory of personality and those who hold the Buddhist-Whiteheadian or event theory. According to the latter, an existing person is a sequence of actualities, several per second presumably (in the human

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case ), not one of which, unless the first one, is necessary to the individual’s being himself. (Leibniz held the contrary opinion, but his view has its penalties.) At each moment, I have the capacity to be actualized the next moment in more than one way. And since in the case of an uncreated being there could be no first actuality, we may drop the qualification, ‘unless the first one’, and say that God could have been Himself even though every actuality in or by which He has existed had been otherwise. (There are, of course, innumerable theologians who deny the applicability of the concept of personality in this sense to God, but there are others who admit it, and a refutation of the Proof can be general and inclusive only if they too are taken into account. This has never been done, to my knowledge.)

(b) Here is the place to consider Abelson’s contention that there is not a single idea of ‘God’, but a loosely-connected family of ideas. This is plausible, but it is also fair to say that only two of these ideas are relevant to the Proof: the paradoxical one which takes the necessary existence of divine perfection to mean a necessary yet unique actuality, and the other which takes it to mean the necessary realization of an individual divine nature in some suitable actualities or other, which actualities being a contingent matter. Either (1) Divine perfection is necessarily realized in the very actuality, or in the very manner, in which it is realized, or (2) it is necessarily realized somehow, in some actuality or actualities able to realize it.

Cortesponding to these two views are two concepts of perfection: (1) a being than which none could conceivably be greater, not even the same being in another actual state; (2) a being than which none could be greater except the

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same being in another actual state. Only (2) escapes the absurdity of a necessary particular actuality, yet it too furnishes a premise for the Proof. For an individuality necessarily actualized somehow is superior to one which merely happens to be actualized. The critics deny this, but on poor grounds. One way to put the Argument is as follows: in religious terms, ‘God is perfect’ means that He is the appropriate object of total devotion, so that all concern, even all interest, has Him for its object. But the interest in the ‘possibility’ that He might not have existed at all—does that have God as object? Any interest in a situation alternative to God would violate the Great Commandment of total devotion. So it can only be contradictory to recognize a being as perfect in the religious sense, yet as existing contingently.

(c) One critic (Allen) grants that within religious language it is scarcely permissible to speak of the nonexistence of deity. And he suggests that one might argue that, outside such language, the question lacks meaning and cannot even be discussed. But then he doubts if this proves anything, since we have to have rules for dealing with languages in general, or with language as such. With this last point I agree. And it is possible, as we have seen (Sec. 16) to set up rules for the ontological argument.

Those who say that ‘existence’, taken on the one hand as a predicate, and on the other as not a predicate, can have no true analogy or common meaning should also, by parity of reasoning, deny that ‘truth’, as analytic and as synthetic, can have common meaning. The parallel is very close. Truth in the one case is a relation of correspondence between language and extralinguistic fact, in the other an intrinsic property of a portion of language itself. For this reason some

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philosophers do indeed reject ‘necessary truth’, and offer ‘validity’ instead. Certainly there is an important difference between the two sorts of correctness of statements. But nevertheless ‘correctness’ is common to them, and similarly ‘actualized somehow’ is common to necessary and contingent existence. Both forms of existence imply ‘capable of being actualized otherwise’, but only in the contingent form is ‘capable of being unactualized’ also implied.

What logical difficulty is there in this? Factual truth and validity have this, among other things, in common, that both valid and true propositions are always mutually compatible (both among themselves and with each other). And indeed, valid propositions are virtually contained in every true proposition (also in every false one), and are a part of what is affirmed in them. Similarly, the divine individuality or existence is in some way contained in every individual, afirmed when it is affirmed, but not denied when it is denied. The critics of the Proof must, it seems, reject this analogy altogether. And so far, they do not show any awareness that this is what they are doing. The fault lies chiefly with theologians, or with theists who have failed to furnish a reasonable analysis of ‘necessity’ which connects it with logical rules exhibiting the relation between necessity in language systems and in reality.

Analytic truth in an extensional or interpreted language is also a sort of correspondence, for it corresponds to every possible object. It is the universally tolerant form of correspondence, just as analytic falsity is the universally intolerant form. The divine existence alone is compatible with any other existence you please, including that of any genuinely conceivable devil.

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(d) The plausibility of the Proof is said to depend upon confusing necessity de re and necessity de dictu, necessity in things and in discourse (Allen). Thus, to exist, God might need to have the property, existing necessarily; but still, the assertion that anything has this property remains contingent. Yet it is arguable that the relation between the two meanings of necessary is closer than is here seen. What can be meant by ‘necessary, if it exists’? The intelligible meaning for objective or extralinguistic necessity is, ‘realized no matter what possibility is actualized’. Thus a “necessary thing” is one required by every possible thing, and this can be so only if it is somehow constitutive of everything. If it be thus universally constitutive, then any language which permits us to deny the statement asserting it allows us by implication to deny simultaneously every positive assertion. And this can only be a defective language. Where necessity is meant, as the Proof intends, unconditionally, there the de re and de dictu forms of necessity should be taken as coextensive. See p. 122(1).

(e) Someone (I do not now find who) has contended, against Malcolm, that the meaning of existence must remain the same, namely contingent existence, existence as not a predicate, no matter what sort of evidence is relevant to establishing it. Thus ‘round-squares do not factually exist’ is necessarily true, even though it is known by analysis, not factual observation. But this overlooks the point that contradictions not only cannot be factually true, they also cannot be necessarily true. They are necessarily neither factual nor necessary. Thus the meaning of ‘The contradictory cannot exist’ takes ‘exist’ in a modally neutral sense, not in the sense of ‘contingently exist’. This modally neutral sense

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is precisely that in which the second ‘exists’ in ‘perfection necessarily exists, therefore it exists’, takes ‘exists’. And the meaning of the whole sentence is, perfecuon is necessarily actualized, therefore it is in truth actualized, ie., present in some concrete actuality or other; or equivalently: necessarily (and therefore truly) some actuality is perfect (possesses adequate knowledge of the totality of the actual, and views it with ideally appropriate appreciation, etc.). ‘Some actuality’ has here a neutral meaning, implying an instance of concreteness as such or in general, which instance is, in addition, an example of the property, ‘belonging to the life of a perfect individual, than which none could be greater (except itself), and which could not be unactualized’. Where is there any logical confusion here?

(f) Is existence ever a ‘real’ predicate? Mr. Allen’s rendering of this Kantian expression is, a term which predicates of a thing more than that it is a (concrete) thing. ‘Actuality’ is surely no such predicate, for it can only say that something actual is actual. But ‘actualizes perfection, which in any possible state of affairs is actualized somehow’, is a real predicate, for only divine actualities can possess it. And it is inherent in the meaning of divine perfection that there must be some such actualities, correlative to whatever nondivine things exist.

(g) A necessary god, it is held, must be extremely abstract, and so not the God of religion (Abelson). But, since the abstraction ‘necessarily actualized somehow’, means, necessarily concretized somehow, and since any concrete state embodying perfection must be worthy of worship, the God proved to exist is indeed the God of religion, but the God of the religion of any and every being capable of worship. One’s

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own religion and one’s own God involve personal elements extrinsic to every general proof or argument. But it does follow from the sense of the Proof that there must be some such personal elements in every case.

(h) Henle contends in an ingenious way that there is (except on certain Neoplatonic assumptions) no contradiction in combining necessary existence with perfection ‘in some respect only’ (supposing that there is none in combining it with perfection in all respects). It is clear from what has been said above that this is incorrect. Only that can be necessary which is infinitely tolerant, in 4/l essential respects, of alternative possibilities, absolutely free from competitiveness in its requirements for existence. Imperfection (even in some respect only) is always competitive, this degree instead of that, or my imperfect aims prevailing instead of someone else’s. God's essential role alone collides with no other. Coincidence with modality itself, flexibility as unbounded as all positive logical possibility, this is the prerequisite if existence is to avoid selecting among possibilities. The assumption here is hardly the ‘Neoplatonism’ to which Henle refers; for it is not the classical idea of perfection at all.

I am surprised that so thoughtful a writer as Henle could think it significant that Anselm did not bother to explain why Gaunilo’s perfect island analogy is irrelevant. What Anselm saw was that God exists necessarily, not because He is perfect in His kind, but because His perfection is His ‘kind’, and because, being individually unique, divine perfection is not in the usual sense a kind at all. On the contrary, ‘island’ is such a kind, and because it is, ‘island uniquely perfect as such’ lacks definite and consistent meaning. Individuals of specific kind, such as islands, have to be identified by rela-

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tively specific descriptions, and finally by pointing to some individual taken as given; hence they are all alike wholly contingent. God escapes such sheer contingency because His identifying characteristic is as universally relevant, and in this sense as abstract, as any idea whatever.

The only sense in which the comparison of one individual with another can point the direction toward God’s necessity is this: some individuals have greater flexibility, greater capacity for preserving significant self-identity through wide changes than others. Hence their identifying traits can be less specific. But to transcend contingency, the traits must be absolutely nonspecific,c and only God has such traits. As for an island, it is scarcely an individual at all; for its identity through change is chiefly a fact for the observer, rather than for the island as a whole, or for the molecules and the like which constitute it. Only by stressing the combination of intrinsic self-identity with flexibility, as a mark of the superiority of (say) high-grade human beings to low-grade, or to any island (unless it be thought of as conscious), can we get any very direct light on the meaning of necessity as inherent in perfection. If the island is conceived as conscious, and this consciousness as individually perfect, unsurpassable, then it will be equivalent to God, save with the addendum, ‘composed of earth or rock, or something of the sort, and surrounded by liquid’. And the combination of the two ideas is not obviously consistent. How can an argument be refuted by showing that a vaguely parallel argument from a doubtfully consistent, or even rather obviously self-contradictory, premise would arrive at a doubtfully tenable conclusion? No mode of reasoning could be safe, under such conditions! Only if the credendals of ‘divine perfection’ to con-

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stitute a coherent conception are at least far better than those of ‘perfect island’ has the argument any cogency. But its credentials are incomparably better. For one thing, we know of innumerable believers in God, and no well-documented instance of a single individual who ever believed in such an island, or gave evidence of seriously thinking it could be believed in. Is this because the islands we know have defects or limitations? Rather it is because simply being an island is already a vast limitation, so that to get rid of defects we must in thought get rid of the character of being an island, or anything much like it.

(i) In spite of Anselm and Malcolm, an eternal reality— it is said—may yet be contingent (Penelhum, Plantinga). We are even told that “for all we know” electrons may always have existed. But physics denies persistent self-identity to electrons! Besides, since there is no conceivable positive empirical test for the capacity to exist without having come into being, nor yet for existing everlastingly, only logical analysis could show this, and according to my understanding, only necessity, the impossibility of not existing, could give support to such notions.

It is worth dwelling for a moment on this matter. Becoming is the pervasive principle of reality; anything which does not become must have some very unusual features indeed, and so must anything which endures forever. The controversy over evolutionism arose partly from the failure on the part of many to see that the burden of proof is upon the assertion of ultimate constancy, not inconstancy. What keeps species stable is at least as much a problem as what makes them change. Natural selection is no less powerful as a conservative and stabilizing force than as a destructive or creative

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one. But in the end, nothing is simply and always stable, except that which could not possibly be otherwise. To survive change (as an individual or species) requires a positive capacity; to transcend all change (by preceding and surviving each and every change) requires absolutely infinite capacity to resist or assimilate change. And absolutely infinite capacity cannot just happen to exist, for it must be the principle of possibility itself; and since ‘principle of its own possible nonexistence’ is nonsense, there can be no such possibility. True, these points may seem less than self-evident. But are their denials any more truly self-evident? I am only urging that the Ontological point of view is no mere sophistry, but an important perspective upon the whole of metaphysics.

One difference between philosophers is in what they expect to understand and how much they want to understand it. When told that an ungenerated and everlasting being might yet exist (or fail to exist) contingently, some of us ask, what understanding could one have of such contingency? The ordinary sources of intelligibility for ‘contingent’ are totally lacking in this alleged case. On a few (to some of us very reasonable) assumptions about becoming or creativity, viewed as the perpetual resolution of the partial indeterminacies constituting the future as such, one can see why all things which come to be must do so contingently. Even the contingency of the laws of nature, as Boutroux showed long ago, can be illuminated in this way. But this mode of rendering contingency intelligible fails utterly with an ungenerated and immortal being. What other mode of explicating contingency have we? So far as I can see, none; we have as sole resource the complete inhibition of all curiosity in the matter. Something might exist always and

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forever which might also forever fail to exist—period. Ask no further questions. No prior indeterminacy would have been resolved, no choice would have been made, no dice thrown, no random process of nature eventuated thus and thus—no! Merely, it is, perhaps, so, and yet it might always have been otherwise. Is there so much instruction in bare words? They remain merely words, and therefore of no real use, untii we can connect the supposed ideas with other ideas in some intelligible way. I suggest, therefore, that if Henle had thought with more acute and persistent curiosity about contingency he would have been able to carry further his generous concession that there may be a good meaning in ‘necessary existence’. It is that meaning which forms one end of the triple disjunction by which contingent is to be understood, the disjunction: totally exclusive, partially exclusive, totally nonexclusive, of (posidve) possibilities; or the disjunction: completely intolerant, partially tolerant, completely tolerant, of all specific possibilities. Complete tolerance is the same as absolute adaptability, unlimited power to preserve self-identity and integrity in response to any world whatever. And this is again only a way of looking at cognitive infallibility. Only knowledge can take a form correlative to anything and everything (the strictly unknowable being the same as nonentity). But only states of perfect knowledge can fully actualize this principle.

For the reasons sketched, should we not side with Anselm in thinking that only the necessary and perfect can be eternal?

(j) One critic appeared to think that a consequence of this—that nothing eternal can be created—is absurd. But why? True, ‘the world’, in its most general possible meaning,

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can be eternal; but in this meaning it is not a particular or individual creature, but merely the bare eternal truth that there are creatures, none first or last in time. And this is an eternal truth only if it be necessary, that is, if God must create without a temporal beginning or end of His creation, or if He could not produce a first or last creature. (This contradicts His perfection of power only if some other being could conceivably produce such a creature. But Aristotle may have been right in thinking that an absolute first or last is here unmeaning. )

(k) It is contended that independence of existence is not uniquely good (Abelson). For bare existence substitute ‘actuality’, or how the predicate exists, and Abelson’s point is an understatement. The divine actuality must be the most sensitive to influence, and in that sense the most dependent, of all. But for its being somehow actualized, no matter how, divinity must be conceived as wholly independent, and ¢hss independence is entirely a merit. Maximal independence and maximal dependence, the one for abstract, and the other for concrete, aspects of individual existence, these are essential to the worshipful perfection of deity.

(l) A shrewd point is made by Matthews when he notes that Anselm puts God above anything we can conceive, so that if, as Malcolm does, one identifies ‘conceivable’ and ‘logically possible’, then God must be logically impossible. The answer is that God is above the humanly conceivable, but not above all conception, including His own. In ‘nothing greater is conceivable’, however, there is no reference to human conceiving; even God Himself cannot conceive another greater than Himself. Only this second, unrestricted use of ‘conceivable’ is equivalent to logical possibility.

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There is, nevertheless, a danger of injustice to Anselm in substituting for his ‘not conceivable as not existing’ the Cartesian ‘necessarily existent’. For then the query seems to arise, are we here dealing with necessity only de re or also de dictu? But if the nonexistence of deity is strictly inconceivable, it cannot be legitimate to assert it, and atheism is ruled out. The strictly inconceivable cannot be said to be even possibly true.

(m) A sixth recent critic of the Ontological Proof assumes that by perfection we have to mean an actuality uniquely defined by its ‘completeness’.?¹⁷ Of course it is easily shown that this leads to difficulties. (See Part Two, Sec. 8.) But we do not need to identify perfection with completeness in this sense. Perfection is modal completeness, not actual completeness. No individual actuality can be absolutely complete (exhaustive of possibility), though it can be reladvely so, ie., inclusive of all that is in fact actual, and this by necessity, or in any possible state of affairs. Individual potentiality, however, can be absolutely complete, ie., inclusive of all that is logically possible, qua possible. God's modal completeness means that He could have, not that He does have, any predicate or compossible set of predicates whatever. In this is no impossibility. (Of course, God does not have the anger of the angry man as the man has it, but He has all its actual value, by intuiting with absolute adequacy the man's experience, and that of those at whom the man is angry. He thus has all, in the way of value, which the man has, and incomparably more. And so with other

¹⁷ Leslie Armour, “The Ontological Argument and the Concepts of Completeness and Selection,” The Review of Metaphysics, 15 (1961), 280-91.

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actualized predicates.) Our critic has merely resolved, without noticing it, the ambiguity in ‘none could be greater’ in favor of the interpretation, ‘even itself in another state’, rather than in favor of, ‘except itself in another state’. The latter interpretation avoids the difhiculties to which he points, and actually strengthens and clarifies the connection with necessity. Thus he proves nothing against our version of the Proof.

(n) Still another opponent of Anselm (See Bibliography, Zabeeh) reminds us that if the premises of the Ontological Argument are tautological rather than factual, that is, if they are “true in all possible worlds, then . . . they are vacuously true, since they then tell us nothing particular about our world.” He fails to note that by ‘the existence of God’ is not properly intended a particular feature of ‘our’ or ‘the real world’, but only the following purely general status of any world whatever: if that world exists God created it, and if it does not but could exist, God could create it. Naturally, then, ‘God exists’ is true in any possible world; this is one of the many ways of putting Anselm’s point. The divine existence cannot stand or fall with that of a certain world, a certain contingent thing, for this would mean that the creator was a mere creature! God's mere existence is not, in the proper sense, ‘particular’ at all, though His actuality is indeed so.

Our author is right in this: the essential question is whether the idea of God, or that of necessary, uncreated, yet individual, existence, makes sense. Anselm frankly assumed that it did. Against the positivistic contention to the contrary a supplementary argument is needed, and here

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Anselm was in trouble. But with a different philosophy the supplementary argument can perhaps be provided.

Professor Zabeeh’s willingness to beg the question he purports to discuss is rather breathtaking. Thus, leaning on Hume: “it is a brute fact that every object or impression which exists, could cease to exist.” We have Hume’s (and Professor Zabeeh's) word for it. However, I have read Hume, and I find no evidence for the assertion, just the assertion itself (nor does Kant help here). Again, leaning on Ryle: “since things do happen to wear out, it is rational to expect them to wither away . . .” And so the weakness of the creatures is ohne weiteres attributable also to the creator! By what rule of logic? It cannot be God who is here referred to!

It is said, rightly enough, that the mere use of a word cannot establish a necessity. However, as Findlay (and others) have shown, it is the meaning not just of ‘God’ but of the attitude of worship, that it refers to a not conceivably surpassable being. Since no such being could be a contingently existing thing, i.e., a mere creature, either worship is selfcontradictory (rather than merely mistaken), or its object exists necessarily.

Still another attempt to throw new light upon the ancient controversy is Nicholas Rescher’'s argument (see Bibliography) that the real point of the Proof is this: to understand blue one must have experienced blue and insofar must know that there is (or has been) such a thing; similarly, to understand ‘God’ one must have had religious experience, but then one will also know the reality of the object of the experience. Rescher's proposal implies that deity, like redness, is a special sort of thing, to know which requires a special sort of experience. As though the universally im-

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manent were only in certain corners of reality or experience, rather than everywhere! Also the author suggests that the definition from which the old proof started was insignificant from the standpoint of religion. But the definition grew out of religious experience as such, or as worship. God is defined as worshipful because beyond all possibility of rivalry. Yet this definition (when the false interpretation of ‘none other’ is corrected) has an intelligible content which presupposes no special sort of feeling or sensation. Willingness to consider the definition on its merits, to genuinely inquire into its logical implications, does require that one should no¢ be in the emotional state in which many philosophers find themselves. But the analogy with color sense is about as misleading as it well could be. No willingness can help the colorblind man to experience color; but sufficient willingness may enable anyone endowed with intellectual powers to see some point in the modal form of the ontological proof. To appreciate the full value of the Proof is a religious experience, but to see that it offers a legitimate, and not merely silly, line of inquiry it is only requisite that one think with honesty and scholarly care about the matter, going behind the textbooks to sources in writers who have themselves really meditated upon the problem, and not merely copied others, and noting how these writers have dealt with the objections which have become standard. Professor Rescher does not show any sign of realizing that, precisely for religion, God is a principle and not a mere fact, the contrast between the creator and the creatures being indeed a supreme abstraction for all religious persons. The more abstract and universal a factor of reality, the less must one have this experience rather than that to be able to think the factor. And

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the bare existence of deity is strictly universal, hence any experience will do, if it is sufficiently reflective and unconfused concerning its own content. What Anselm proved and meant to prove is that, assuming that the man of faith understands himself, the Fool deceives himself; not as the color-blind man by being simply unable to encounter the thing, but by being unwilling, or emotionally unable to try, to think a certain concept. God in His bare existence is not a mere special quality, but a Universal of universals, the Form of forms. He is infinitely more than this, true enough, but He is not less than this. And this suffices for His necessary existence. Even Thomas admits that all creatures in some sense know their Good, and that this is God. But man reflects upon his good; he cannot be simply unable to know it. The problem is one of self-understanding on the deepest level. The color-blind man can understand himself perfectly on that level.

One final attempt to discredit Anselm’s argument as reformulated by Malcolm runs as follows.¹⁸ Malcolm gives the proof in the following steps: (1) If God does not exist His existence is impossible; (2) if He does exist His existence is necessary; (3) His existence is either impossible or necessary; (4) His existence is not impossible; (5) hence it is necessary. Huggett objects: since Malcolm derives (1) from (a) ‘If God does not exist, He cannot come into existence’; and (2) from (b) ‘If He does exist He cannot have come into existence, nor can He cease to exist’; it follows that (3) has no more force than the disjunction: either (p) ‘God is nonexistent and cannot come into existence’, or (q) ‘He exists and

18W/. J. Huggett, “The Nonexistence of Ontological Arguments,” Phslosophscal Review, 71 (1962), 377-79.

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cannot have come into existence or go out of existence’. But then one cannot refute (p) by arguing that God'’s existence is at least conceivable, for (p) says only that coming into existence, not that existence, is inconceivable of God. However, the argument has here been oversimplified. Huggett is assuming that what does not exist and could not come into existence nevertheless might always exist, need not be logically incapable of existing always. But this implies an ultimately total divorce between modal and temporal status which an Anselmian ought to reject. What does ‘might’ mean in nontemporal terms? The intelligible reference is to possible happenings, whose antecedent conditions—at least if we go back far enough—do not uniquely determine their specific outcomes. A critic of Anselm needs to show that contingent existence is intelligible in some terms other than those of coming to exist and ceasing to exist. I am not aware that this can be done. A concept whose representation in reality is contingent is one which can be conceived as realized and also as unrealized; but if both these conditions are conceivable, how can a transition from one to the other be inconceivable? You may answer, because the thing is defined as eternal Yes, but this amounts to conceiving two alternative states of ‘eternity’, and saying that it is logically mere chance, arbitrary fact, which one is realized. But is it not in time that accidents, contingencies, can occur? The theory which the anti-Anselmian is implicitly adopting is that of happenings, accidents, in eternity. The difficulty is not merely etymological. We have no experience of contingency in nontemporal form,; the notion is at best wholly controversial. Save to refute Anselm, it performs no function that I at least can see. Hence it

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is question-begging. Known contingency is confined to things capable of a genesis.¹⁹

The very meaning of ‘eternal’ is dubious apart from necessity. Without necessity, nothing could establish the least probability of eternity; one would have to wait, so to speak, forever to see if the thing did always go on existing. Nay more, since the future is potential rather than actual, even God Himself could not know that He would never cease to exist, except by knowing this to be impossible; and how He could at the same time know that His nonexistence was (is?) eternally conceivable is utterly beyond even the vaguest imagining.

Someone may wonder if the foregoing commits us to the view that either the world has had a beginning or it exists necessarily. It does so commit us, but we must not overlook the ambiguity of ‘the world’. Either it means the universe in something like its present state, or at least with the same or similar laws, or it means some universe or other (created and nondivine reality) with no matter what laws. The former is reasonably viewed as contingent and also as having had a genesis; the latter I suspect is necessary and has neither come into being nor can cease to be. It is not, however, a rival to God, for it is not save in the vaguest sense an individual, but only the exceedingly abstract class, nondivine individuals in general. The rivalry which the definition of God excludes is with individuals. Besides, the universe is always wholly embraced and surpassed by the divine knowledge. Its eternity only means that God can never lack a universe to know. Anselm has other ways than the one just considered of

¹⁹ C, Harcshorne, "Real Possibility,” The Journal of Philosophy, 60, No. 21 (1963), 593-605.

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discriminating contingent from noncontingent conceptions. Thus if a concept requires a certain composition of parts, how could this be necessary, why not some other parts, in some other arrangement, instead of the specified composition? What Anselm was groping for but did not entirely attain was a theory of arbitrary, exclusive, or competitive conceptions as distinguished from those wholly without arbitrary, exclusive, or competitive features. Becoming as essentially involving real additions to the definiteness of reality must be arbitrary or competitive (why not some other addition?). So with any particular arrangements of parts. So also with any particular degree of imperfection (and all imperfection is a matter of degree). Imperfect things compete for existence, they get in each other’s way, to some extent, and their precise degree of merit is always accidental. Their partial intolerance for other forms of existence is one of the implications of their lack of perfection. But absolute perfection (unsurpassability by another) is no arbitrary degree of value, but the measure of all degrees; and its absolute capacity for dealing with others enables it to be the wholly tolerant, noncompetitive accompaniment of all competitive existence (including God Himself in His contingent or competitive aspects).

Huggett's little essay is one more in the long line of melancholy examples of how eager people are to refute Anselm’s reasoning, rather than to learn from it.

None of the above-mentioned critics seems to worry about the paradox of a God to whom existence can at best, as they seem to suspect, be imputed by sheer faith, but whose allegedly possible nonexistence must even more definitely remain a matter of sheer unfaith, or negative faith. Obviously God could not know His own nonexistence, and if no one else could

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either, then it is simply unknowable. It has been proved above (Sec. 15) that an imperfect mind could know the existence, but not the donexistence, of a perfect mind.

Nor do any of the critics seem to have a clear notion of why existence is in general contingent, unless it is merely because predicates are abstract or indeterminate and existence is concrete and definite. But it is only actuality which is fully concrete, only the particular how or state of concretization; the mere that is always at least relatively abstract, and in the supreme case before us, it is infinitely abstract, and indeed as abstract as genuine or positive possibility itself. Hence the type distinction is here entirely concentrated in the gap between the that and the how. Like so many dichotomies, that of ‘essence and existence’ is simple-minded, and obscures a real distinction. ‘Existence’ is merely a relation of exemplification which actuality (any suitable actuality) has to essence. Thus I exist if my identifying personality traits (gene structure, the property, first-born son of— and—, ot what you will) are somehow embodied in actual events, no matter which. Upon the legitimacy of applying an analogous, but even more radical, distinction to the idea of God depends the possibility of an ontological proof. Most theists have not been in a position to make this application. The central difficulty with the proof, the partly unconscious ground of opposition to it, and probably even of the positivistic denial of the concept of God itself, is in the oversimplified form of this concept presented by classical or neoplatonic theism.

Philosophers should, at long last, give due heed to the manifest difference between existence, the mere abstract truth that an abstraction is somehow concretely embodied, and the actuality, the how, of the embodiment. The ignoring

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of this duality in nearly all discussions of the ontological problem is a marvelous instance of how even centuries of prolonged controversy, involving almost an entire learned world, can still leave a point unnoticed by anyone. The possibility of such collective blindness helps to make intellectual life exciting. There is always a chance of seeing clearly for the first time what implicitly many have been looking for.

The failure to distinguish between existence and actuality seems also responsible for the notion that one might collapse Anselm’s second argument into his first, and refute Prosl. 111 by refuting Prosl. II. The contention that the second argument presupposes the first has been strongly put in Germany by Henrich (see Bibliography), who, in his detailed and, in some respects, admirably careful analysis of the fortunes of the Argument in modern philosophy, stresses the difficulty of explicating ‘necessarily exists’ unless it means that (simple) existence is contained in the essence, and hence derivable a priori. But then the first argument should be sound, since simple existence is being treated as an ateribute. What is missed is the distinction between being actualized somehow and being actualized precisely thus and thus. The latter can never be an attribute, but must be a concrete instance of the attribute, hence contingent; the former can in principle, or in one privileged form, be an attribute, the attribute ‘exemplified in any possible case’. This is noncompetitive exemplification. Competitiveness is clearly an attribute (hypothetical dollars are hypothetical competitors, actual dollars actual competitors), and therefore noncompetitiveness, if there can be such a thing, is also an attribute. But, since it is competitiveness which gives mean-

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ing to nonexistence, the noncompetitive cannot not exist; it must be actualized somehow.

Henrich wrestles valiantly with the apparent abolition in the Argument of the categorial difference between a predicate and its realization, in other words the abstractconctete paradox, and reaches the conclusion that the problem has neither been solved nor definitively shown to be insoluble. He is to be congratulated, for he is right on both counts, so far as the philosophers he discusses are concerned. He also lays down three conditions which a philosophy must meet to have the right to employ the Argument. It must have an idea of divine perfection; it must be aware of the radical difference in general between essence and existence; and it must be able to admit a spiritual reality (an ‘eidos’) quite independent of any act of thinking it. That a philosophy exists today which meets these conditions is a fact apparently unknown to this German author, even though, long before Whitehead and certain other non-Germans, some largely forgotten German thinkers (e.g., Fechner) could have met them.

It is strange that the author’s otherwise magnificent erudition has not saved him from the traditional fault of limiting Anselm’s reasoning to that of Prosl. II. For he imputes only the first argument, from simple existence, to Anselm, while the second, from necessary existence as a perfection, he treats as a post-Anselmian achievement! Thus the Gaunilo legend for the thousandth time poses as a piece of scholarship. Does perfection not entail infinite existential tolerance or adaptability (the infallible can know anything whatever), hence absolute noncompetitiveness, hence the exclusion of nonexistence as meaningless or contradictory? If so, the

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Argument is valid. Yet it takes no step in the direction of describing how, or in what actual concrete form, perfection is realized. The categorial or logical gap between essence and existence, which Henrich stresses, in the divine case becomes an absolutely infinite gap between abstract essence and /or existence, on one side, and concrete actuality on the other.

The trust in mere dichotomies was effectively criticized by Peirce seven or eight decades ago. But the lesson has yet to be learned. The ‘cultural lag’ in philosophy is great indeed. (Thus Henrich in 1960 does not know Prosl. III.) ‘Existence’ can have various positions short of full concreteness or actuality, but in one supreme case it must be as abstract as essence, and hence a priori. The comprehensive or universal contrast of idea or essence is with actuality, not with existence.

Against these authors I maintain: Anselm discovered, and really discovered, the modal uniqueness of the idea of God. What he overlooked, and nearly all his critics equally fail to see, is that, since actuality cannot be necessary, there must be a real duality in God, as in no other being, between necessary existence and contingent actuality.

[Return to Part One Contents]

24. The Proof and the Other Theistic Arguments

There is a final consideration. Philosophers all know that according to Kant the other supposed proofs for God fail unless they can resort to the principle of the ontological proof (that perfection and necessary existence are inseparable). Kant is believed to have refuted the principle, hence to have disposed of all the proofs in one blow. But did he refute the principle? True, he also accused the proofs of other weaknesses.

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But in view of the disreputable history of the criticisms of Anselm, can we trust the criticisms of the other proofs? Admittedly, there is no one locus classicus to be compared to the neglected and scorned Prosl. III and Reply to Gaunilo (though the 10th Book of the Laws has perhaps some title to this honor, and it, too, is underestimated). Still, similar prejudices are involved, such as the belief that theism must mean either classical theism or classical pantheism, or the empiricist notion that a proof for God must be a posteriori. From the empiricist assumption it was deduced—essentially a priori and without any empirical nonsense of reading texts— not only that Anselm’s proof was invalid, but also that the only hope of a proof other than the ontological would be in an inference from some sort of factual observation. In reality, the ontological is not the uniquely a priori proof; it is but one such proof. All the proofs, properly stated, proceed from ideas; but not all from the idea of God itself. And all show that we must either admit some basic idea to be absurd, or take it to be necessarily true, and admit also that this truth entails the necessary existence of the Greatest being. Unbelief is confusion or else belief is confusion. There is no third possibility.

Belief here of course means only belief in God. No special doctrine of any church or group is involved, unless it, or its denial, is deducible from the conceivability of Greatness. Such matters as Anselm’s special beliefs about the Church, the Trinity, and the Incarnation are at best subsidiary to the main religious belief, belief in a God who is unsurpassably all that it is better to be than not to be, just so far as such unsurpassability is logically possible, and who is surpassable exclusively by Himself, so far as this mode of

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exclusive surpassability is possible. Beyond that, He is what He is, and there is little we can know about it except that He knows, and that what He knows is all truth. In what sense does He know? In just the sense in which it is better to know than not to know: infallibly, because this is possible and best, yet not completely and once for all with respect to actualities, because this is contradictory, possibilities for actualization being inexhaustible and therefore never exhausted, even by deity.

To the Anselmian theory that Christ must suffer so that man's offense against God could be pardoned without injury to the divine honor or justice we may object that an author who insists that the divine nature is for us ineffable and full of paradoxes ought not lightly to assume that the values which motivate God in His treatment of man will agree so precisely with the transcendentalized legalistic notions of a certain human society. Medieval notions of ‘honor’ and ‘justice’ may be absurdly inadequate or irrelevant to the cosmic and everlasting. God (in His necessary aspect) is ‘whatever it is better to be than not to be’: perhaps it is not better to be so concerned with legalities and prestige as the deity of Cur Deus Homo is represented as being.

Thus a weakness in Anselm’s thinking is in the ‘human-all-too-human’ valuations on the basis of which he applies the above-quoted formula. The formula, however, transcends these applications and may, if properly construed, have independent validity.

[Return to Part One Contents]

The Moral Argument against Heaven and Hell

[...] the ethical aspects of classical theology and its newly worked out alternative are to be considered. The traditional idea (though not the one that prevails in the Old Testament) is that good behavior in this life must be motivated by concern for one's welfare after death. People, it was thought, are not to be trusted to love their neighbors in this life unless they have something for themselves to hope for or fear after they die. We are to gamble with God about rewards or punishments in a later life earned by how we respond to divine commands in this life. How much sin can we commit and still, upon dying, find ourselves, if not in heaven, then at least not in hell but in purgatory? Berdyaev called this Dantesque scheme "the most disgusting morality ever conceived." If it were possible to startle thosemillions, presumablywho still today accept this scheme, Berdyaev's words ought to do it. But probably it is not possible. James Joyce, in an early novel, expressed an attitude somewhat similar to Berdyaev's. Joyce also wrote a limerick to make the point, which ends: ". . . the smell / Of a horrible hell / That a Hottentot wouldn't believe in." (I owe this information to my learned friend Robert Palter.)

A more gentle response than Berdyaev's to the idea of rewards and punishments after death can be read in a pleasantly readable mystery story by a contemporary Jewish writer:

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I'd like to ask the rabbi what he meant when he said that punishment and reward after death deprived man of free will?

The rabbi paused and said, "Well, I suppose it depends on what you mean by free will."

Why freedom of choice, of course. The right to choose

Between bread and toast?" the rabbi challenged. "Between turning right or left at a crossing? The lower animals have that kind of free will. For man, free will means the freedom to choose to do something he knows is wrong, wicked, evil, for some immediate material advantage. But that calls for a fair chance of not being discovered and punished. Would anyone steal if he were surrounded by policemen and certain of arrest and punishment? And on the other hand, what virtue is there in a good deed if the reward is certain? Since God is presumably all-seeing and all-knowing, no transgression goes undetected, and no good deed fails to be noted. So what kind of free will is that? How does it differ from the free will of the laboratory rat that is rewarded by food if he goes down one path of a maze and is given an electric shock if he goes down another?

Then what happens after death according to your people?

We don't pretend to know. ¹

This is one way of spelling out what Berdyaev meant.

It is a conviction of mine that a test of antisemitism is in the way one answers the question: "Can I take seriously the idea that it just might be that the Jews, in their differences from Christians, have been more right all along on some issues?" If the answer is "Yes," then perhaps there is no antisemitism. If "No," then I have my suspicions. (I am in no sense whatever Jewish.)

Is it really necessary, in order to induce good behavior in people, to convince them that they will be rewarded or punished after death for the way they have lived? The ancient Jews did not think so. Many modern Jews do not. Is Jewish behavior less law-abiding than gentile behavior, are Jews the murderers and thieves in our society? The abusers of wives or of children? I am not aware that this is so. How about Japan, where Christians are a tiny minority? There the religious picture is complex and subtle; but we know that the Japanese population has a vastly smaller proportion than

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ours of those who kill or rob others. I suspect in fact that the Japanese are today surpassed by no other people and equaled by few in their good behavior, as judged by fairly reasonable standards (other than the admitted fact that male chauvinism is still rather marked in them). Yet I doubt if you could show that hopes of heaven or fears of hell loom very large in that country, granting that one branch of Japanese Buddhism does have recognizable duplicates of the Western ideas of heaven and hell.

How well did the heaven and hell idea ever work in influencing behavior? Frank Knight, the philosophical economist of the midcentury, once said that the relation between religious beliefs and behavior is "one of the deepest sociological mysteries." There is some influence, but it is hard to pin down factually. In any case the unfreedom of behavior controlled by threats and promises, the reliance on naked self-interest, is repellent once one sees it for what it is, a confession of disbelief in love as the principle of principles, and a glorification of egocentricity. If to be good is to be loving, how can we motivate good behavior by rewards and threats? What have they to do with love of neighbors? If we love people we want to help them. How can doing what we want to do require a reward, beyond the satisfaction of having a rational aim and capacity to realize it? Unless being loving is its own reward it is not really loving.

Abortion and the Nonabsoluteness of Personal Identity

In a previous chapter (chapter 2, section B) I remarked that it is clearly false to say that a fetus, infant, or child is strictly identical with an adult, even though the adult grew out of the child. It is also clearly false to say, as "prolifers" seem to say, or imply, that because the fetus or infant came from two persons and can (with much help from persons) grow into a person, therefore, it already is a person. The fallacy tries to hide under the vague terms 'life' and 'human': "When does human life begin?" As I write this, the president of this country, in a public address, implies that if the human fetus is alive abortion must be prohibited. But the ethical and legal question is, "When does an individual human animal

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become a person in the full sense?" For it is persons who are more valuable, intrinsically of a higher order, than mere animals. And persons are more valuable because they think on a level of which even the chimpanzees are, so far as we know, incapable. The Greek word 'logos' ('word,' also, 'reason') points to this distinctiveness of the human being as such. There is zero evidence that any newborn infant reasons in any sense beyond or equal to the capacity of dogs, apes, or porpoises.

In order to justify strongly qualifying any legal or moral right to put an end to so important a natural process as a human pregnancy, it is not necessary to deny or attempt to conceal plain facts such as those just cited. It is not a mere opinion that there are enormous (I am using words carefully) differences between a fetus and an adult human being, differences that are similar to those by which we judge ourselves to be more valuable than even the apes. To argue on the assumption that these differences are irrelevant to the question of abortion is to beg that question so patently and grossly that it is somewhat hard to believe in the good faith of those who do this. And the "pro-life" literature is full of such question-begging.

I give an extreme example to illustrate this. Jesus said, "Suffer little children to come unto me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." This has actually been quoted to imply that Jesus meant, "Suffer even little fetuses to come unto me." Not only did Jesus not say or reasonably mean that, he did not even say or mean, "Suffer infants to come unto me." At any rate, it is a wild guess to suppose that he meant that. A child such as Jesus had before him, showing fondness for him, was much more than a newborn infant. It was beginning to show the unique human power of speech and to enjoy personal relations in a manner beyond the nonhuman creatures. Physiologists know that its brain cells must have been matured definitely beyond the state of the newly born, or of a fetus, which some physiologist has compared to the brain cells of a pig. Yet "pro-lifers" like to appeal to science to support their contentions. Of course the fetus is alive! So are puppies and kittens. Of course it is human (who ever in this controversy has denied this?) if ''human" here means that its origin is in the union, in a human womb, of a human sperm and a human egg cell. To pretend that this settles the question of value is to grossly beg the question.

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The aliveness and humanity of a fetus, meaning its origin in, and (given sufficient help) likely development into, human adulthood is admitted by all parties. The question, however, concerns, not the value of the origin, or the possible eventual stage of develoment, of the fetus, but the value of the actual stage. Not everything that can be is, and the "equal value of the actual and the possible" is not an axiom that anybody lives by or could live by. Many things in an early stage of development would have an importance in a later stage which they lack in their earliest stages. In nearly every society until recent centuries it was taken for granted that killing of human adults is a vastly more serious matter than even infanticide (if the latter is done by the parent or parents). This is enough to show that the idea of a fetus as a person in the full sense is not so plainly true that it can be used as a noncontroversial premise for political or moral conclusions. Nor is there anything in the Constitution to justify it. Did the makers of that Constitutionwho brought themselves to make partial exception of women and blacks and even, in some respects, of half-grown children, all of whom, beyond controversy, have the unique human capacities of fluent speech and reasoning which no fetus has and which alone justify, if they do, killing other animals for fooddid these men have fetuses in mind when they wrote about the rights of persons or citizens? To equate treatment of women or blacks with treatment of fetuses is a gross insult to members of those two groups of undoubted persons.

If being a typical member of the Kingdom of Heaven were really like being a fetus, the saying of Jesus would scarcely be an appealingif even an intelligibleinvitation to membership in that Kingdom.

Would it not be well if some of the rhetorical tears shed over the dying of fetuses were saved for the tragic sufferings, in many cases the deep misery, of women, many of them very young, who against their intentions and wishes, have become pregnant? Their unwillingness to be mothers may have various grounds, by no means necessarily selfish or unreasonable. We are in a society that does a miserable job of teaching the truth about sex, also about love and friendship. Parents with the courage, tact, and knowledge to impart that truth effectively are apparently uncommon; and yet

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some of the others, one surmises, are the very ones who wish to prevent schools from doing what they themselves cannot or will not do.

We should all be "for life," especially for the lives of those who quite certainly are persons. Unless that is given a clear priority, the whole pro-personal-life idea looks like a contradiction. And that contradiction is to be put into the Constitutionor the law of the land?! On the chance that what seems to most of us, and has seemed to most societies, to be far from a person is really a person, one is to demand that what we all agree is a person is to have at most only equal claims. So weak is human judgment in many among us that it can offer such a proposal seriously.

It is only too true that birth control, and the availability of abortion when the former fails (and only abstinence is infallible), may encourage some to live frivolously and miss the very real values that fidelity to a single mate can give. I have had fifty-four years of experiencing these values. I have not sought or accepted sexual relationships on any other basis. I do not need to be told what many are missing by following a different life-style. But in oldfashioned civilized societies there have always been many who also missed them. These are very difficult problems. I wish I knew all the answers to the relevant questions. But I think I know that some of the most emphatic pronouncements come from those who do not know the answers. They want to take a sad situation, huge numbers of women, many still little more than children, pregnant at the wrong time and in the wrong way, and make it even worse. If the Supreme Court is our last bastion against their endeavors, then how fortunate we are that the court exists!

The resourcefulness of one-issue fanatics in obscuring issues is almost inexhaustible. Consider the endlessly reiterated adjective "innocent" used of fetuses. If, and only if, the defenders of a right to abort (in certain cases) had ever used, or were likely ever to use, as argument the contention that fetuses are wicked and ought to be punished, only then would the innocence of the fetus be a relevant consideration. Of course the assumption is totally false and therefore the consideration as used is irrelevant.

The innocence of the fetus is indeed somewhat relevant if used on the other side of the argument. The fetal innocence is like the

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innocence of the other animals, a total incapacity to distinguish right from wrong and therefore to be wicked. This

supports the view that in value qualities the fetus is drastically inferior to a person (normally and responsibly so- called).

Another irrelevant yet actually used argument is to ask the defender, not of abortion but of a limited right to abort, how would you have liked it if your mother had decided to abort you in the early fetus stage so that you would never have enjoyed the career you have enjoyed or any out-of-the-womb career? The answer is that, using pronouns responsibly, I would neither have liked nor disliked this, for there simply would not have been what "I" refers to when the author of this book employs the word. In an early-stage fetus there is no conscious selfhood, much less, if possible, than there is in a gibbon ape. Ask any psychologist.

The term "pro-life" seems to imply (another red herring) that those who grant a limited right to abortions are against "life." It is a statistical fact that properly done abortions in early fetus stages are far safer for the mother than ordinary childbirth. Even this fact seems to get pushed under the rug. It may not be decisive but it is relevant. Moreover, it does not begin to exhaust the ways in which the "pro-life" politicians are cheerfully endangering the lives of undoubted persons. By putting many very personal matters into the hands of the police and magistrates, they may greatly increase the number of badly done abortions, and do harm to members of families in which an additional birth may be a catastrophe. I could go on.

To attempt to legislate a total cessation of abortions comes close to threatening civil war. What consensus there is concerning the topic is strongly against such legislation. It would be a classic case of bad lawmaking. The controversy is also a classic case of the way we human beings can be entangled in our own language and by verbal ambiguities deceive one another and, above all, ourselves, unless by good luck and good will we have been taught and have learned how to use words responsibly. We are all only too likely to take advantage of such ambiguities when so doing promises to increase our political power. And the "pro-life" movement is definitely political. It is quite other than a group of saints acting out their saintliness.

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Identity, Nonidentity, and the Primacy of Love

Our concern here is only incidentally with abortion, important in a practical way as that subject is. Our concern with the meaning of personal identity, however, is far more than incidental. I hold that every major mistake about God involves a mistake about human nature, and (generally speaking) vice versa. And I regard it as a fact about the history of religions that only one of the great religions has been at all clear and correct about the sense in which a person is the same reality through change. This religion is not Christianity, which until very recently has, in its philosophy, nearly always analyzed personal identity partly wrongly. It has supposed that a person is simply one reality from birth (or before) until death (or after), although this one reality has partly different (indeed very different) qualities at different times. Various logicians and a few philosophers in the West have pointed out the confusion in this account (H. Scholz in Germany, Bertrand Russell in England, Carnap, Whitehead, and William James in this country, David Hume long ago in England), but philosophers and theologians have tended to ignore or weakly answer their criticisms. The example of Aristotle has been somewhat unhelpful in this regard. As with a good many other questions, Plato's philosophy, carefully considered, tends to correct Aristotle's mistake, but Aristotle came later and his wonderfully versatile genius gave him enormous influence. His "substances" still stroll the world.

A Spanish philosopher of our time, Juli n Mar as, has pointed to the truth by saying: "A person [probably Mar as did not have fetuses or infants in mind] is the same person through change, but not the same thing." Or, as I said above, with each change we have a new concrete reality, not simply the identical reality with new qualities. There is numerical, not merely qualitative, alteration. That John Smith (born of parents A and B at time t) is "the same person" day after day and year after year means that John Smith does not become Henry Jones (born of two parents other than A and B or at another time than t) nor does John Smith become an elephant or a mountain or (after infancy) anything other than a human person through the changes in question. But John Smith on Monday and John Smith on Tuesday are two realities, numer -

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ically as well as qualitatively distinguished. This, I submit, is plain fact. The two are in different loci in space-time, they are concrete realities that can be or have been observed as such. What is not fully concrete is the "identity" of the two. This is the abstraction that both are human persons and that between the two was a series of intermediaries, with no definitely observable break between them. Thus the one reality "turned into" the other. None of this is clearly and correctly stated by saying that the two are simply identical. Identity in the strict sense first defined by Leibniz means: with all properties the same. With strict identity, differences are not in what is referred to but only in the referring expressions. Genetic identity, as of persons, is a nonstrict identity. By insisting on treating the facts otherwise, one is, knowingly or not, playing fast and loose with language; and it is foolish to suppose that this can be done in a serious and difficult question of religion, ethics, or metaphysics without misleading others and/or oneself.

A nonstrict identity is one in which there are two or more concrete actualities with partly differing qualities. The actualities may be partly identical. For instance, A may include B, which is then strictly identical with a part or constituent of A but not with A as a whole. There is a case for the view that a person in a later state includes thatnperson in an earlier state, though not vice versa. So far as memory is involved, A-now includes A-then, for A- now-remembering-A-then is not complete without A-then. This is the Bergson-Whitehead doctrine that memory is somehow literal embracing of the past in the present. In whatever sense this is correct, there is genuinethough only partial and nonstrict, yet numericalidentity of a person through change. Only I remember my very past in the inward way in which I remember it. I remember it mostly vaguely and partially, but still I- now cannot be fully described without mentioning that past of mine. So genetic personal identity is not mere similarity plus the mere continuity of Hume's or Russell's analysis (and some Buddhist analyses) of genetic identity. They overstated the nonstrictness of genetic identity. But this does not justify pretending that it is really strict identity. It is, in many glaringly obvious ways, very far from that. For instance, in deep sleep one is not even a conscious individual. One's body is there, but where are one's thoughts or feelings? If this is a small difference,

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what is a large one? It is like the general difference between a tree and a higher animal. In fact, Aristotle well said, "A tree is like a man sleeping [and not dreaming] who never wakes up."

The importance of the distinction between complete or strict and only partial identity is seen when we take into account that it is not only in memory that we seem to have the past in the present. This happens in perception also. Events we see happening actually happened before we saw themlong before, if the happenings were far off in the starry sky. It is arguable, and I believe true, that no account of the present is complete without referring to past events as perceptually embraced in that present. If this is so, then I-now may be partly identical with you as a moment ago. Coming closer still to the heart of the problem, if I-now feels a physical pain, then I-now embraces intuitively what is either just now happening, or has just already happened, in some of my cells. There are reasons for preferring the second interpretation. But either way I am partly identical with those cells, and with perceived neighbors, and not merely with my previous remembered states of consciousness.

We are now ready to look at the theological and ethical importance of our analysis of genetic identity. The great preacher of love or "charity," Paul, wrote, "We are members one of another." I once (in a class taught by Rufus Jones at Haverford College) had my life changed by this text, plus the philosopher Royce's discussion of it as llustrative of what he called "community." It started me on a path that led far beyond Royce's own philosophy and also beyond classical theology. Paul was right, in a reasonable sense literally right, in the text quoted. And his eloquent poem in praise of ''charity" or love shows how wonderfully he knew the religious significance of his words. But still he stopped short of full understanding.

What Jesus termed "the law and the prophets," in other words, the essentials of religious ethics, were the two "great commandments": love God with all your being (heart, mind, strength) and your neighbor as yourself. It is not said, "nearly as yourself." Love for self and the other are in principle to be on the same footing; the ideal is their strict equality. How few are the Western philosophers or theologians who have really accepted this proposition!

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Nearly all have tended to say, love your neighbor because that is the way to promote your own future welfare, if not in this life then in the next. The justification of altruism was sought in enlightened self-interest. Self-interest, however, was taken as its own justification. Self-love stands on its own feet, but love of others is indirect selflove. I submit, this betrays the Gospel ideal. And it does this in two ways.

If personal identity is strict or unqualified, is the nonidentity between persons similarly unqualified, so that "We are members one of another" is simply false? How can A love B as A loves A, if the point of "A loves A" is that A simply is A, whereas B is simply not A? Sheer identity is to explain the one love, sheer nonidentity to explain the other love. What can the two loves have in common? How can they be equals? This is one way in which the traditional interpretation of "person" betrays the Gospel ideal.

The other way is equally manifest. We are told that love for God is to be the all-in-all of our motivation. This contradicts the idea that self-love needs no justification, stands on its own feet as entirely rational in itself. On the contrary, it stands under the strict injunction that it is to count for nothing except as it is somehow included in love for God, which love is to be the inclusive motivation. We are to love ourselves as valuable to God. This is exactly how we are to love the neighbor. "Inasmuch as ye have done it to the least of these, ye have done it unto me." The justification for love of others is as direct as that for love of self. The only detour (if it is that) is to bring in God, and it is the same for self-love. Thus the two great commandments, properly understood, are entirely in harmony with each other, and neither is in harmony with the traditional Western doctrine of motivation.

After Rufus Jones, the philosophical mystic of the Society of Friends, had started me on the consideration of the meaning of Christian or Judaeo-Christian love, I began to move toward a view which differed somewhat both from classical and from Royce's theology, but which, I gradually discovered, had some elements in common, not only with various modern or recent Western philosophies, but also with some views of ancient and modern Buddhism.

It is Buddhists who really went the limit in qualifying personal identity to allow for partial identity with others. This was called

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the 'no soul, no substance' doctrine. They really believed that we are members one of another. Personal identity, personal nonidentity, are alike partial. There is no absolute and direct justification for self-love in contrast to a merely roundabout one for love of others. Both are on much the same footing and neither makes much sense merely by itself. Apart from our interest in others, what are we? Start with those others that are our bodily cells, and go on to our sympathy with characters in history and fiction, our love for relatives and friends, other lesser animals, plants. Apart from all this, we have no self. It is our loves that make us anything worth mentioning. In a generalized sense of the word, it is "altruism" that explains self-love, not the other way. I-now sympathizes with my probable future and remembered past selves, and that is my self-love. It is no mere identity. And I, as ordinary language puts it, (partially) "identify myself with," "sympathize with," other people's past and future selves. Sympathy, the root of altruism, is the common principle of all love and all senses of identity as applied to individuals.

What the Buddhists chiefly lacked, though in some sects they came close to it, was an idea of God adequate to express their insight into human motivation. In this, the West, at long last, did them one betterafter nearly two thousand years of wandering in the wilderness of an extreme pluralism of persons and other "substances," each perfectly self-identical and perfectly nonidentical with one another. Similarly, God was a supreme person or substance, in a quasi-absolute fashion nonidentical with the creatures. Gradually, with increasing clarity, in various parts of the world, a new way of qualifying the plurality of persons, things, and God, capable of interpreting the belief in the ultimacy of love, is being worked out. A branch of Hinduism has for several centuries represented some such view (the Bengali school, founded by Sri Jiva Goswami); Whitehead and other process theologians, Cobb, Ogden, and others are recent or contemporary Western examples. This view has had representatives or enthusiasts in many branches of Christianity, some in Judaism, and at least one (Iqbal) in Islam.

If we reject the Buddhist-Whiteheadian view (that a human career, for example, is not a strictly single reality with differing qualities but an apparently continuous succession of realities each as

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a whole new), then we are not only supposing that for over twenty centuries the Buddhists, who thought with care about the matter all this time, were simply mistaken, but we are also supposing that Hume, Russell, a number of accomplished logicians besides Russell and Whitehead (one of whom, Scholz, was a trained theologian who wrote a fine book on Christian love)and, besides all this, that even contemporary physicists, who keep telling us that they have been forced to the conclusion that reality consists of "events not things" (meaning self- identical yet changing things)are also in this simply mistaken. You can suppose all this, but still, what consensus could be more impressive than that between one of the great religious traditions, much modern philosophy, and the most exact natural science? We shall see in the next section that the biblical doctrine of divine love is most readily interpretable in the Buddhist-Whiteheadian way.

It does not help here to appeal to ordinary language. The assertion of strict or complete rather than partial identity is not a piece of ordinary language. It is a highly technical, but as such manifestly paradoxical, assertion. Ordinary uses of pronouns and proper nouns are quite consistent with the theory of only-partial identity with self and only-partial nonidentity with others.

Self-Identity as Attribute of God

If, in ordinary cases, the identity of an individual through change is a highly qualified or relative matter, and if God, as maintained in Chapter 1, is to be conceived as in some respect changeable, then is the identity of Deity analogously qualified or relative? I answer, Yesbut, as with all analogies, and especially the one between a creature as such, or the human being as such, and Godthere is difference as well as similarity. It is easy to see that the relativity involved in the passage from unconsciousness in dreamless sleep to waking consciousness, or between nonrational infantilism and adult rationality, or vicious hatred and kindly love, are not to be attributed to Deity. Indeed, God must have something almost like the strict identity many seem to think they find in each of us. The divine integrity through change must be ideally perfect. Divine

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action as righteous, principled, or loving must be infallibly constant. The only change must be in increase in whatever aspects of value are incapable of an absolute maximum, these being summed up in the idea of enjoying the beauty, the aesthetic harmony and richness, of creation. Only in this aspect is there any "shadow of turning" in God.

There is also the question of the relativity of nonidentity with others as applied to Deity. Are we and God members one of another? Again the answer is, Yes, but with a difference in principle in this supreme case, as contrasted to ordinary ones. Deity is the highest possible form of the inclusion of others in the self and the highest possible form of the self being included in others. Infallibly and with unrivaled adequacy aware of all others, God includes othersnot, as we do, in a mostly indistinct or largely unconscious manner, but with full clarity and consciousness. Another statement of Paul's is relevant here too: "In God we live and move and have our being." Since God forgets nothing, loses no value once acquired, our entire worth is imperishable in the divine life. This is the Whiteheadian "objective immortality in the consequent nature of God." It is the non-Pauline version of "O death, where is thy sting?" Also God, being ubiquitous, universally relevant to all creatures, is present to every creature, included in it in whatever manner the nature of the particular creature is capable of experiencing God, in most cases without anything like distinct consciousness. In this extremely generalized sense, God is universal object as well as universal subject. No creature is universal in either role.

The Present Condition of Humankind

In a worldthat is to say, on a planet of fear and violence (which now seems potentially unlimited), what can a religion of universal love contribute? It can at least relieve us of fears of evils which, so far as real knowledge goes, are imaginary, such as the fear of a God who loves creatures so little as to threaten them with some supernatural hell. After Hiroshima we know that there can be hell enough on earth. Such a God would love us, not for what we are, unusually complex and unusually free and conscious

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animals with limited life spans, but for what there is no clear evidence we are, creatures with supernatural, unending careers, only a vanishingly small fraction of which are to be lived on earth.

A religion of love can encourage us to look upon nature as a realm of love and freedom, whose members, in an extended sense fellow creatures, are in their humbler way also "images of God," testaments to the divine nature. Thus it can express and enlighten the current concern for the environment as no mere platform for our strutting about, or set of exploitable resources for our survival and luxurious living, but rather as a vast system of embodiments of and suitable objects for sympathetic participation. We thus become citizens of the universal society, the old Stoic idea, but without the Stoic reduction of freedom to mere preprogrammed voluntariness.

It is important to realize that some of our current problems are radically different from those which confronted our species in the days of the founding of the major religions and that the differences result chiefly from science, pure and applied. We can either try to content ourselves with applied science (technology), refusing to open our minds to the essential spirit of science, the most intensive, constructive, cooperative form of curiosity about the concrete world around us, or we can open our minds to that spirit. We cannot do this while holding tenaciously to the letter of religious texts as definitive in all the matters with which, taking their words at face value, they seem to deal. In science no book settles once for all what is to be believed. The God whose "images" we are is supremely intelligent and (we may presume) bids us be intelligent, is supremely creative or free and bids us be creative and free in our own appropriate ways. Science is a principal form of this creativity. It is really an intellectual form of love, a search for the hidden beauties of nature which are expressions of and contributions to the supreme Artist and Appreciator of art. Scientists, especially the greatest among them, have often used the word 'beauty,' and often, too, the word 'God,' to communicate their feelings about their work.

If the religion of love, freedom, and beauty cannot be content with traditional theology in those aspects of it which are criticized in this book, it also cannot be content with a merely atheistic or materialistic view. We have no reason to be uncritically impressed

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by present-day China or Russia. The consequences of a world-view blind to the great "sun" of love (the concern of life for life, experience for experience, feeling for feeling, consciousness for consciousness, freedom for freedom) are not hard to see in the dark sides of communist activities. But this does not mean that we must substitute mere fear or hatred for the sense that communists, too, are our human fellows, as are the literal- minded traditionalists in religion. All are expressions of and contributions to the divine life. And our society, too, has its dark side. Both great powers threaten humankind.

A Requirement for Ethical Judgments

On one point there might be a rather general consensus among theologians and philosophers: Any ethical judgment should be capable of defence without telling falsehoods, misstating facts, arguing from ambiguity, or playing fast and loose with language. The "pro-life" literature is mostly a string of verbally implied identifications of fertilized egg cell with fetus, of fetus with infant, infant with child, child with youth, youth with adult. I repeat, any cause is suspect which ignores or denies distinctions so great as that between even a child and an animal form (say a three- or four-month- old fetus) in actual functioning far below the higher mammalian level, or which collapses the contrast between 'actually valuable' and 'potentially valuable,' as though 'capable of becoming such and such' were no different from 'actually being such and such.'

A child speaking with some fluency, say three years old, is already, for all we yet know, beyond the mental level even of an ape. But a fetus or newborn infant is well below that level. And a two-month- old fetus is vastly below it. Indeed, this is, as differences in the world go, one of the really great ones. Our lives are enormous journeys from less than nothing of rational personhood to the fullness of personhood. It is one of the wonders of the world that this journey is possible. But the journey is the progressive creation of value, with no fixed value there from the start.

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Suppose the fetus really is the beginning of an endless career and hence infinitely important. Its destruction cannot, on the hypothesis, cut short that career, and might for all we know go on better in the supposed supernatural state after death. Thus the infinitizing of human lives is of no help in determining how their finite careers on earth are to be viewed. Rather it destroys any reasonable perspective on those careers. It is in this life that we are to achieve happiness and do good. Of no other life have we usable knowledge.

Arguments have been offered based on reports by those who have "come back from death (so-called) to life" remembering remarkable experiences of how it was after their hearts stopped beating and their lungs stopped inhaling and they were in that sense dead. But the fact that these persons did retain or regain consciousness is sufficient evidence for the uninterrupted aliveness of their brain cells, upon which, and not directly upon heart or lungs, consciousness depends. This tells us nothing at all about what it will be like when our brain cells are dead.

Religion and Philosophy

Not only do religious people need to open their minds to science, in its basic spiritual vision or attitude, but they also need to have some appreciation for the role of philosophy, with all the latter's manifest limitations and inability to reach anything like a stable consensus. For as science is the cooperative, public-spirited, intellectual search for the hidden beauties of nature, which believers in God must take as manifestations of the divine, or as the really superhuman "word of God," so philosophy is the cooperative (though facing greater difficulties of communication), public-spirited, intellectual search for principles so fundamental that they can mediate between science and religion, or between one religion and another. It can help us to decide what to do about the stubborn fact attested to by all history that in civilized societies consensus in religion, otherwise than by brute force (and then only through hypocrisy and the stifling of individual curiosity or inquiry) is not a practical goal, at least for any future that we can foresee. I regard the lack

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of philosophical literacy in some circles in this country as a danger to our democracy. The one-issue fanatics in politics are insufficiently disciplined philosophically, and they are a danger to the democratic process as such.

In a televised discussion of "creation biology" versus evolution, a Louisiana man explained candidly his need to accept creation biology by the statements that he needed an anchor in life, that he found it in the Bible, but that, if God "lies to him" in part of the Bible, he cannot trust God to be telling the truth in other parts. The following implications of this defence are remarkable.

It is implied that reading the Bible is fully equivalent to having a conversation with God, or at least to reading letters in the divine handwriting. It is implied that this man has no knowledge of life, of nature, of the varied thoughts of great minds about life and nature, no experience of good and evil, sufficient to give him norms by which to discriminate degrees of truth or levels of meaning in the Bible. It is also implied that every mistake in the Bible must mean that someone is lying, or indeed that God is lying. Yet this very man, thus innocent of any sense that he can rely upon of value or importance, or of how to interpret documents written in a very different culture from ours (devoid of our science and technology, our philosophy, and much else), claims to be able to know or to reasonably believe that one book is the book, all of which must be absolutely true, or else of no religious help at all. There are many books for which similar claims are made. For Islam it is the Koran, for Hindus the Bhagavad Gita, for multitudes of Chinese the I Ching or the Analects of Confucius, for Christian Scientists the book by Mary Baker Eddy. For Jews the Old Testament is the entire Bible. Our Louisiana citizen is disagreeing with all of these and countless others as well, including millions of nonfundamentalist Christians. How, without criteria which would enable him to see more truth in some parts of the Bible than in others, can he possibly form a reasonable judgment as to whether the Bible, or even whether any possible human book, could be the infallible God addressing us in human words in such fashion that we could not be mistaken as to the meaning, or as to the lesson we could wisely draw from the words?

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I have some fear of that Louisiana man (for whom I also feel compassion) and others like him. For they would be willing to have certain aspects of their view enacted into law, backed by the powers of the police. The only justification I can see for this attitude is that our all-too-government-controlled educational system has already used that same police power to tax people to pay for education in public schools, whether or not parents or pupils like what is taught in those schools. This is a rather baffling political dilemma we have drifted into, thanks to our insufficient belief in freedom. If we had more freedom than we have in education I would see no excuse whatever for the government's doing anything to help along such an intellectually unimpressive cause as that of trying to derive knowledge of nature from a book written by those who had incomparably less of that knowledge than we have. But the dilemma spoken of is real.

Compare the text that Eve was made from Adam's rib with the texts that announce the two commandments of how and what to love as summing up the essence of religion. Everything some of us feel we have learned from life and literature seems to support the commandments, nothing of it supports one of the two Genesis accounts of the origin of the female half of the species. The other account simply says, "Male and female created he them." True, we are not God, not infallible. But then how could anyone, not infallible, have much confidence in his or her ability to know that a certain book must be either infallible (something it is close to meaningless to say of a book) or else have no wisdom to give us? An educational system that does not enable people to think in a more informed and disciplined way than that Louisiana man evidences is perhaps not good enough to be supported by general taxation.

Our Constitution rightly separates church and state. But can education and religion be equally separated? We need more consideration of that side of the question. I am not happy with the currently available answers. And I write as an emeritus professor of a state university. However, I am grateful that my own higher education was all private.

Since there is no clear consensus either in philosophy or in religion, it behooves teachers (writers, lawmakers) to be careful

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about presuming to narrow the options that individuals face in choosing basic beliefs. To try to bully readers or hearers into a choice between just the two possibilities, a Godless belief in evolution, or a belief in God that excludes evolution, is to mistreat people. There is no support in philosophy for the exclusion of a third option, belief in God that includes belief in evolution. And there is no consensus in theology for this exclusion either. To suppose otherwise is to be unaware of the actual state of knowledge in our time.

A religion and philosophy of freedom must try to teach people to keep asking the question,''Does this or that procedure unduly narrow the options for individual choice?" "Creation biology or else a Godless biology" is a cruel, as well as an ignorant, dilemma. Nor is there any consensus for the view that a fetus has all the value of a person, and that its destruction is thus murder in the same sense as any other homicide. Even if a bare majority in Congress or state legislatures could be attained, it would be tyranny to impose this view by the police power. There are many of us who deeply believe this. The fetus is "human" biologically; but the issue is one of ethics and law, not of mere biology: it transcends natural science.

Pollsters are telling us that a substantial majority of the citizens of this country believe in God. As a believer, I find this encouraging. In Europe it seems that believers are perhaps a minority. But, alas, I strongly suspect that in Europe literal-minded fundamentalists are a much smaller proportion of believers than is the case here. As a non-literal-minded believer I find this fact discouraging, almost frightening. Given enough political power to fundamentalists, how close might we come to a new Inquisition, that great monstrosity which disfigured traditional Christianity? Religious fanaticism is still with us, and it has had an ugly history.

A friend, a theologian, had a phrase that has stuck with me, "the acidity of orthodoxy." Orthodoxy can be worse than acid. It can be lethal. I have encountered a "pro-lifer" who gave me little sense of being pro my life or the life of adults generally. Pro-fetuslife is a very special form of enthusiasm for life. I have respect for the fetus as, like all animals, a wondrous creation, and a suitable object of sympathy. In addition it is capable of eventually, with

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much help from relatively adult persons, of becoming first an infant (and then a child), beginning to learn from its elders, and finally an adult human person. We are all human individuals long before we are persons in the value sense of actually thinking and reasoning in the human fashion. Even in dreamless sleep as adults, we are not actually functioning as persons; but this does not abolish the obviously crucial difference between a fetus whose potentiality for rational personhood requires at least many months of help by actual persons to be actualized even slightly, and a sleeping adult who has already functioned as a person for many years and who has made many plans for what it will do in its waking moments, perhaps for years to come.

The spell of tradition, taking over part of the function of instinct, is the wall that staves off chaos in human behavior. It may be that many simply must go on believing in survival in the rather naive form, as it seems to the rest of us, that we are all familiar with. But it cannot be right to try to prevent individuals who feel no need for this belief from nevertheless believing in God as the only immortal beingsave as the objective immortality of the past in God makes us and all creatures permanent divine possessions. Accepting the two commandments said to sum up Biblical religion is one thing, belief in tall tales about human careers after death is another and, in my judgment, incomparably less important one. It is hard enough, though I find it personally not too hard, to believe firmly in God, without having also to believe in those tales. The arguments for theistic belief that I have carefully formulated (with so far scarcely a word of rebuttal) in my book Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method do not support infinite careers for human animals. That is a radically different belief from any reasonable point of view. It requires us to add to our observational knowledge of our species and its place among the animals on this planet an infinite addition making our species not only radically more intelligent than the others but, in one respect, as different in status from the others as God is believed to be to creatures generally. This not only does not follow from belief in God but tends to make God a mere means to our everlasting happiness and to make each of us a rival to God in endurance and ability to preserve

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personal individuality through an infinity of experiences without monotony or loss of integrity.

The central question of religion cannot be, "What about heaven and hell?" but must be, "What about God, cosmic mind and love, exalted in principle above all else, the only indestructible, all-inclusive, yet individual, being?"

The belief that God does not simply and completely make things, but brings it about that they partly make themselves and one another, does not mean that the divine creating is just one more case of creating. In principle, the divine action has unrivaled superiority. Most obviously it is divine decision which determines the form of the statistical or approximate cosmic orderliness, leaving the details for the creatures to settle. What physicists are trying to discover are, as some of them have said, divine thoughts by which the creatures are, not (we are learning to say) determined, but so influenced that abstract regularities or laws apply to the results. Finally, it is divine decision which determines how creaturely experiences are to be objectively immortalized and so achieve the only importance they will ultimately have. Thus, to quote from a Jewish ritual, God "gives to our fleeting days abiding significance." Our value to posterity extends this significance, but without God it would ultimately fade away toward nothingness, so far as human wit has been able to grasp this problem. The species cannot be known to forever escape destruction from cosmic forces and its own folly, and posterity's ability to use our lives for its own welfare or enjoyment is unpredictable and certainly limited. Only God can be guaranteed to make ideally wise use of what we have been.

Several objections to the foregoing are foreseeable. One is that if all God is doing is giving the world an orderliness by which creaturely freedom (and hence chance) have their limited place and to immortalize creaturely experiences in and for His-Her own life, this is too little to do for the creatures. Also, it makes God ultimately selfish. Finally, it is God who receives all rewards, not any creatures. These objections imply a somewhat complex defence, if defence is possible.

First, I wish to insist that it is no small thing to give the world sufficient orderliness to make it possible for free creatures (that is, creatures) to adapt to one another essentially harmoniously. Every

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organism is an internal harmony, proportional to its health, while it lives, and healthy organisms are bound to predominate in nature. The cosmic harmony is an infinite good, at least in the sense that without it there would be no good worth mentioning, and that, if the creative advance is beginningless and endless (as I hold), there is no upper limit to the value produced. It is not to be supposed a simple, slight thing that a being, by its own influence, orders all other things so that the opportunities for good expressions of freedom justify the risks of more-or-less evil or unfortunate expressions. How such ordering is possible exceeds our human imagination to grasp. It is a mystery in the best sense of that word. And belief in it gives meaning to our lives.

Second, I know of no proof that God's influence upon the creatures is only that expressed by the natural laws giving order to worldly happenings. From the unsurpassable power and wisdom of God I deduce that if the divine influence would produce better results for the beauty of the world by going beyond the mere ordering in question, then the influence does go farther. But I doubt our human wisdom to know if this further limiting of freedom would produce better results. All I do think I know is that the opportunities involved in a given degree of freedom tend to increase only with a corresponding increase in risks. Primitive man had more freedom, more opportunity, with more risks of doing harm than other animals; we, with our science and technology, have still more scope for our decision-making, and we can do much more harm and much more good. This is what I see clearly. Whether, or how far, miracles happen, as recorded in every religion, I do not know and see no way to decide. I cannot live and die for their having occurred or their having not occurred. The meaning of life for me is independent of that question.

Is God Selfish?

The charge that a being is selfish unless it can do good to others without this good being of use to itself is a curious confusion, almost comical when looked at calmly and analytically. Save me from a friend who says to me, "The good that results to you from

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my being and acting is nothing in my life. I am totally unmoved and ungratified by the benefits my action brings to you. Whether you live or die, enjoy or suffer, is all one to me. My own possession of good is in every respect totally independent of any good in you. I am like the sun, bestowing benefits without the results giving me anything I would otherwise lack. I am absolutely unselfish, that is, I do not rejoice in your joy, or sorrow in your sorrow."

The situation, looked at carefully, seems as follows. It is human beings who do not, and could not possibly, get the full value of the good they bring to others. By the time a good deed reaches its result in the other, the benefactor may be dead or far away and know nothing about it. At best, no human being can fully share in the experiences he or she helps others to enjoy. Nor can we fully share in the sufferings we cause others. Our limited power to perceive and understand guarantees that. Hence there is need for us to be willing to furnish others with values we are ourselves unable to fully profit from. Every parent or teacher experiences this. Accordingly, we will, if we are ethical, try to bring good to others some of which can never become our good. But quite obviously all of this arises from our limitations, none of which is applicable to God. God cannot possibly miss the enjoyment of any beauty divinely given to others. The final harvest from every seed sown is reaped by God. And this is the meaning of divine cognitive-perceptive perfection. In that sense Deity is indeed absolute perfection. So the traditional version of the divine unselfishness is the attribution to God of an absolute form of the relative defects which distinguish the creatures from God!

God is neither selfish nor unselfish as we exhibit these traits. Rather, God is unsurpassably loving, and that means fully grasping the good of others as therefore also divine good. God's satisfaction includes all the satisfactions of others, integrated on a higher level into the satisfaction which surpasses that of any conceivable other but perpetually exceeds itself as new others arise to enrich it.

Note, too, that if God participates more fully in our happiness than we can in that of one another, it also follows that God participates more fully in our suffering. Vicarious suffering is the only meaning of divine unselfishness, and process theology (Berdyaev, Whitehead) fully accepts this. The cross is Christianity's

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sublime symbol. Would that, in its doctrine of the divine perfection, it had made more use of what is thus symbolized!

A further objection to the concept of creaturely good as finally contributory to divine good (and only therewith immortal) is that it does not give us a sufficient rational aim to say that we can contribute to a divine good when our lives are over. We shall not be there, still conscious of God's enjoyment of our having lived. Here, too, I see confusion. Our consciousness, so far as there ever has been such a thing as our consciousness, will still be there in God. It will be such consciousness as we had before dying, but all of it will be imperishable in God. If we are now aware of ourselves as contributing to the divine consciousness, that very awareness of God's awareness of us will not perish but "live forevermore" (Whitehead). What will not be there are new, additional states of awareness belonging to us, other than those we had before dying.

Divine Love as the Meaning of Life

If I am told that it is asking too much freedom from egocentricity to expect human beings to accept the imperishable divine enjoyment of our earthly lives as a sufficient aim for human endeavor, I can only reply, "What then did you have in mind when you accepted, if you did, the great commandment to love God with all your being? Did you then hold back with the proviso, 'Assuming that God forever keeps on giving me new joys and blessingsotherwise I refuse to play'?" Just as people have not taken seriously the second commandment, to love the neighbor as the self, so they have not taken really seriously the first commandment. My proposal is that we accept both as meaning what they say and as among the most exact expressions of an idea to be found outside of pure and applied mathematics.

God is not to be bargained with. We are contingent beings. We might not have existed, and so long as we live it is our will to live that keeps us alive. "The universe," as Stephen Crane implied in a poem, is not in debt to us. The reward for living is the living itself. Anything more is a bonus. It is other creatures who may owe us things, and with whom we may bargain. There was a man

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who said, "I am willing to be damned for the glory of God." Would this excellent fellow have been willing, for the divine glory, to admit that there might be no such things as damnation or as being assigned to purgatory or heaven? The glory of God is everything or nothing. It is the absolute measure of value.

What then does God do for us? Divine action makes our existence possible, with all its moments of joy and tolerable sorrow (the intolerable deprives us of consciousness), and in addition gives us a rational aim and possibility of making wise, caring decisions in such fashion that, in the long run and on the whole, those we love, including ourselves and our human posterity, will probably (because the world is ordered) have better lives than if we decide carelessly or selfishly. Also, and in any case, whatever good qualities of experience we enjoy, or help others to enjoy, will be indestructible elements in the Life, love for which is, so far as we understand ourselves, our inclusive concern. If there is any serious rival to this as an aim I do not know of it.

The wise and almost unbelievedly neglected Fechner said it over a century ago: "To find one's satisfaction in satisfying God, as that one who finds greatest satisfaction in the utmost possible satisfaction of allhigher than this no feeling of satisfaction can go." ²

I do not recall Fechner referring to Plato, but I think Plato would have been keenly interested in the following:

However high any being (other than God) stands, it still has an external world; other beings, similar to it, limit it; only as it rises higher does it contain more within itself, exist more purely within itself.

But God, as the totality of being . . . has no external environment, no beings outside himself; . . . is one and unique; all spirits move in the inner world of his spirit; all bodies in the inner world of his body.³

These passages from Fechner show that Plato's vision of the World Soul, God as the cosmic, ideal animal, was not lost forever. Spinoza, following the Stoics, had a version of it; but Spinoza's version was ruined by determinism, the denial of freedom in either God or creatures. Spinoza talked of creation, but he emptied the

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concept of meaning by likening it to the way a triangle has three angles. Recently Strawson, widely influential British philosopher, has suggested that what philosophy can regard as worthy of the veneration formerly directed to God is "the universe." If that means simply "the inclusive reality," well and good. But much depends upon how one conceives the inclusive reality. A few among modern theologians (the saintly D. C. McIntosh, for one) have used the mind-body analogy. There is really no substitute for it. But any basic misconception of the human or higher-animal basis of the analogy will cause trouble in the theological use of it. To this extent there was some ground for the medieval suspicion of it.

Some will say that identifying God with the inclusive reality is "pantheism." Once more, it depends on how "the inclusive reality" is conceived. Conceived deterministically, with no freedom allowed to the included constituents or members, the analogy ruins theology. But it also prevents any real understanding of the ordinary animal case. Allow some freedom to the bodily members (cells or other micro-elements) and the theory begins to work. Allow, further, at least minimal sentience to the members, so that the relationship can be one of sympathy, feeling of others' feelings, and it works better still. Allow, as freedom implies, that the members create something of themselves, one another, and the soul of the whole, and vice versa, and it works best of all. So much for the ambiguous charge of "pantheism."

Some readers will be worried about the question, "Is not the injunction 'Love the other as oneself' utterly beyond human capacity to obey?" I answer, "It is the absolute ideal, and therefore not a literal description of how people behave." Only divine decisions literally express an absolute idea. This is why it is unbecoming to boast of one's unselfishness or charity. We can all see in others the rationalizations of selfishness of which human ingenuity is capable. But the ideal, however transcendent of our capacities, is relevant as showing us exactly what it would be like to be ethically infallible. It is also relevant as showing us what it would be like to be completely rational about conflicting interests. It is not rational to value oneself for various personal qualities rated by norms of value which, applied accurately and fairly, would show the other equally or more valuable, and yet put a higher value on oneself

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simply because one is oneself and the other is the other. Self-love is natural enough, but it is not reason or the principle of rationality.

By animal feeling one is the center of the universe: I here, everyone else there. Reason tells another story. The other is as much the center as the self. This contrast is the human condition. Egocentricity is an illusion pervading our lives, but we know that it is an illusion. The idea of God is the idea of a being that really is the seat of all value. Nothing is valuable unless valuable to God. As Niebuhr was so brilliant in pointing out, we are tempted to put ourselves in the place we know belongs properly only to God.

The value equality of self as such and other as such does not mean that we do not for practical reasons have special responsibilities for our own welfare. There are many benefits which no one can give to us unless we give them to ourselves. Kant was very right in talking about a duty to make oneself happy. Those who neglect their own health or other conditions of happiness will end up being a nuisance or worse for others. Who wants an unhappy spouse, unhappy neighbor or friend, least of all if the unhappiness is largely the individual's own fault? There is also the need to bear in mind the difficulty of knowing what really will benefit another whose tastes or wishes we may not understand. That "do-gooders" are sometimes nuisances or tyrants is only too true. But there are, nevertheless, times and circumstances when altruistic behavior is a blessing and inspiration to those it intends to help and to others who behold it. Sometimes it saves a drowning person at real risk. Sometimes it transforms the character of a previously lost soul, as in Victor Hugo's story about the thief and the bishop.

Charles Peirce, considering what the ideal of good behavior is like, suggested that a mother of several children, with a good attitude toward those children, is a fair model to think about. I had such a mother and I agree with him. I argued often with my mother and even grieved her sometimes by this. But I recall no instance when I thought her selfish toward any of us. I know of no one needlessly offended by her, no instance of even the slightest tinge of cruelty. Yet she had no morbid idea that her own happiness was to be neglected. After, as an old lady, she was widowed and had inherited most of her husband's money, at her own initiative, in consultation with a financially shrewd son, she divided some of

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the money among the rest of us. She would always pay our fare to travel to her place of retirement. As she put it, with a smile, "My money is for my own pleasure and it is my pleasure to have you visit me . . ." But if for a good long time we did not come there were no complaints. She really did approximate living by the second as well as the first great commandment. Even in marked senility, no sign of greed or resentment appeared. Her kindness went all through. True, she did, in imagination kill off a younger sister who was very much alive a thousand miles away"I'm the only one left [of the seven Haughton children]." But this only showed that she was human, after all. She also confessed, "I never liked my mother," something she would not have said when in better health. But her mother was less kind and gentle than she wasalso less humorousand the incompatibility between the two was intelligible and hardly her fault.

The memory of my mother is one of many which make it impossible for me to respond positively to the suggestion heard so often that, apart from the account of the life of Jesus, or even, apart from the Bible as a whole, we would know nothing about God. "Speak for yourself," is what I feelI must say to this. The Hymns of Ikhnaton, naive in some ways as they are, would almost convince me, and in some respects they make points I miss in the Bible (the idea of self-creation is there, for instance, as it is in a pre-Columbian Mexican poet of long ago, "The creator of all is self-created.") The idea of a God of love has dawned on many in many lands and at many times. There is no book the absence of which would leave us helpless to arrive at this idea. It was found in China, India, pre-Christian Palestine; an approach to it was known by the Amerindians, some of them at least. Plato almost had it: in certain respects he came closer to it than the medieval theologians.

On the other hand, I am in no position to say what would have happened to my religious development had my parents and several teachers at school not been Christians well trained in relatively orthodox ways. And the parables of Jesus seem to me full of wisdom; incidents like the washing of the disciples' feet, or the forgiveness from the cross, seem full of symbolic power to convey religious insight.

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On a less positive note, I believewith Peirce, Whitehead, D. H. Lawrence (three rather different persons) and my father (different still)that the Book of Revelation is a poor expression of a religion of love, for the very reasons these four agreed upon: that it expresses hate, arrogance, resentment, and superstition run riot. It ought, as they held, to have been omitted from the Canon. So there we have itconsensus in religion is out of our reach. We have to agree to disagree.

Consensus in politics is also difficult to attain, but without a minimum of it our species is doomed. The development of nuclear explosives, perhaps even the possession of poisons (in present stocks, it is said, capable of poisoning the entire population of the world), has brought us to this degree of danger. Thus the perilous ''experiment of nature," a species as free from instinctive guidance as ours, is approaching its critical stage. Was the experiment too dangerous? As theist I accept on faith the infallible wisdom and ideal power of God. But if I play at criticizing God it is at this point.

Why There is Human Wickedness

To the question, "Why is there so much wickedness in human beings?" our culture knows two answers. One is the biblical Garden of Eden story, interpreted as an account of how sinfulness became innate in us all, the theory of Original Sin. The other is the scientific and evolutionary account, including psychiatry as a part of sciencethough not necessarily the psychoanalysis of Freud and Jung. The Garden of Eden account has all the marks of a very tall tale, with its highly unnatural serpent and much else. Moreover, there is no evidence whatever that its author or authors had the slightest knowledge of the possibility of an evolutionary account of the origin of species, including ours. It is an axiom of intellectual procedure that to have a fully rational right to adopt a philosophical or scientific belief one must have considered what other explanations (taken in their strongest not their weakest form) could be offered to solve the same problem. Biblical authors did not reject evolution. There is no sign that they knew of it as a possible theory.

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In their ignorance they did what they could to understand human nature. Today we have not their excuse for the result.

According to evolution, animals are enabled to serve the needs of their species and to take their place in nature without needless damage to other species (definitely including those whose members they prey on) by two factors: instinct, or physically inherited modes of behavior, and culture, or psychically inherited modes of behavior. In the lower animals the instinctive or physical inheritance predominates, in the higher animals the cultural or psychical more and more takes over as one ascends the hierarchy toward the human species. On all levels there is an aspect of freedom with its chance combinations of decisions. This aspect implies that neither laws of nature nor the decision of any agent can make all of these combinations fortunate ones, exactly conforming to some ideal plan or arrangement for the good of the whole. What fits the needs of one organism may not fit the needs of another. Conflict and suffering cannot be wholly excluded; there will be good luck as well as bad luck for particular individuals. On the lower levels such conflicts involve no wickedness, for the creatures are essentially instinctive; their individual decisions, though not wholly determined by either instinct or culture, are too naive, too little conscious, to involve any comparison of their action with an ethical principle of right and wrong. On higher levels, perhaps only on the highest (the human), there is such comparison. Now either/or: the individuals on this high level are ethically infallible (capable of acting rightly, knowing that they are doing so, but incapable of acting wrongly, knowing that they are doing so) or all animals capable of being ethical are capable of lapsing from their ethical norms. Not only is it the fact that human beings are fallible ethically, but it seems infinitely unlikely that they should be othewise. Infallibility is a property of deity. Only God is either cognitively infallible or incapable of unwise or unrighteous behavior. Does not ethical or practical infallibility belong with cognitive infallibility? Unsurpassable power, unsurpassable wisdom, unsurpassable goodnessthese define God, not any mere creature.

In the foregoing I have transcended the merely biological and introduced theological considerations. Let us return to the biological problem. Chance, or good and bad luck, occurs on all levels

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of life, for reasons already explained. This implies suffering and frustration in varying degrees. At their births, and often thereafter, human beings suffer. With good luck the sufferings of birth are slight, with bad luck, severe. There are evolutionary reasons why totally painless birth is unlikely, perhaps impossible. There are similar evolutionary reasons why there will be infectious diseases, which are the good luck of bacteria or virus organisms causing the bad luck of the host organism. To wholly prevent these things would impose further limitations on the freedom of creatures to make themselves (and in part their descendants, thus causing evolutionary change).

What sort of world, far from ours in structure, if even a coherent world at all, this further limitation on freedom would imply takes perhaps more insight into world possibilities than we possess. We are, then, a species of animal whose members must at times suffer. This is true of all species, but the members of our species are peculiarly sensitive and capable of suffering in a far greater variety of ways than other sorts of animals, with complex mental as well as merely physical forms of suffering or frustration. Moreover, in this species (for good reasons) the young are born radically helpless and immature, devoid of the sense of right and wrong they will later acquire. If their parents or caretakers are themselves suffering severe frustrations, their nervous systems irritated to the breaking point, or if they have escaped the cultural inheritance without which the human deficiency of physical inheritance, or lack of instinctive wisdom, means incompetent treatment of offspring, then the offspring are likely to be badly treated. Remember, the parents are mere creatures and hence fallible. How then will the offspring react to the bad treatment they receive? Because of their immaturity, their pre-ethical stage, they cannot react in an ethically noble way, with forgiveness and compassion for the parents' deficiency or the parents' suffering. To bad treatment they can only react more or less badly, either by violent rebellion and active hatred, orprobably even worseby sullen apathy, passive hatred. Thus their emotional development begins badly.

One can often, alas, on public vehicles, such as trains or planes, see parents obviously engaged in ruining their offspring (by treating them with hatred and cruelty). It is not only Freud who has taught

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us how important these early misfortunes are in the formation of human characters. Harry Stack Sullivan, whom I have read, and another American psychiatrist, whom I have heard lecture, have been my teachers in this matter. I think they give a far better explanation, not indeed of original sin, but of what tends to produce wicked behavior, than any tall story written long ago.

There is, however, a theological aspect which can be taken to complete the merely biological account. As Reinhold Niebuhr, in his inimitable way, has pointed out, our unique human capacity to form general ideas, including the extremely general idea of the Creator of all, opens us to a form of temptation unique to our species. So far as we know what it would be like to be God, we also know what we lack by not being God. The other animals, we may surmise, share with us the status of creaturehood but, unlike us, do not at all know what it would be like to be the universal Creator. Butand here the plot thickensNiebuhr sees that we can to some extent deceive ourselves and imagine that we are not quite mere creatures, that somehow we are ourselves infallible, all-wise, or all-powerful: if not without qualification, then still sufficiently so for whatever it is we have set our hearts upon. We can try to play at being more than in truth we possibly can be.

"Playing God" is a phrase that can be sadly misused. Example: if a surgeon operates, some religious groups complain that he is not accepting an individual as God made that individual. If a doctor helps a patient with a terminal disease to die, he is said to be taking God's role. This charge makes sense only on the assumption that it is God who normally completely determines what happens to us (for example when we die), not our own decisions or those of other creatures.

Those so talking do not, by my standards, know what they are talking about. They are less well informed than they think they are as to what the role of God really is. If they are not playing God, they are certainly to a questionable extent playing at being "in the know" about God. At any rate, Niebuhr may well be right in his view that one form of wickedness arises from not fully accepting our creaturehood, our not being God. Politically powerful individuals are exposed to this temptation. But so is a father in an old-fashioned male-dominated family.

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I submit that a theologically interpreted evolutionism can do a better job than anything written over two thousand years ago to explain human wickedness. It can even adopt one element of the Eden story: what made Adam's "fall" possible was his "knowledge of good and evil." This is inherent in his ability to conceive deity. It also is inherent in his symbolic power, his ability for speech, including maps, diagrams, graphs, musical notations, sign posts, and representative drawings and paintings. Other animals on this planet (there may be billions of planets) lack these capacities in any remotely comparable degree. But with this symbolic power goes a partial freedom from physical inheritance of behavior, and with this a danger of social chaos and failure to serve the needs of the species or to take our place in nature without needless damage to other species, all of which functions instincts admirably serve.

When wolves or coyotes kill many sheep at a time, far more than they can eat, this is not because their natures or instincts are wrong as such, but because instinct cannot adapt to conditions which until quite recently did not obtain in the part of the earth where the instinct developed. Herds of sheep, weakened and made helpless by domestication for many generations, are a novelty for North American animals. In their natural environment, wolves do not decimate quantities of sheep or any other kind of animal. The wild sheep of the Rockies did quite well, thank you, for thousands of years, until civilized human beings came along. Among animals it is only the human species that makes ugly gaps and desolations in nature. Albert Schweitzer (who respected animal life but, as a biologist friend has pointed out, failed to understand it) was morally indignant at a leopard that slaughtered the chickens in the coop he had constructed so badly that, though the leopard could get in, the chickens could not get out. It would be a fortunate leopard that could catch even two chickens or other large birds in the open forest as easily as that leopard caught many almost at once. Incidentally, it was like a human being to blame the leopard, or nature, for what was primarily his own doing.

If we cannot hope to see wickedness as God sees it, we can nevertheless have some partial grasp of the truth that, being a creature (in the fashion in which each of us is that, localized in

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space-time, having to acquire personality, beginning with merely animal individuality, taught how to behave as a person by fallible elders, themselves taught by fallible elders, and so on), we cannot have the infallible rightness of behavior that is a defining characteristic of deity.

I add a thought that, so far as I know, I am the first philosopher to say clearly and definitely: To describe our difference from God as infinite by calling us "finite" is far too little. We are much less than simply finite. The entire vast cosmos may be (and I believe is) spatially finite, as relativity physics has made clear it may be. We, however, are the merest fragments of finite reality. Fragmentariness, not simply finitude, distinguishes us from deity. With this fragmentariness goes radical dependence upon our surroundings, by which we can be destroyed at any time. True, "destruction" here does not mean that our careers up to the moment of death are nullified, made into nothing, for that is nonsense. But our careers can have in each case a last member, as a book a last word; whereas the real divine book reaches no last word, just as it has had no first one, and is in that respect infinite. And in that infinite book our finite ones are imperishable.

Is God in every sense infinite? According to dual transcendence this cannot be. God has a spatial aspect; the divine "ubiquity" is God's presence everywhere in space; but if space is finite, then so is the divine ubiquity. Moreover, if the spatial expansion of the cosmos is possible, God's spatial finitude can also expand. But what canot be is that God should be a mere fragment of the spatial whole, as each of us is.

Nuclear Arms

In the present situation the greatest practical threat of all is possibility of nuclear war. Since there is no way now known (if you question this, do a little research in the subject) that promises to prevent nuclear war from being nuclear annihilation of at least most of our population, and much else besides around the world, the aim of nuclear arms is not to enable us to win in nuclear war but to enable us to prevent there being any such war. As the

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Russian Khrushchev said years ago, if country A can and in a nuclear war would destroy country B twice over, and country B can (and would) destroy A once over, neither country has a rational reason to use nuclear arms. So all talk about parity in numbers of nuclear weapons is absurd. We could reduce the world largely to rubble and death. So could the Russians.

Is it sensible to ask the Russians to give up what we (wrongly) tell the world is an advantage in nuclear armaments? If they are so unwise as to believe what we thus unwisely tell them, then of course they will not agree to reduce armaments to come down to parity with us. Mutual ability to destroy is the only relevant parity in the matter, if the aim is deterrence.

It seems foolish diplomacy to expect to accomplish anything by threatening to catch up to the Russians in excessive armaments unless they agree to reduce numbers down to ours. If superiority in numbers really is an advantage, and they have that advantage (as some of us assert), what can we offer the Russians to give it up? We should tell them we think it no advantage, and we should prove that we mean what we say by unilateral reduction, not down to less than is needed for deterrencemeaning ability to destroy the enemy were he so mad as to provoke usbut with the sole purpose of giving him no motive for doing so.

We should stop letting what Russia is doing militarily dictate our military budget and further ruin our economy with the inflation that goes with such a policy. We should free our policy from slavish dependence on what Russia is doing in armaments, and encourage the Russians to follow our example as we try to attend to the economic needs of our people, also to free our society, as Eisenhower warned us we should do, from excessive dependence on the industrial-military complex, which today threatens our economy and makes the Reagan policy partly selfcontradictory. Militarism is anti-economical. Japan and Germany show what a blessing it can be if a country controls its military caste or military-industrial complex. Our best hope may be that Russia will begin to see the point and will do more for its nonmilitary industries and agriculture than its present militarism allows it to do.

Whether or not Theodore Draper is right in regarding a "no first use" of nuclear arms declaration as of questionable value, the

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overwhelmingly important point, for which Draper argues so persuasively, is that they should not be used at all. 4 If we had been more civilized than we are, we might have done better not to have used them twice ourselves. We set an ominous example.

A nuclear freeze would be better than nothing. But the only significant aim is reduction. We should try to lead the world in this, without looking over our shoulder too anxiously to see what others are doing. We should show that we know our own minds and have our own convictions, above all the conviction that explosives with virtually unlimited destructive powers have no sane use except to prevent others from using them. There is only one planet, and if we incinerate and poison much of it, all our hopes are doomed, not just our hopes of victory. The Russians must, it seems, know all this; we should show enough respect for them as not complete fools to act as if we knew that they know it. If they don't know it, negotiations will not help. If they do, negotiations should be about matters other than who has the most nuclear weapons.

The foregoing is, of course, an amateur's view; but I have read a good many discussions by experts, including many issues of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and listened to a number of speeches by authorities on the medical aspects of nuclear warfare, than which a more dismal, horrible topic of contemplation can scarcely be imagined. In comparison, talk of a supernatural hell seems childish folly.

God and the Universe Once More

For Plato, the universe was the divine body, for Goethe it was the "living garment of deity." If the divine body, or garment, is spatially finite, this does not do away with its radical superiority to our bodies or garments. There is nothing outside it by which it could be injured or disturbed. As for what is inside it, this cannot threaten it either, as cancer cells threaten us. For the divine-human analogy assumes a difference in principle between the ideal animal and all others, or between the nonfragmentary organism and the fragmentary organisms. The human infant begins to impose a

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secondary life-style expressive of its feelings (and thoughts, as fast as it becomes able to think) upon a system which already had a basic order in its cells and their inherited and acquired patterns, all of this expressive of the general laws of nature. But these laws themselves express the World Soul and its unsurpassable mode of awareness and feeling. The World Soul does not begin to exist on a foundation otherwise established.

When an animal dies and its individual life-style no longer controls its members, the result is not chaos, but simply a return to the more pervasive types of order expressive of the cosmic mind-body. The World Soul, being aware of what occurs in the Divine Body, can vicariously suffer with its suffering members (Plato did not say so, but we can say it). But it cannot suffer in the sense of having fear of an alien force. This Soul's power is the unrivaled, eminent power. Any individual can influence it, none can threaten it. Its life-style is the supreme law of the whole.

There must, it seems, be readers who have been thinking: a World Soul implies a world brain, and there is no such thing. I have in principle givenindeed, Plato gavethe answer to this objection. A central nervous system, with its brain, is, as already remarked, the quintessential body of an ordinary or human vertebrate animal. But the contrast between that and less essential bodily parts arises from the animal's having an external environment. Our awareness is most directly conditioned by our nerve cells. The rest is but means to the functioning of those cells, so far as the possibility of our awareness is concerned. Plato began his analysis by pointing out that the cosmos needs no limbs to enable it to move about, for it is its own place (space being merely the order among its parts); it needs no digestive system to transform materials taken in from without into bodily tissue and no lungs to enable it to utilize air from without; for nothing is without. So with all organs outside the central nervous system. Plato did not understand that system; but we can see that is is not only the seat of consciousness, but is also the means of adapting internal activities to external stimuli. This function cannot apply to the inclusive organism.

Thinking out the question of the role of a body for its soul, we realize that, with no external environment, the sole function of

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the supreme Body for the supreme Soul is to furnish it with awareness of and power over its bodily members. Thus there can be no special parts, such as brain cells, in contrast to other parts; for all have the same function of directly communicating with the Soul. Thus every physical individual in the Body becomes as a nerve or brain cell to the Soul. There can therefore be no special part of the cosmos recognizable as a nervous system. The whole cosmos must everywhere directly communicate with God, each member furnishing its own psychical content (its feelings or thoughts) to the Soul. In turn, the member, in whatever way its own type of individuality makes possible, and across the two-way bridge of sympathy or feeling of feeling, receives influences from divine feeling or thought.

Such is my attempt to indicate and profit by the way various thinkersFechner, Whitehead, and some othershave tried to go further along the path first blazed by Plato.

The great theoretical physicist Hermann Weyl once wrote, "If the space-time whole is not divine it is certainly superhuman." I think he understated the case.

In the foregoing discussion, I have not mentioned the Big Bang account of current physics. I am little competent to discuss it. But I do hold the considered conviction that it is not a proper role for physics to attempt to deal with really ultimate questions. I doubt, on principle, the possibility of knowledge by empirical, observational science to the effect that, for instance, the Big Bang and its consequences constitute the whole of created reality, before which there was not anything (or only God); or that there could never have been and could never be other laws of nature than those now obtaining. We cannot, with any cogency, extrapolate our stretch of observed cosmic happenings to infinity, nor can we know that a Big Bang beyond which we cannot extrapolate can have had no predecessor. With Berdyaev, I believe in a divine time, our access to which is not unlimited, to say the least. Time as we know it best may indeed have begun with the Big Bang, but not all time, creaturely or divine. The integration of physics into a comprehensive system inclusive of philosophical principles is an achievement for the future. I envy those who, if the species endures in spite of its present hazards, will some day manage to work out

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and understand such a system. What a splendid achievement that will be!

Notes

1. Harry Kemelman, Thursday the Rabbi Walked Out (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1978), pp. 22930.

2. See Hartshorne and Reese, Philosophers Speak of God (University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 251, 1st column.

3. Ibid., pp. 24950.

4. Theodore Draper, ''How Not to Think about Nuclear War," New York Review of Books, 29, no. 12 (15 July, 1982). For critical comments by R. Peierls and others and Draper's replies, see ibid., no. 14 (23 Sept., 1982), pp. 5861.

Evolution and Belief in God

I was seventeen years old, Dr. Gardner, an Episcopal clergyman and my science teacher at Yeates boarding school (now only a memory in a few minds), introduced me to the theory of evolution. I remember no details; but since Gardner was in every way, as I had sufficient opportunity to know, a religioys man, he must have interpreted evolution positively and as compatible with his theological beliefs. Had he attacked it on that ground I would certainly have been keenly interested and concerned and would have remembered the conflict thus brought to my attention. The fact is that I do not recall knowing anything in my teens about the supposed incompatibility between evolutionary biology (what other biology is there?) and belief in God. I may or may not have known then that my father, probably before I was born, had accepted the basic idea of evolution. He, too, was an Episcopal minister; like Dr. Gardner, he was not a fundamentalist, that is, not a Christian who confuses worship of God with worship of a certain set of ancient documents written (and translated) by human beings. A year or two later, at Haberford College, a Quaker institution, a young instructor taught, in a class in which I took part, a fairly sophisticated version of neo-Darwinism. Again I saw nothing irreligious in the theory. I still see nothing irreligious in it, though I now have some understanding of the several reasons why many think otherwise.

In the Southwestern American city in which I now live, one can frequently read in the local newspaper letters insisting that there

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are only two options: evolution without God, or God without evolution. In fact, of course, millions of believing Christians, and a still larger number of believers in God, also accept the basic tenets (not, of course, every detail of some current scientific formulation) of evolutionary biology. I suspect that most European Christians do so. In my long academic life I have known hundreds of scientists (especially ornithologists), numerous theologians, and numerous philosophers; yet an anti-evolutionary scientist, theologian, or philosopher has not come my way. I've heard one or two on radio or television, and I once met a fanatical Canadian college student who claimed to know just how false evolution was; but, on the whole, anti-evolutionary scientists, philosophers, and theologians are for me almost fictitious entities. I did come to know an Australian school teacher of biology, an excellent observer of birds in the field, who argued against evolutionbut not on what seemed very cogent grounds.

The history of nonevolutionary biology is not merely the story of fundamentalist Christian opponents of evolution. Aristotle was a prime example. Immanuel Kant was another; his (pre-Darwinian) opposition was emphatic. And I regard this aspect of Aristotle's and of Kant's thought as a weakness, and in Aristotle's case even an inconsistency, in their world-views. In recent philosophy, antievolutionism is hard indeed to find. It is in regions or circles where philosophy counts for little, as in some parts of this country, that evolution is supposed vulnerable to easy attack. In scientific and philosophically literate circles the argument seems about over. Must religion be a last retreat from knowledge?

There are any number of open questions as to specifics about evolution, but they are neutral to the issue between evolution as such and fundamentalist "creation science." Moreover, the "creation scientists" (supposing for the argument that the phrase makes sense) disagree, too, on specifics. Some say that there may be evolution of species but not of genera (or is it of genera but not of families, or families but not of orders, or orders but not of classesbirds, say, or mammals?). After all, the brief account or accounts (are there not two?) in Genesis are vague as to definite species (other than the human), or even as to genera or families. To call 'science' a view whose only definite evidences are what can

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be read into a certain book has no reasonable connection with what practicing scientists mean by the word. This has, in a way, been admitted by some spokespersons for creation "science." They say that their view is a philosophy. But this usage too has little connection with what practicing philosophers understand by that word. I say it is bad philosophy, bad science, bad theology, and bad hermeneutics (textual interpretation), and no good thing at all.

Evolution, Chance, and Natural Law

First, the philosophical question. A philosopher may believe in God and many have done so and do. But philosophers do not now make statements about "the word of God," as though God uttered or wrote sounds or words of some human language for us to hear or read. There is, however, a genuine philosophical question about the religious meaning of evolution. According to the tyrant idea of God, there is no element of chance in reality. Everything is deliberately and precisely arranged by divine wisdom and power. According to the evolutionary theory, offspring vary from their parents and from one another partly by chance. If evolution proceeds in a fairly definite direction, it is because natural selection weeds out many nonadaptive chance variations, so that from very simple beginnings is woven a very complex "web of life," in which live many widely differing, but in their basic requirements mutually compatible, species. This web of life Darwin calls beautiful, and any good theory of beauty will justify this application of the word. I have argued this question elsewhere.

Presupposed in the foregoing is a basic set of physical laws setting limits to the reign of chance in nature, laws governing the behavior of the basic elements, especially hydrogen atoms. These laws are not explained by evolution. To suppose that Darwinism reduces the biological order to pure chance is thus a mistake. A basic physical order is assumed but not explained. Those of us who believe in God can suppose that this basic order is divinely decided. The numerous creatures could not get together and decide it. For

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the game of life there must be rules not established by any player, unless God is taken to be the supreme player.

It is known that the chance variations are not only the results of combinations of genes (units of inheritance) from the male and female parents. There are also "mutations," larger (mostly harmful) variations altering the genes themselves, and resulting from chance encounters between particles (such as cosmic rays) and the genes. As environments change, what was harmful may become useful and be retained through generations.

Presupposed by the theory is that the basic physical laws make it possible for cells (consisting of complex molecules highly organized into enduring systems) to exist and to reproduce themselves in a manner largely controlled by the structures called genes. Darwin did not know about these "bits of information" as to how new cells are to be made up. This lack greatly weakened his theory. Neo-Darwinism is a much stronger system. Never have subsequent discoveries done more to confirm the basic rightness of a concept than those since Darwin have to confirm his idea of natural selection. Mendel's laws of gene combination are exactly what Darwin needed in order to make the theory work without the assumption of the inheritance of acquired characters, for which (except in a sense to be discussed) empirical evidence was and is lacking.

Darwin's Mistake

Darwin used the very word 'chance' for his variations among offspring, but explained that he did not take this to be the whole truth of the matter. However, he also made it clear that the power of his theory to explain the evolution of species did not depend on belief in the absence of real chance and the presence of determining causes in nature. The biological explanation was, Darwin saw, a statistical matter. Given a huge number of generations, a fairly stable environment in inanimate nature, small variations due to combination of the dual inheritance from parents (plys mutations now and then), natural selection could in the long run and on the whole produce what we find. Whether by chance or not, the

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variations and mutations could, and according to the evidence did, do the required job.

What we have then is this. Darwin was a believer in causal determinism; but, as we know now, his theory works even better on a nondeterministic basis, such as those provided by quantum theory and the increasingly widespread general acceptance of statistical thought in science. Even before quantum theory the actually used laws of gases were already statistical, so that determinism did no real work even in that matter. The same was true of the entropy law in thermodynamics, and Willard Gibbs's phase rule in chemistry. Darwin in England, Gibbs in the United States, and others in Germany were participatingDarwin partly unknowinglyin a transformation of science away from determinism and toward a philosophy of chance limited by law. Neither pure chance nor the pure absence of chance can explain the world.

Chance, Freedom, and the Tyrant Idea of God

What is the theological significance of the foregoing? We have seen that chance is an inseparable aspect of freedom. Only those happy with the tyrant conception of deity can suppose that divine providence (creation or rule of the world) excludes chance. It merely limits the latter's scope. For example, a hydrogen atom may have certain degrees of freedom, but there are many things it cannot do. Again, for each type of unstable particle there are half-life laws. These never tell us precisely what an individual particle will do, but they tell us how long it will take (the length of time being specific to the type of particle) for half of a large group of particles of a certain type to change into some other type, or to disappear into energy. This mysterious-seeming order in disorder is, so far as we now know, the nature of the elementary constituents of the physical world.

If our previous analysis of the necessity for universal freedom of individual creatures is sound; if God is genuinely conceivable only as supreme freedom issuing in, dealing with, lesser forms of freedom; if the notion of creature as absolutely controlled, absolutely ordered puppet, is without positive meaning, except as the

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limiting or zero concept of an imagined series of less and less free individual creatures (what a creature would amount to if it amounted to nothingif all this is true, then the present state of physics and biology is insofar theologically satisfactory. Everywhere, being a single creature can then mean making decisions among open possibilities, further determining the partially indeterminate tendencies constituting the future until it becomes present and then past.

Since genes too (or their dynamic constituents) are creatures, as are particles, they must be acting freely within limits, which means that the results are partly random, not predetermined by any intention or power. The only conception of providence which would exclude all chance would also exclude all decision-making creatures, which means, all creatures. Thus it would be ''providence" without any world to provide for.

What kind of teleology (things arranged for the best) did Darwinism displace and discredit? It was that of a world order in which every monstrosity, every suffering, every birth of an unviable, ill-adapted animal was divinely decreed. The "problem of evil" in its most unmanageable form was the price of the view the bishops defended against Darwin. Moreover, Darwin saw this more clearly than the bishops did; he made it clear that he did not doubt the divine existence merely because of his evolutionary theory. His letters show this plainly. He said that the theologians had not, to his satisfaction, shown how the all-arranging power of God was compatible with the freedom of the creatures, particularly of human beings. He was right; they had not made a reasonable case on this point. But the difficulty was not primarily biological, it was theological. On purely theological grounds Darwin thought more cogently than the bishops mostly did. He said what they, on their own grounds, should have said. Or rather, he half said what they did not even half say.

What kept Darwin from successfully solving his own personal religious problem as to what to think about God was not his empirical biological discoveries. It was his a priori faith in the deterministic philosophy of science, which had reigned nearly unquestioned (even by theologians) in the Newtonian period, then nearing its end. What was theologically requisite was soon to prove scientifically acceptable. This was the admission that chance is a real aspect of

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nature in general. The theological relevance of this is simply that the denial of chance implies the denial of freedom, and the denial of freedom ruins theology.

God Takes Chances with Free Creatures

"God," said Einsteinwho, like Darwin, could not admit the reality of chance"does not throw dice." "On the contrary," said Arthur Young, an inventor important in the development of the helicopter,''God does play dice. To have creatures is to take a chance on what they may do." (This was in a conversation we once had.) This, I say, is good theology.

I ask the reader to recall that the evolutionary scheme presupposes an aspect of order in the world which it does not explain. To adapt to mere disorder is meaningless; and so the basic orderliness of the world cannot be explained by mutual adaptation among the creatures. That there are laws of nature is providential. Any cosmic order is infinitely better than none, for mere chaos is indistinguishable from nothing at all. But the only positive explanation of order is the existence of an orderer. Hence evolution is not, I hold, fully intelligible without God. And since God means supreme freedom dealing with lesser freedom, there must be a pervasive element of chance in nature. So the specifics of nature cannot be mere actualizations of a divine plan. The renunciation of strict determinism, which does no real work in science anyway, opens the door to a new form of theologizing, purified of the taint of divine tyranny which disfigured classical theology.

See James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for a vivid picture of the dark side of classical theism. It has been shown that the sermon given in that book is no mere invention of Joyce's, but, almost word for word, an actual sermon written by a priest or monk of the Catholic church. There was a dark side of traditional religion, and Joyce very reasonably disliked it. The idea of God as supreme love enjoying (or, if you prefer suffering, or neutrally cognizing) the spectacle of sinners everlastingly punished for eternally predestined actions is not a pretty one; but there it is in

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classical theology. Darwin did better than he knew in helping to discredit it.

The Religious Opposition to Evolution

To form a judgment concerning the force of the evolutionary argument, one needs to have in mind a great mass of observational facts drawn from many branches of science: the study of fossils, the anatomy of plants and animals, the distribution of species over the earth's surface, evidences of changes in the earth's geology and climate, continental drift, the behavior of animals, and still others. One needs also to have considerable mathematical competence, since the issues are complex statistical questions of probabilities. Sewall Wright, a great evolutionist of this century, a person I know well as a careful, honest thinker, with no particular wish to undermine belief in God but a great wish to think and observe accurately throughout a long lifetime, possesses the requisite abilities and competences. He, like everyone else I know much about who, with anything like the same equipment and care, has gone into the matter, has no doubt that evolution has occurred. It is a great satisfaction to me that he is also a convinced psychicalist. If he is agnostic about God this is not for biological reasons, but because he finds it impossible to reconcile belief in God with his understanding of relativity physics. I appreciate his difficulty, which has bothered me for many years, as it has some other philosophers. I believe the difficulty is not decisive (and I am not alone in this), and in any case it is irrelevant to the biological issues.

Confronted with the attempt of believers in the literal infallibility of the Bible to dismiss the evidences of evolution, some of us feel a disgust such as Emerson expressed long ago in the following outburst:

It is not in the power of God to make a communication of his will to a Calvinist [the kind of fundamentalist that Emerson knew]. For to every inward revelation he holds up his silly book, and quotes chapter and verse against the Book-maker and Man-Maker, against that which quotes not, but is and

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cometh. There is a light older than intellect, by which the intellect lives and works, always new, and which degrades every past and particular shining of itself. This light, Calvinism denies, in its idolatry of a certain past shining. ¹

Today most of us would put more stress on observation and on logic than on Emerson's inward revelation, but we would agree with the charge of idolatry. God utterly transcends any book. As one of our founding fathers thought, it is nature, God's handiwork, that is the real "word of God" concerning the general structure of the cosmos. My clergyman father believed exactly that. I once heard another Episcopal clergyman (in Savannah, Georgia) say that to him science was revelation as truly as the Bible.

Not only is it difficult to believe that God literally took a rib from Adam and made it turn into Eve, but, as Clare Boothe Luce has well said, the human male was thus given the honor of being the mother of mankind, stealing from woman what in all honesty belongs to her.

God "Makes Things Make Themselves"

In what sense, granted evolution, can God be called Creator? Charles Kingsley, an English clergyman, beautifully puts it thus, in formulating the divine procedure: "I make things make themselves." Only so does a good parent, a good God, proceed. For the parent, or God, to do simply all the making is to leave no genuine function for the children to perform. Language supports this. We say that we "make" decisions, resolutions, or attempts, implying that God is not the unilateral maker or decider of literally everything. So the Socinians thought without quite saying it; so Lequier and Fechner thought, and they virtually did say it. Finally, Whitehead said it. And I believed it before his saying it, as my 1923 dissertation shows.

It is no mere accident that the linguistic analysts, influenced by Wittgenstein, have not noted the testimony of common speech in this matter. For their consideration of the "ordinary language" test has been applied selectively, under prejudices not altogether

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impossible to discern. We, finally, and not God, make decisions (mostly unconsciously) as to details of the lives of ourselves and our fellows. And so (according to the neoclassical view) do all creatures, though in still less conscious fashion in most of the natural kinds.

Does our making presuppose antecedently existing matter, while God's does not but is "from nothing"? I ask, in reply, "In making me did God use my parents or was I made simply from nothing?" I believe we can safely await an answer to this; for any answer will show the difficulty that classical theism faced. If my parents were not causally required for my existence, then we know nothing of the meaning of "cause." And if they were, then clearly I was not made from nothing. Our only knowledge of causation and of making is from the way what happens influences what happens next. True, we have an intuition of ourselves thinkingthat is, 'making'our thoughts or feeling our feelings, where the selves in question are simultaneous with the thinking or feeling. But if, analogically speaking, God's causing or making of the world is similar, then the world just is God's thinking, and surely that is not the intended meaning.

Recall once more the analogy with magic. God said, "Let there be light" and there was light. "Let there be . . .," and it was so. "Let there be . . .," and it was so. I have no quarrel with these verses from Genesis, but I deny that literalists understand their function. At the climax of the Book of Job (an inquiry into the ways of providence) we are told that a human being cannot understand God's creative power. Since we cannot understand it, neither science nor philosophy can make use of the idea to justify definite conclusions.

The origin of creation science is neither science nor philosophy. Nor is it intellectually responsible theology. Rather, it is poetry, and its function is to communicate feeling and express an attitude. God beheld what he had created and "saw that it was good." Somehow in response to divine decisions a good world order was coming into being. That it was coming into being preceded only by God, or by God and nothing, is not definitely asserted and, in view of the rebuke to Job, is not in order. We do not, in biblical terms, know how, or just with what, or without what, the creating

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is done. This is all beside the religious point, which is the reality of God as somehow voluntarily producing the basic world order and the essential goodness of the result. Also significant is the way God observes that result and only then "sees that it is good." According to classical theism, God first, or eternally, knows exactly what is to result and how good it will be; and the actuality is merely the planned good over again with no additional determinations. I regard this as a bad interpretation of the biblical account.

Creation Neither Out of Nothing Nor Out of Matter

What divine creation of a particular world order presupposes is neither a preexistent matter nor nothing at all. It is not matter; for that is a label for what, in the psychicalist view, is really an extremely elementary form of creaturely mind in the form of feeling, in huge numbers of momentary flashes with no conscious knowledge of individual identity through change. It is feeling uncomplicated by what Shakespeare once called "the pale cast of thought." In this sense it is unconscious, but not insentient. Creation's presupposition is not nothing; for there are difficulties with the idea of an absolute beginning of the creative process. There is no religious need for such a beginning, which limits God's productivity to a merely finite stretch of past results. This is not the only way in which the tradition, while talking much of the divine infinity, unduly finitized deity. The Buddhists wrote about a past of billions of billions of years, or an even huger number, while Europe talked about a mere several thousand years of past creating by deity. How childish this must seem to Buddhists, as it does to scientists!

Classical theism attempted to harmonize Greek philosophical and Judaic religious views. It is still desirable to search for harmony between the two traditions, but we need to use our additional resources in science, philosophy, and historical scholarship, including our vastly increased knowledge of the history of religions.

Taking Genesis and the Book of Job together, we may say that the biblical view was that the divine creativity is a highly mysterious matter. One may think of it by analogy with primitive magic, a

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notoriously superstitious affair. One may simply say that no humanly accessible analogy helps, that we just cannot have any rational theory at all here. This seems to be the message of Job. But that book had as author and (for all we know) intended readers only people whose culture was radically different from ours. It was prescientific and prephilosophicalas we, since the Greeks, have known philosophizing. So perhaps the veto on trying to theorize theologically need not without qualification apply to us. In fact, as some scientist has pointed out, part of the evidence by which the voice from the whirlwind convicts Job of inability to comprehend God's creating or ruling the world no longer applies. Science has thrown considerable light, for instance, on how animals manage to feed themselves or nourish their young. And we can lift leviathan out of the sea, even if not exactly with a fish hook. Above all, it is a thousand years too late to imply that, although God made human beings in the divine image, endowed with the ability to have definite (even though more or less abstract) thoughts about "all time and all existence" (as there is no ground for supposing even apes or porpoises can do), yet we are not to use our thinking capacity freely in seeking to learn about nature but must give absolute priority to the literal words of a book expressing thoughts that, it is only sensible to believe, were the thoughts of some remote human predecessors. And we are to have laws passed to impose this way (or at best to penalize a contrary way) of proceeding upon many who utterly reject the theory on which it is based. (The matter isas Milton Friedman points outgravely complicated by our primary reliance upon compulsion and governmental control in education. In so many ways we have feared to accept freedom as a guiding principle of life.)

Medieval thinkers went far beyond (or perhaps fell behind) biblical conceptions, using their understanding of Greek ideas. They thought they knew better than the naive writers of scripture what concepts do and what do not literally apply to deity. They were not fundamentalists in the current sense. However, if there is any consensus at all in scientific or philosophicalor even theologicalcircles in the matter, it is that the "medieval synthesis" was no permanent solution of the ultimate problems. It was pseudo- biblical and pseudo-Greek. If we make our own fresh try at the job, we

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may well partly fail too. But we need not be, as the Schoolmen were, Platonic yet largely lacking in much of the best of Plato's insight; Aristotelian yet lacking some of that thinker's most carefully worked- out ideas; Christian yet contradicting any natural interpretation of the heavenly parent of the Gospels and the Old Testament idea of the merciful Holy One.

In the Bible, God is just not an unmoved "pure actuality," in purely eternal fashion planning the very details of worldly existence. According to Genesis, the initial creative action took timesix "days," was it? At each stage God received new impressions of the goodness of the result. And then, as human beings came on the scene, God soon saw something not entirely good in the result and acted accordingly. Thus the God-world relations were not pictured as merely instantaneous but as a progressive and in some sense time-like succession. And there was action and reaction between Creator and creatures. There was the Covenant between God and Israel. The whole thing was a social transaction. Even the relations of God to "inanimate nature" seemed to take this form. The sea obeyed the injunction "thus far and no farther." The sun, "rejoicing as a giant to run his course,'' was no mere lump of dead matter. Since we now have a philosophy in which the social structure, fully generalized, is the structure of reality, we have less need than the Church Fathers had to explain away the social cast of biblical language. And we also have a philosophy (and science) in which creative becoming is taken as at least much more pervasive and more nearly ultimate than was possible with the overestimation of fixity and mere being which characterized Greek and medieval thought. So in that way too we can come closer than the Scholastics to agreeing with those naive scriptural writers above spoken of. Doubtless they were in some ways naive; but also, doubtless the Schoolmen had their own somewhat different form of ignorance or prejudice. We might do better than either group of predecessors, we who also are images of deity.

Classical theology paid insufficient attention, in reading Plato, not only to the mind-body analogy for God and the world, but also to the doctrine that the soul (any soul) is self-moved and that soul in its various forms is the explanation of all motion or change. Human or animal souls move themselves and their bodies, God

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moves God and all actualities, without fully determining any. Aristotle rejected the soul's self-motion and attributed change to matter in combination with mind. So his God, who (or which, for it is not a person) is wholly nonmaterial, is changeless and entirely uninfluenced by, as well asand this was a consistent consequence- unaware of, the changes and accidental details of the world.

Aristotle was perhaps the first to state the intuitively satisfying principles: what comes to be is contingent (becoming produces genuine novelty and is in principle not wholly predetermined or preprogrammed); but what is without ever becoming is noncontingent, could not possibly not have been. It follows that in sheer eternity there is no freedom, but in becoming there is some freedom. But, while making this splendid contribution, Aristotle, by dropping Plato's insights about the World Soul, the cosmos as divine body, and the partially temporal nature of the World Soul, was unable to anticipate, as Plato did anticipate, the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic view of God as aware of the individual creatures. Aquinas and the other Schoolmen combined Aristotle's neglect of a not-wholly-immutable World Soul with the Platonic contention of God's knowledge of the creatures, thus losing Plato's consistency in asserting, and Aristotle's partial consistency in denying, God's knowledge of concrete, contingent reality. It was mediocre Platonism and mediocre Aristotelianism. And it was a biblical heresy.

It is true that the mind-body analogy does not immediately and in any very simple way show God can be the highest (though not the sole) creative power, the highest (though not the sole) decision maker. For although, by the Sperry psycho-physiological principle, the infant soul (or the infant experiencing) does begin to influence the becoming of the nerve cellsand less directly that of the other bodily cellsthe early stages of the embryonic development must proceed without any infant psyche; for prior to the development of a nervous system there is no reason to attribute any such thing to the embryo. All that the facts indicate is cells multiplying and differentiating. The differentiations are in principle explained by the fact that different positions in the embryo expose cells to differing stimuli. The German biologist Driesch argued for a holistic entity directing cellular development, which he called an entelechy,

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but this has not proved a fruitful idea scientifically. And, in ordinary plants, which never do develop a nervous system, it is the cells that, to a botanist, explain growth, not something corresponding to the plant as a whole. A tree is a cell colony, not a single individual with integration comparable to that of each of its cells; as Whitehead put it, "a tree is a democracy." Its cells may have souls as little monarchs of their molecules, but probably not the tree a soul as monarch of its cells. So much for Aristotle's vegetable soul. It is not enough to say that he did not know about cells. Knowing nothing of the fact of cells, he implicitly denied them, just as in his male-favoring genetic theory he denied eggs to female human beings. I think a philosopher should know when he does not know, and avoid, better than this powerful mind did, implicit denials of things of whose existence or nonexistence he knows nothing.

As Soul of the cosmic body, God does not, like the infant, come to be out of a previous world state not involving Him-Her. Any stage of the cosmic body grew out of a previous stage already divinely besouled. This is the uttermost application of the analogy, the all-inclusive one. If the infant is slightly creative of its bodily cells after a certain stage in its body's development, God has already been and must always be, not slightly but supremely creative of the cells in the divine body, including you and me as such cells. Whitehead calls his view a "cell theory of reality" but never took the Platonic step of conceiving the cosmos as supreme body. I hold that in this he fell a little below Plato. The divine analogy to the human fails unless the mind-body relation applies on both sides to God. The human soul as disembodied is hopelessly unclear or false. A merely disembodied God is an unfounded idea. There is this much truth in naturalistic materialism. What we should be simply without bodies is gibberish. The great letter writer Paul knew that, so he posited a "heavenly body."

It may appear that the phrase "supremely creative," not only of recent stages of the worldly process but of all its predecessors, is not enough to make God the "creator of all things, visible and invisible." My proposition is simply that it is enough, provided you admit that the singular, concrete entities created are to have freedom, to be to some extent self-decided"self-moved," as Plato

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put it. For then, as Kingsley said, what God does is to make things partly make themselves. Adam sinned: this was his decision, not God's. Indeed, the serpent's tempting of Adam was the serpent's decision, not God's. Job's torturers' acts, and even Satan's instigating of them, were not executions of divine decisions. God told Satan what not to do, but gave no positive command, or even definite suggestion. The "sovereignty" of God is not, I suggest, a very biblical idea, especially if one has a low opinion of the respect of sovereigns for the freedom of their subjects.

Value and Sympathy as the Keys to Power: The Final Mystery

How does God make things make themselves? Here at last we come to the final mystery. It is natural that it should be mysterious, for we are not divine. But still, we have some clues, without which we should have no right to any theology at all. How does the human mind, or sequence of experiences, influence the development, health, illness, and action of the human body, as it seems to do every moment? This, too, is mysterious, and many scientists have thought that we shall never understand it. Yet here also we have clues.

The open secret of the mind-body relation is this: our cells respond to our feelings (and thoughts) because we respond to their feelings (and would respond to their thoughts if they had any). Hurt my cells and you hurt me. Give my cells a healthy life, and they give me a feeling of vitality and at least minimal happiness. My sense of welfare tends to sum up theirs, and their misfortunes tend to become negative feelings of mine. I feel what many cells feel, integrating these feelings into a higher unity. I am somewhat as their deity, their fond heavenly companion. They gain their direction and sense of the goodness of life partly from intuiting my sense of that goodness, which takes theirs intuitively into account.

It comes to this: power over others, influence upon others, is either indirect (the power of one holding a loaded and cocked pistol, or with a large income) or it is direct and immediate. In the latter case the only explanation, I suggest, is that if X has an intrinsic value, say a sense of pleasure, to appropriate which is

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harmonizable with the life-style of Y and which therefore can enhance Y's feeling of value, then (if the spatiotemporal relations are favorable) X will tend to feel Y's value or feeling and will thus be influenced by Y. Somewhat indirectly, even brutal tyrants are partly influential by their intrinsic values, their charm, their feeling of confidence or exaltation, their flow of ideas, etc. Intrinsic value gives power.

Theologically applied, the principle explains the quality and scope of God's influence by the assumption that God appreciates and fully appropriates every feeling of value there is, sums up and integrates on the highest level possible what the creatures come to in value terms. As a result God charms every creature irresistibly to whatever extent is compatible with that creature's level of freedom. Plato and Aristotle hint at such an idea; but they did not realize that the highest intrinsic value must be the value of the most perfect and inclusive form of love. Because God loves each creature better than it or its fellows can love it, the creature, even though it is necessarily partly self-creative, cannot but make some response to the divine love. Thus Plato's analogy, in a form transcendent of Plato in certain respects, gives greater power to his theology than he himself could give it.

God's purpose is that there be happy creatures, that is, partly self-determined actualities. How can this purpose guarantee that some such actualities come into being? It is hardly an explanation to say that God's power is unlimited. However, consider what it would mean for there to be no response to the divine appeal. What would then make it true that God was in solitude, wholly without creatures to love or inspire? Would it be a mere nothing instead of a world, a mere emptiness? I hold, more explicitly and definitely than perhaps anyone before me has, that what makes a negative statement true is always something positive. "No food in the refrigerator" does not mean, and is not known to be true by observing, nothing in the refrigerator. We know it by observing the back wall of the interior or the shelves in a way that would not be possible were there solid or liquid foods on the shelves. Mere nothing plays no such role as that of making negative statements true. "Nothing" plays no role at all. Even a vacuum in the refrigerator would not be sheer nothing. So I hold that God would not know that there

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were no creatures by there being nothing instead. Indeed I question what sense it makes to suppose a supreme knower knowing its own knowing of its own knowingof what?

The minimal idea seems to be of Creator-creature, not mere Creator or mere creature. However mysterious it seems, it must somehow be that the divine love and consequent divine charm is such that it can call into being creatures able to respond to this love (thus there is a "magical" aspect), even though the creatures come into being as partly self-active from the very start.

A version of the same mystery is, "What keeps the creative advance of the world going on, instead of petering out, so that, perhaps after the next moment, there would be nothing going on at all?" Well, no moment could make itself the last moment, for no such intrinsic character of a moment is conceivable. Would it be the nothing that followed the last moment? I do not find this intelligible. The divine-creaturely process can explain what needs explaining, which does not mean details causally deduced as necessary; for becoming is no deductive affair.

A merely creaturely or a merely divine process or reality explains nothing. The former has no principle of order, no directive to enable freedom to produce anything but meaningless chaos. The latter has no content; it is an empty powerto do what? Divinity is, for instance, infallible power to know whatever in particular could exist, and the certainty of knowing its existence be this existence a fact. But with only its own existence, what would the highest knower know? I see only a wholly verbal solution of this riddle. Without creatures, 'Father,' 'Son,' and 'Holy Ghost' are empty formulaepower-to-do without any doing. The love of the three for themselves and one another makes a verbal but empty answer to the question, "What is love when it has only three ideal forms, somehow equal yet genuinely differentiated, and there are no unideal forms at all?" God-with-creatures is the answer, not either side by itself. The Creator is eternally and necessarily creative, it is only the particular creatures whose very existence is contingent. Necessity and contingency are necessary to each other. But the necessity that there be some contingent things or other is entirely consistent with the genuine contingency of those things.

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There is no logic requiring us to say, "That accidents happen some accidents or other, is itself only an accident."

Contingency is not in the idea of contingency's having some real instances, but only in what instances. Contingency must be somehow actualized, but just how or in just what it is actualized: that is the contingency. No further contingency is required. In contrast, not only must there be something eternally necessary but the something necessary is eternally definite and has no alternative. The purely eternal and necessary aspect of deity could not have been otherwise than it is; it is necessarily all that it could have been. Since it could not have been prevented from existing, it is meaningless to call it unfortunate, bad, or in any sense open to criticism. In its empty abstract way it is absolutely perfect. Only the time-like aspect of the divine life is contingentnot that there could have failed to be some such aspect, but that the particular contents in which it is actualized could all have been otherwise. And their richness has no upper limit.

The main contention of this chapter, somewhat like that of the preceding one, is that it is an eighth theological mistake to regard belief in God as incompatible with the general idea of an evolution of species. Indeed, this is an understatement. Not only is the evolutionary idea of things partly making themselves and (in reasonable consequence) influencing their offspring or successors harmonious with, but something like it is derivable from, belief in God. Creaturely self-making or freedom is that without which the idea of God is scarcely a reasonable or beneficial one. Evolution is at least one way in which freedom of creatures can be given a basic role in a world view.

Psychicalism and Evolution

If there is a weakness in current evolutionary theory, it may derive, not from the admission of chance as pervasive, but from the tendency of science generally to limit itself to the supposedly merely physical, rather than psychical, aspects of reality. The "evolutionary naturalism" to which many philosophers and scientists incline is really a temporalized dualism. First, mere matter, without

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a trace of mind in any kind or degree, then (as "emergent" qualities of some physical wholes) the addition of primitive forms of mind, followed by more advanced forms.

With mind comes a distinctive kind of inheritance, additional to that carried by the genes, and it is this psychical inheritance which enables acquired characters to be passed on. For instance, most songbirds, to some extent at least, learn their songs partly by listening to their elders or contemporaries. Imitation of sounds comes in, and this involves psychological relations of stimulus-response and positive or negative reinforcement of modes of behavior. As new modes of behaving are discovered by individuals, some of these modes prove adaptive, and the individuals achieve thereby greater breeding success (say by nesting in barns rather than sites provided by nature before the coming of civilized human beings). Successive generations may learn this behavior from early experience, and thus the habits of an entire species may change considerably, especially with gregarious species like barn swallows.

One further step: physically inherited structures which happen to fit the new psychically inherited and adaptive modes will then also be adaptive and will be favored by natural selection. Thus indirectly even physical inheritance will eventually be altered by individual behavioral-psychical acquisitions. The farther down the evolutionary scale this factor can be supposed to go, the more power the theory can have to explain changes in species. Changes made by individuals in their behavior will not arise from mere random changes only but partly from the individuals' creative insightsin a word, intelligence, in however humble or primitive a form. But, as Dobzhansky says, the creativity here is that of individual creatures. They partly make, not only themselves, but their very species.

Creativity in creatures has both positive and negative aspects. It helps to produce new forms, and in the long run to enable animal life to fill the vast variety of niches in nature. If there are tree trunks, there will be animals seeking and finding food on tree trunks; if there is water, there will be animals living or (like penguins) at least feeding in water, etc. The result is what anyone who wants nature to be richly satisfying to contemplate must approve of: a vast variety of forms of life (and feeling), each internally

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harmonious and all capable of coexisting for long periods. And all these creatures may be supposed to enjoy their lives, to receive positive and negative reinforcements. (And, as Skinner says, the positive are the most constructive.) Creatures survive partly because they want to succeed in the little tasks inheritance assigns them and are at least slightly inventive in pursuing their short-run purposes. A bird may not know what a nest is for, but yet feel that a certain shape is satisfying in the arrangement of materials, and may try to bring about that shape. The option: either long-range purposeslike those of human beings after infancy or early childhoodor no purpose at all, is childish; but I am not convinced that all deniers of pervasive purpose in nature are adequately aware of how childish it is.

The Perils of a High Level of Mind and Freedom

The negative side of the psychical factor is that the greater the power of thinking becomes, the less behavior can be preprogrammed by physical inheritance (that is, by instinct), and the greater the individual variety in behavior. There is also greater danger that the individual will not perform its proper role in the ongoing of the species but will rather seek its own gratification and safety at the cost of its fellows and offspring. It may also exterminate other species symbiotically valuable to its own species. Hence religion is actually a biological necessity for a species on a sufficiently high level of intelligence. Bergson's explanation of primitive religion in these terms seems convincing. In thinking animals, religious sanctions must partly take the place of instinct as a check on species-destructive forms of behavior. Religious satisfactions or encouragements are also needed to counterbalance the fear aroused by the knowledge of mortality and the discontent arising from the knowledge of how probable it is that one's desires will meet with very limited success at best.

As science and philosophy grow more sophisticated and penetrating, primitive religion no longer satisfies those sharing in or aware of these inquiries. Commerce, communication, and travel acquaint us with the variety of religious, even on higher levels.

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We see that they all make great claims, which cannot all be wholly true. We in this century, far more than our forebears, even in the Victorian period, are deep in the conflicts resulting from these factors. They are the penalties of intellectual and technological progress and have some tragic aspects.

Goethe, with his remarkable profundity, held that science has two rather different effects on culture. For scientists, especially the most creative ones, science brings inspiration, the vision of nature as mysteriously fascinating and beautiful, almost worthy of worship, although seemingly indifferent to human life and its problems. But to merely humanistically educated persons, science is chiefly destructive culturally. It destroys belief in fairy tales or myths and gives most people no comparably enjoyable views of reality to take their place. Goethe's fears on this head seem still relevant.

On many levels religions are struggling with the problem, or bundle of problems, just sketched. We all do what we can with the rival religious claims and solutions.

That the crimes and aimless hooliganisms in our society are partly caused by the lack of universally efficacious religious inspiration and guidance seems clear. It is not just that youngsters have insufficient religious motivation; their parents have lacked it, too, in many cases, and perhaps their grandparents. And these youngsters have been confronted with devastating, frustrating dilemmas, such as those connected with the Vietnam undertaking, or the nuclear danger now looming so threateningly, and the baffling rivalry of the great powers, brandishing weapons they dare not use, short of what looks like insanity, but also cannot see how to do away with.

I still do not believe that we should give up the scientific vision, with its majesty and beauty, or the philosophictheological vision of cosmic mind as cosmic love.

An Ornithologist Who Opposed Evolution

About one aspect of the evolution controversy I happen to be something of an expert. This is the ornithological aspect. Wallace, who also discovered natural selection independently of Darwin

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like him, observing similar phenomena in tropical parts of the world (mostly different parts from those Darwin visited)was, like Darwin, knowledgeable in ornithology. The agreement between these two superior Englishmen (superior in many notable respects) is impressive testimony to the strength of the case. It is stronger now. Unlike Darwin, Wallace maintained a religious faith to the end and did not admit that the origin of the human species was explicable in the same way as that of the other species. But in his time the fossil record of human and prehuman but human-like animals was far skimpier than it is now. When some rash religious critics of today say that we lack intermediate ''links," they can only be saying that the gaps are greater than the theory implies they should be. But this is an extremely complex issue. Bones usually decay fairly rapidly; long preservation requires very special conditions; it is certain that we have not uncovered anything like all the fossils that lie somewhere buried in the earth. The gaps can only get smaller, and they are already small enough to convince any number of competent persons that the theory of "descent," as Darwin called it, is sound.

Returning to the ornithological aspect. We have a fossil bird intermediate between the dinosaurs and presentday birds, the archaeopteryx, which had feathers, the most universally distinctive feature of birds, but was far more like reptiles than are modern birds. A feathered lizard, 140 millions of years old, is a recent discovery. Considering how fragile bird bones are, the fossil record of the transition, many millions of years ago, from reptile to flying birds, may not be surprisingly scanty, assuming evolution.

During the several decades between Darwin's announcement (1858) of his theory and 1900, there was, in Germany, first an enthusiastic reception of that theory, and then a fierce attack upon it. Bernard Altum (18241900), distinguished observer of birds and a Catholic priest, in his Der Vogel und sein Leben (The Bird and Its Life), argued vigorously and ingeniously against Darwinism. ² If a strong case could have been made, this was the time and the man to make it. The negative case was more easily made then than now, for Lamarck's defence of inheritance of acquired characteristics had not been subjected to adequate tests, mutations were not known, no one had more than the vaguest idea of how the genetic

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machinery worked or what its laws were, fossil records were skimpy, etc. etc. But the religious motivation to try to refute Darwin was available and Altum had at least that. The nonevolutionary point of view was not held in the disrepute it is now; it would easily get a full hearing, and it did. In addition Altum was a vigorous thinker and a brilliant observer of birds. He gave a splendid account of the territorial theory of bird song, which he accepted. This was nearly sixty years before Eliot Howard's Territory in Bird Life quickly convinced the learned world of the validity of the theory. So far as I know, Altum was the last ornithologist of any marked distinction to take up the anti-evolutionary cause. For a time he made an impression. An unfortunate effect of his advocacy was that it prevented his admirable thought on territory from getting the attention it deserved.

Altum combined nearly all the mistakes one could well make, so far as evolution is concerned. Like Darwin he rejected the idea of chance, or of any freedom of the creatures, apart at least from human beings. A providential order meant for him the absolute exclusion of randomness or inharmony in nature. In the cosmic whole there was a place for everything and everything was in its place. Animals had no intelligence, even (he seems to imply) no feelings, and no purposes. Their actions were determined by the cosmos as a whole, a single integrated organism. How this related to Altum's theology I do not know. But it fits what I have been calling the tryant idea of divine power. Animals are made by a higher power to do what they do.

Altum argues that the functions of song, for instance, are not in the least understood by the singing bird. Pure instinct completely determines the behavior. The nondivine purposive element is simply not there, in no matter how primitive a form. It follows that our species is essentially supernatural. Abruptly, with us, feeling, thought, and individual creativity come upon the scene. An unconscious, insentient, uninventive world suddenlyin our species alonebecomes conscious, emotional, and inventive. Or is it in all higher mammals? The evidence given for the lack of purpose in the other animals presupposes the view I have called childish, that what seems to do the work of purpose must be either the thoughtful, longrange, complex sort of thing that human language makes possible,

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or no purpose at all. The possibility of extremely simple, shortrange purpose or desire, deficient in thought but not in mere feeling, is ignored. In this way the question of an evolution of feeling and the psychical generally is begged.

Altum is impressed, and rightly, by the aspects of symbiosis, living together, found in the relations of species. Insects and birds help plants to propagate, and plants help birds in various ways, and such things imply, he believes, a cosmic ordering to adjust species to one another. He does not distinguish, however, between, on the one hand, a basic ordering of partly free and self-ordering individuals, the cosmic aspect of the order being given by laws of nature that are not absolute in a more than statistical sense and, on the other hand, on ordering according to the classical idea of strictly sufficient reason leaving individuals no leeway for decision making. The latter is Altum's view. Only the cosmic power, expressed in instinct, effectively decides. "An animal does not act, but is acted upon." This as the reader knows is exactly the view I am combating in this book. It has, as one consequence, the nastiest form of the theological problem of evil, and, as another consequence, the problem of human freedom, and how, if we too have no freedom, we can form an idea of divine freedom, such as almost every theologian has claimed is part of the meaning of worship.

Has any present-day anti-evolutionist significant resources lacking to Altum? I fail to see it. On that side of the issue, Altum had everything of consequence that is available even now.

In my own book on birds, Born to Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song, ³ I take evolution for granted; but by stressing the psychical element, the creativity of the individual animal, and offering evidence for that in the case of singing birds, I do implicitly strengthen the evolutionary case. I give definite quantitative observational evidence for the territorial function, and consequent adaptive value, of song, and also and above all for the hypothesis that singing birds have a primitive form of what in us we call an aesthetic sense or musical feeling. Incidentally I confirm Altum's generalization: the gregariousness or sociality of a species is inversely correlated with its degree of song development. Singing is favored by an individualistic mode of existence, tending to sep-

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arate widely in space the singer from its presumptive listener, whether mate or (sexual or territorial) rival. The principle is, the farther the song needs to be heard and distinguished from others audible at a given spot, the more distinctive it needs to be. Hence musical refinement and/or complexity are favored by nongregariousness. They are also favored by inconspicuousness in the normal habitat and with the normal behavior, on the principle that the more easily the bird can be identified visually the less it needs to be identified by sound.

Consider the geographical distribution of birds. In Madagascar many of the species are neither the same nor radically different from those some hundreds of miles away on the continent of Africa, and the explanation is at hand: the ancestors of the island birds came from the continent and in thousands or millions of years evolved into some new species. In the tropics this is easier by far to see than elsewhere, since in tropical regions, or those with mild winters, birds are mostly non-migratory and a moderate spatial separation tends to prevent interbreeding; hence new species may in time result. In the Galapagos Islands, which taught Darwin so much, the separation of one island from another enabled some finches, arriving no doubt at this or that island, to find their way in groups (finches tend to be gregarious), perhaps by a storm blowing birds out of their course, to other islands and so to develop many species to fit the various open niches on islands originally birdless. New Zealand has a similar relation to Australia as Madagascar has to Africa. Are we to look to the Book of Genesis for light on such situations? Without that document, we have a working method that really illuminates the facts (almost none of which are definitely referred to in that ancient writing).

Assume for a moment the nonevolutionary view: how then do we understand the fact that, on the hypothesis, what God has done is to make things such that observers of nature are bound, sooner or later, to be led to a conclusion which seems to wonderfully illuminate the phenomena; yet God has also made a certain Book, which, we are told, must be regarded as the infallible word of God, and which, we are also told, contradicts that conclusion. God's world and God's word seem remarkably incompatible. Why would

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God so ingeniously deceive us? Is God "tempting" us, a suggestion that some actually propose?

We have navels. If Adam had one, then he came from a mother. At least this is the eminently reasonable conclusion. If not, then Adam was not fully human as we know our species. The point goes much farther. Each of us is unconsciously influenced (who doubts it?) by having spent months in a womb and by having been born more or less painfully into a very different environment. If Adam lacked these experiences, how different he would be from us as well as from any other mammal! One could go on and on. The human fetus goes through stages which to some extent mimic structures in what evolutionists view as our remote ancestors. Here again, the Creator seems determined to deceive us, to trick us into becoming evolutionists.

Perhaps, after all, creation science ought to be taught in school, it is so rich in farcical aspects from the evolutionary standpoint. Who could be bored if full justice were done to that aspect? And yet, alas, the thing we are asked to take seriously is more pathetic and sad than amusing. It shows how much some natures crave easy answers, definite slogans with which to encourage friends and intimidate enemiesor offspring. I received yesterday a circular from a woman in Canada who dares to speak of her "knowing as God knows" all sorts of definite truths which she can easily put into words, such as that the words of the Bible took fully into account everything that has happened since the words were written down (the view of omniscience that the Socinians rejected for carefully considered reasons). Ah, well . . .

We human beings, naked apes, featherless bipeds, who enjoy the privileges of conscious thought, must also bear its burdens. The other animals may in their way be closer to sublime wisdom than we sometimes are. They live their roles in the divinely-inspired, partly self-realized Scheme; we may, much of the time, be living in some little scheme of our own imagining.

The writers of The Book were, I dare say, hardly fundamentalists. Certainly they did not drive in cars and use electronic machinery, as some of their modern readers do, devoid of any inkling of the scientific spirit, the "natural piety," which made these inventions possible. None of them exhibited even a suspicion of the evolutionary

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biology which, centuries later, convinced most relevantly educated people by its picture of the origin of our and all species, or of the physics and astronomy which penetrated to the ultramicroscopic atoms and explored the development of the solar system and star galaxies.

Has someone begun to tell us about "creation physics"? Would that be very different from just physics, plus an attempt to conceive a theological interpretation? Such an interpretation need not be an account of how our present cosmos sprang complete from the disembodied mind of deity; it might rather tell how the divine Mind incarnated itself in some initial stage of the development of that cosmos (the beginning of our "cosmic epoch," in Whitehead's phrase) governed by divinely decided laws which leave the details of happenings to decisions made by countless kinds of nondivine creatures. What came before that cosmic epoch may perhaps be beyond both physics and theology to discover. If divine awareness is in principle exalted above the human, there must be some truths which only the former can know.

The authors of the biblical writings show no realization of how science and technology, with their tendency toward increasingly rapid accumulation of skills, might someday so drastically alter the death and birth rates, especially of infants and women, and in addition so reduce the importance of brute physical strength, as to quite change the place of women in society and put into permanent question the overwhelming male dominance that had hitherto characterized human groups. Biblical literalists ask us to pretend that this is to make no difference in how we react, for instance, to Paul's instructions about how to treat women. Yet these same literalists are themselves ignoring some other biblical injunctions which also, obviously, no longer apply. They tell us that one cannot draw the line between texts to be taken seriously and texts not to be taken seriously. But in practice they do draw this line. Would they really like to put homosexuals to death (Leviticus) if only our laws allowed it?

How easily our built-in "thinking machines," our brains (which are also far more than thinking machines, but are at least that, or something like that) can make slips in deriving conclusions from assumptions, or err in adopting assumptions! Instincts, tested through

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thousands of years, are much more reliable as far as they go. But highly inventive, thinking creatures produce new problems and must invent new solutions.

In speaking of the wisdom of the other animals, I have in mind that we cannot understand God as having simply our kind of thinking consciousness to the nth degree. God does not have some tiny field of direct and distinct (in creatures it is only relatively distinct) acquaintance with reality (perception) and know the rest by brilliant inferences from this small sample and recollections of other samples. God's field of distinct perception is the de facto whole itself. No thinking is thus needed to get to the whole from the part. God's intelligence is not, as ours is, "discursive," as the older thinkers expressed it. To form the conception of God we have to try to understand what function is left for thought when perception does the entire job of yielding the physical whole.

It is remarkable (but one can explain it) that, while classical theologians wrote about the "will" and "knowledge" of God, the word "perception" was usually avoided in this context. Whitehead is original here, too, for he attributes "physical prehensions,'' equivalent to perceptions, to deity. But then, what need is there for divine thinking? The answer seems to be that, because the future is only potential, a matter of more or less universal "might-be's, would-be's, and must-be's" (in Peirce's terms) rather than fully concrete or particularized actualities, God must have awareness of what we call universals, and the awareness of the universal is what concepts give us. In this way God can be supposed to distinguish our fragmented awareness of the physical whole of things from His-Her unfragmented awareness. We have to treat the distant and not-perceived through concepts of what might be out there beyond our field of vision, hearing, and smelling. We use universals or concepts in a way God would not have to. But God has to be aware of the truth involved in concepts, since that is the truth so far as the uncreated future is concerned. And so, too, God knows mathematical truths, which concern universals, abstract possibilities.

God is like the other animals, rather than like us, in the following way: for the other animals, the field of perception is almost the whole, so far as the animal has definite awareness of that whole. The animal's instincts take the real whole into account to some

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extent; but of this the animal is largely unconscious. It does little thinking about what is not at the moment perceived, unless it has in the very near past been perceived. So, for the animal, the animal's body and its near environment almost are the whole. For God there is no external environment, the divine body just is the spatial whole; moreover, this body is vividly and distinctly perceived. For most animals, the near external environment is almost the entire relevant environment. In addition, the reliability of instinct has some analogy to that of divine wisdom. It is our kind of animal alone that would win the prizes in a contest for extremes of follyknights tilting at windmills, sinners trembling at visions of hell fire. So Plato's description of the world as patterned after "the ideal animal," or the ideal of animality, makes some sense.

I once spent perhaps half an hour with a German psychoanalyst who had studied under Freud. He surprised me by saying that he believed in God, and that we were related to God as our cells are to us. Naturally, I was pleased by this information.

For God, too, reality develops, and for God, as for us, the end is not yet. Indeed, though there may be an end to our cosmos, as well as our species, there can be no end of the divine-creaturely process, out of which even laws are born.

Theologians used to object to the idea that "the world" is "coeternal with God," making it seem that God's eternity has a rival. But this is to misunderstand the import of "the world." If it means the present system of natural laws, there is no need to take that as eternal. If other laws are conceivable, God is not to be forbidden by us to make use eventually of these other possibilities for patterning a universe. That God with no world is probably an absurd idea does not mean that there is a definite individual which is not God and is eternal. The world consists of individuals, but the totality of individuals as a physical or spatial whole is God's body, the Soul of which is God. So there is no eternal, worldly individual, rival to God. Simply, eternally God has some creaturely individuals or otherindeed, taking the divine past into account, an infinity of them, but a growing infinity, in the meaning that Bertrand Russell at least held is not a contradiction. So, in a sense, even God evolves, but in a decidedly transcendent or divine sense.

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Notes

1. Emerson wrote these still pertinent words in his Journal in March, 1843. See The Heart of Emerson's Journals, ed. Bliss Perry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1909, 1926), pp. 196f.

2. For Altum's importance, see Erwin Stresemann, Ornithology: From Aristotle to the Present (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 32830, 215, 238, 273, 322, 341, 360, 361.

3. Born to Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1973).

Materialism and Dualism in Greek and Medieval Thought

until modern times had two principal views about the place of mind in the world, by 'mind' meaning such processes as feeling, thinking, remembering, experiencing, and the like. According to the dominant view, there were two basically different aspects or kinds of reality, mind and matter, or souls and bodies. (From the Greek word 'psyche' for soul comes the word 'psychology'; I shall sometimes use 'psychical,' in contrast to 'physical,' for mind in contrast to mere matter.) The general belief was that much of nature consists of mere matter, the merely physical, entirely lacking in mindunless the divine mind, said to be everywhere, ubiquitous, somehow comes in. Thus rocks, water, or air. However, in the living parts of nature there is something additional called 'soul.' In plants this is what Aristotle called vegetable soul, lacking feeling or thought but having power to preside over the growth of the organism. With animals the soul is at least sentient, able to feel; with humans it is conscious, able to think and know. This scheme may be called 'dualism.' To be sure, the two aspects, soul and body, were not merely coordinate. Body was everywhere, soul was localized (apart from God). On the other hand, in the theistic systems, which most systems were, mind or soul in supreme form, God, was creator of, or at least supreme power over, everything. To that extent, psychology rather than physics was dominant, if we include in psychology the theory of the divine nature as supreme form of the psychical or spiritual. One did not talk of a "psychology of God," but this was implied,

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if God knows, thinks, or has purposes, and if we can theorize about these as divine attributes. Actually Berdyaev in this century may possibly have been the first to use the expression quoted in the previous sentence.

The harsh duality of mere body, in portions of nature, and body -with-soul in other portions was somewhat softened by a rather vague use of 'form' as found in mind and in the nonliving things. Thus a physical shape is a form, and so is a particular quality of sensation. I shall not stop to consider this complication. It tends to distract attention from the basic contrast I wish to consider, that between the supposedly merely physical and the psychical. I also will not consider the Stoic cosmology. I hold with Peirce that it was the weakest of the Greek systems.

The other view known in the West in early times, sharply formulated in Greece, was 'materialism,' accordingg to which reality consisted fundamentally and universally of atoms, infinitely hard lumps of 'matter' invisibly small, with unchanging sizes and shapes, moving about in empty space. Even a mind was but a swarm of a special kind of atom. This, taken literally, was not dualism but a materialistic or physicalistic monism. The influence of mind on matter, or vice versa, was, for this view, merely the interactions of atoms of one kind with atoms of other kinds. This was a neater theory of nature than any dualism can be. However, to mention only one difficulty, it is far from clear how mere differences of size, shape, and ways of moving about could constitute the difference between thoughts or feelings and mere insentient lumps of stuff. Greek materialistic atomism had no theology properly so called, but only a theory of immortal gods, such as Apollo or Venus, made up of special kinds of atoms whose organization into individual super-animal bodies was mysteriously indestructible and so immortal. Greek materialism seems to have had little effect on medieval theology unless it influenced Tertullian's doctrine that every individual, even God, has a physical aspect, a body. This doctrine does not seem to have influenced subsequent classical theism.

Plato's World Soul: The Mind-Body Analogy for God

Plato, the first systematic philosophical theologian in the West, perhaps in the world, was also, in the view of many, one of the

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wisest and best of such theologians. He regarded the universe as a divine body, animated by a divine soul called the World Soul. Superficially interpreted, Plato had two Gods, the purely eternal God, called the Demiurge, creator of all noneternal things including the World Soul itself, which was quasi- eternal and embraced in itself all other created things. A deeper interpretation, accepted by some scholars, holds that the purely eternal God is only an abstraction, an aspect of the World Soul ("Plato's real God"Levinson), which is the concrete deity, with the Demiurge that same Soul considered merely as having an eternal ideal which it is forever engaged in realizing by a process called "a moving image of eternity." Since self-creation or self-making is a basic idea in neoclassical theism, the idea that the Soul, utilizing the partly self-created creatures, creates its own forever unfinished actualization is a tempting way to read Plato. The Soul is aware not only of the eternal ideal but of the noncosmic animals, including us, and their lesser souls. Strict omniscience in the classical sense of surveying all events, no matter how future to us, is not, I think, an idea to which Plato is committed.

Alas, Plato's wisdom was only partly taken advantage of in later developments. If he perhaps influenced Tertullian in that writer's assertion of a divine body, later thinkers for two thousand years seem mostly not to have taken the hint. Nor did they appreciate Plato's discretion in viewing God's power as that of "persuading" the creatures, who do not completely enact into concrete actuality the divine ideal. Plato seems uncertain whether the incomplete control of things by God arises from "matter" or from the freedom ("self-motion") of created souls (the latter being the neoclassical view). In any case Plato was not burdened with the most egregious form of the problem of evil. The medieval theologians were less judicious. They made God a disembodied spirit with power to determine all becoming, or at least failed to make clear how they avoided this catastrophic conception.

It is fairly obvious that Plato's "two Gods" doctrine in some degree anticipated Whitehead's "primordial" and "consequent" natures of God and my principle of dual transcendence. The twentieth-century "process theology" is in some respects a return to Plato, after a very long detour.

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To appreciate the idea of a divine body, we need to remind ourselves that any idea of God must in some way make use of analogies, or at least metaphors, in attempting to show how our idea of the radically superhuman can nevertheless be our human idea. We have no alternative to the use of comparisons with phenomena in our experience. These fall basically, for theological purposes, into two kinds or classes. There is the class of interpersonal relations. Thus God is thought of as related to a creature as a parent to its child or as a ruler to a subject or citizen of a country. Other variations are the teacher-pupil relation, or a writer and director of plays as related to the actors and actresses who perform the plays, or a musical composer-conductor as related to the musicians performing the music. In Judaea only the interpersonal analogy seems to have been actually used. In Greece Plato offered a very different one, the relation of a person as soul or conscious individual to the physical body of that individual. His suggestion was largely ignored, for instance by his disciple Aristotle, and by the scholastics generally. I think that in this they were sadly mistaken. I shall now explain why.

Interpersonal relations, whether those of parent to child or of ruler to ruled, have two serious limitations as bases for a divine-human analogy. As soon as a child is born, it begins a long process of separation from its mother, and it has always, even in the womb, been separated from its father. But the divine is that which is "nearer to us than breathing and closer than hand or foot." The intimate sustaining presence of deity is very feebly suggested by the parent-child relationship. The other limitation of interpersonal relations for theological purposes is that the radical inferiority of human beings in comparison with deity is only weakly or misleadingly modeled by that of a child in comparison with its parent. True, the child at birth, or as a mere infant, still more before birth (pace prolifers) is indeed far from equal, in intelligence or according to any standard measure of value, such as moral goodness, to a normal parent. But a healthy child talking with some fluency, showing kindness and sympathy with other children or its parents, is already beginning almost to rival adults in some virtues, values, or powers.

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To furnish anything like an analogy to the vast contrast, and the impossibility of rivalry, between a human person and deity, one must follow the production of the child all the way down to the fertilized egg cell. A person or higher animal is at least a (very complex) multicellular creature, a metazoan. The egg cells is so only in potentiality. Actually it is no metazoan, and the facts that it was produced by metazoan animals and could be enabled, with a vast deal of help, to become such an animal, cannot with intellectual honesty be equated with simply being such an animal. As the Buddhists for two thousand years have seen, "A can turn into B" is one thing, "A is B" is another. (So long as pro-lifers persist in denying this distinction, than which none could be much plainer, my conclusion must be that they are trying to prove their case by verbal ambiguity.) Even a small child is enormously superior to a fertilized egg or any single cell whatever, for the child is many billions of such cells, a substantial portion of them organized into a nervous system, the most complex, subtly integrated natural system we know about, short of God as the integrated cosmos!

Inferior as the early pre-child stage of a human offspring is to its parent, it is still not by itself an adequate basis for trying to conceive our relation to deity. The fetus is radically separate from its male parent, and even in relation to its mother it is to a considerable extent on its own. In later stages it could conceivably be in an incubator and still grow into a child, physically regarded.

Now turn back to the mind-body analogy. Here indeed we have something like what we need. Each cell in our body is almost as nothing in comparison with ourselves as conscious individuals. Yet each may contribute something directly to our awareness, at least each cell in our brain's cortex may do so. The brain, or perhaps the central nervous system, is a sort of body within the body, the quintessential body. Between our experiences and our central nervous systems (or, if you will, our brains) there is no further mediating mechanism. How we feel, and how certain nerve cells act, depend somehow directly on each other. If we think or feel in wrong ways, bodily ills may quickly follow; if our cells internally function badly, we feel the harm as our own. What is pain, some of us wonder, if not our participation in cellular damage or discomfort? As David Hume rightly remarked, if anywhere in our world mind acts directly

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on body (and vice versa) it is in nervous systems. God must act directly on each creature, not merely via other creatures. The mind-body, or mind-nerve-cell, analogy is all we have for this, apart from rare and controversial cases of table rapping and the like. How can theology justify neglecting this unique form of creature-creator analogy?

Male Bias in Theology

Theologians thought that the mind-body analogy implied a degrading view of deity. They forgot (when so thinking) that the father analogy can similarly be regarded as degrading. Does God have a male sex organ? Yet without that organ what is left of the idea that, as God causes the world, so the father causes the child. The grim joke of the matter is that our forefathers were under the utterly wrong conviction that the physical origin or "seed" which is the beginning of the offspring is solely from the father. Their excuse, but not by any means justification, was their ignorance of the female egg cell, without which no child comes to be. Each child comes from two seeds, one from father and the other from mother. Male chauvinism has, as one origin, the sheer mistake of denying the female egg cell! The theory (one finds it in Aristotle) was that the mother furnishes merely the soil in which the seed is planted. The father furnishes the "form," the mother the mere "matter." The father is thus the real cause of the child, not the mother. I say that this is only excused, not justified, by ignorance. For there was not a scintilla of evidence that the mother's ovaries and egg cells and their functions did not exist. Sheer ignorance was turned into a theory insulting to women. My sex cannot justify this procedure. At best it can ask to be excused.

I have even understated the case against the traditional view of the father as sole origin of the offspring. All experience shows that in form children are as likely to resemble mothers as fathers. Aristotle's theory is against the evidence, not merely unsupported by it. Why was Aristotle so sure of his father -favoring theory?

Had the male half of the species made somewhat more use than it seems to have of its vaunted capacity for rational objectivity, a

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capacity it has sometimes accused women of lacking, it might have realized that at least a partial, and for all anyone can easily prove, fairly complete explanation of the fact that women have not been close rivals to men in most of the arts and sciences of civilization is not something women are born without and men with but the opposite, something men are born without and women with. This is the capacity and hence obligation to assume 99 percent of the not-light task of reproducing the species, plus the more arbitrary cultural imposition of tasks that the men and women are born equally capable of, such as preparing food and spinning, weaving, and sewing garments. When we find the sainted Thomas Aquinas saying, "What makes a woman a woman is her inability to produce semen," we see what the medieval score is in this matter of sexism.

A few menRalph Waldo Emerson, a hero of my youth, John Stuart Mill, and some male playwrights and novelistsstand out as exhibiting in the last century the disinterested rationality about the division of labor between the sexes that most men and all too many women have long lacked and, alas, some still have not yet acquired. How much more reasonable it would have been had Aquinas said that what makes a man a man is his physiological inability to bear and by his own bodily product nourish children!

In fairness it should be said that so long as the medical and hygienic knowledge and technical resources needed to lower the death rate, and therefore the desirable birth rate, were lacking, and women were forced to bear and care for, on the average, a large number of children and to spend most of their adult lives doing that, it was not in human weakness to see what a difference it would make to the lives of women when the death rate of the young was drastically lowered, and in addition women's longevity greatly extended. These and other quantitative changes resulting from applied science have qualitative implications. This is what the feminist movement of recent times is all about. Like other movements, it has its share of fanatics. But the changed basic conditions are realities and must be faced, well or ill. Women must still perform the primary part of the bearing of children; but they no longer need to see this task as their only important adult function. Indeed, it is not in the interest of men any longer that they should do so. The world does not suffer from a dearth of babies, and women

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cannot give men the companionship they need if being mothers is alone on their mindsthat and being men's mistresses.

The mind-body analogy is not degrading if the father (or parental) analogy is not. And without either analogy there is no good basis for the idea of God as causative of creatures.

Creation from Nothing, Magic, and the Tyrant Conception of God

There is one phenomenon that has some resemblance to what seems to be meant by the classical (but not Greek) idea that God causes the world, not out of some already existent entity but ''out of nothing." This is the phenomenon or supposed phenomenon of magic. God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. The magician says, "Abracadabra," and the genie comes out of the bottle. To be sure, the magician saying "Abracadabra" is not disembodied spirit; his speech is done by his body. However, one can think of a magician or of God producing the result by merely thinking something. What it comes to is that for the creation-out- of-nothing idea there was no noncontroversial analogous phenomenon whatsoever. It was a human concept, or supposed concept, with no basis in well-attested human experience. Yet what fateful consequences sprang from this so oddly and insecurely based idea! The matter is too important for exclusive reliance to be placed on such a semantic quicksand as the supposed occurrence of purely magical causation.

The feminists' complaint that they have been asked to worship a male deity seems pertinent and well founded. "Men are the masters" easily fits the tyrant conception of God, whose function is to command while the creatures merely obey. But how if the command is, as Berdyaev suggested, "Be creative and foster creativity in others." Then God as all-creative, all-determining Cause, effect of, influenced by, nothing, is no longer an appropriate idea. Much more appropriate is the idea of a mother, influencing, but sympathetic to and hence influenced by, her child and delighting in its growing creativity and freedom.

Lincoln said, "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master." Is Lincoln to be considered nobler than God? Would God

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be a master, in the sense some have given this term, a cosmic sovereign? Tyrannical people may worship a tyrant God, but why should the rest of us do so?

Mind or Soul as Creative of Its Body

We are now ready to go more deeply into the Platonic analogy of soul and body. What is this relationship? Here Plato was somewhat baffled. All the world was then baffled by the problem of matter, which is still a wondrous conundrum. But physics and biology have thrown some light on it which the ancient world was without. We know, for instance, that the mind-body relation is not a one-to-one relation but a one-to-many relation. The body is a society of billions of cells, each a highly organized society of molecules and particles or wavicles. At a given moment each of us, as a conscious individual, is a single reality; but our body is no such single reality. Each white blood corpuscle is a tiny animal, each nerve cell is a single individual. Similarly, God's cosmic body is a society of individuals, not a single individual. The world as an integrated individual is not a 'world' as this term is normally and properly used, but 'God.' God, the World Soul, is the individual integrity of 'the world,' which otherwise is just the myriad creatures. As each of us is the supercellular individual of the cellular society called a human body, so God is the super-creaturely individual of the inclusive creaturely society. Simply outside of this super-society and super-individual, there is nothing.

Unlike the human bodily society, the divine bodily society contains not merely multitudes of radically subpersonal entities, such as cells or molecules, but also multitudes of multicellular plants and animals, including persons and those nearly personal creatures the apes and whales, and who knows what other forms of life on the astronomically probable billions of planets? Yet God is superior to all these in a manner of which the person-to- cell analogy gives only a faint idea. It is still, in some respects, a far better idea than that given by the merely interpersonal analogy of parent or ruler.

The "divine right of kings" never was really divine. The ancient Jews knew that, bless them. A king is only another human person,

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more by accident than intrinsic worth put in a position of power. But you or I as conscious individual is not just another cell in our bodily society. We do indeed rule over those cells by a sort of divine right, since it is the laws of nature, which for a theist are divinely instituted, that give us power to control our bodies, that is, power over our cells. The power of any one cell over us is as nothing compared to the power each of us has over multitudes of cells. We are quasi-deities in our bodily system. No parent has a comparable power over a child. In the womb a mother has only a vague, limited influence on the development of the fetus, compared to her influence on her own brain cells.

It is obvious enough, nevertheless, that if we take Plato's analogy seriously, and also the parent-so-child analogy, then it is the mother, not the father, who furnishes by far the best symbol of deity. The fetus-mother relationship is decidedly more intimate than the fetus-father relationship. Here, too, the male bias got things upside down.

I add with some diffidence that one reason for my hesitation to accept any of the recent (or old) theories of the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth (some of the best of these theories being formulated by careful readers of my writings) is that any such theory at least strongly suggests the idea of deity as highly spiritualized masculinity. It is a constant temptation to male chauvinism, and a temptation in historical fact not altogether resolutely resisted, to put it mildly.

We come to the question: Does human experiencing in any sense create its brain cells? Here neurophysiologists disagree somewhat; but there are experts who hold that experiences exercise a creative influence upon the development of brain cells. Our every thought and emotion does things to those cells, which at birth are far from fully developed. Hence it is that an infant cannot even begin to learn to speak or to think (in the way made possible by language) until some months have passed. The human individual to some extent presides over the coming to be of its cells. A great Platonic poet, Edmund Spenser, expressed this idea, long before modern physiology:

For the body from the soul its form doth take
For soul is form and doth the body make.

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The analogy between God-world and Soul-body can be carried yet further. Cells are like tiny animals; integrated individuals. Perhaps they are sentient individuals. There has long been a book (by the psychologist Binet, published in 1888) on The Psychology of Microorganisms. Why not a psychology of cells? True, apart from the white blood cells, our cells are not mobile. But it does not follow that they are inactive. They are constantly reorganizing their parts, repairing damage, andexcept the nerve cellsdividing and thus reproducing their kind. No evidence, so far as I can see, supports the idea that cells are totally without anything like feeling. The feelings would concern chiefly their internal relationships and the stimuli they receive from their neighbors (in the case of nerve cells, across synaptic connections). They would not, unless in some extremely primitive sense, think or remember, but only feel. But what could show that they do not do even that?

It is arguable that we have direct evidence that cells do feel. For what is pain, physical suffering? It is fact that we feel pain when cellular harm is done. In shaving one often feels a slight twinge of pain and yet can see no cut in the skin. But wait a second, or two or three, and blood appears. Occasionally not, but is it not reasonable to think then of imperceptibily slight skin damage? If it is fact that our suffering means cellular damage, what is the simplest explanation of our feeling of suffering? Surely the simplest explanation is that our suffering is our immediate sharing in, sympathy with, something like suffering in the cells, which can give us feeling because they themselves have a kind of feeling that, when vaguely intuited by us, in indistinct, blurred fashion (so that we cannot consciously make out the individual cells, one by one), becomes our human kind of physical pain. We know that our awareness of cells (still more of molecules or atoms) is blurred, since we cannot identify the microindividuals as such. The hypothesis that sensation is indistinct but direct sympathetic participation in cellular feeling is the simplest explanation of human (and other higher animal) sensation that has been offered. One finds it (in different words) in Bergson, Peirce, Whitehead, and a few others.

Theologically the view has great advantages. For it makes sense at last of the ancient idea of love as the principle of principles. An American psychiatrist (I believe it was Karl Menninger) has

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quoted from an English author of the nineteenth century, "To sing the praises of love 'is to set a candle in the sun.'" The sun, I suggest, is the glow of that bond of sympathy which, as Plato hinted, holds the world together and relates the divine and the human. Our praise of this bond can indeed not appreciably add to its luster. But still, in the relative darkness of some theological discussions of love, the candle of our analysis may significantly increase the visibility.

Psychicalism and the Universality of Love

One more step. Even supposing that cells feel, we have the molecules, atoms, and still simpler constituents of nature to consider. Either the explanation in terms of sympathy, feeling of feeling, the root idea of love, goes to the bottom of things or it does not. If it does, then we have a coherent system of concepts applying theologically, psychologically, biologically, and physically. Otherwise we have a dualism of two ultimately different ways in which mind is related to what it experiences or knows, or in which individuals are held together to constitute a universe. This is an intellectual alternative; on one side a really thoroughgoing conceptual integration, on the other, a lack of such integration. Physicists, confronted by a dilemma of this sort, tend to favor, at least provisionally, the integral view. They tend to dislike dualisms. I recall a physicist expressing disgust for the idea that nature consists first of the merely physical, devoid utterly of life, and then of the physical plus an absolutely new principle of life. More and more, physicists dare to say that all nature is in some sense life-like, that there is no absolutely new principle of life that comes in at some point in cosmic evolution.

If this drive for conceptual integration proves irresistible, as I suspect it may, then we shall see either a universal materialism (or physicalism) or a universal psychicalism. The negative concept of mindless, insentient stuff or process (apart from special and exceptional cases) will be accepted as the universal principle of reality; or mind in a most generalized sense will be accepted as that principle. I suggest that theology must favor the second solution. Then love

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will relate God not only to human beings but to all creatures, and will apply to the soul-to-bodily-cells relationship and, in its ultimate generality, to all relationships of creature to creature, creature to Creator, Creator to creature. Of the two escapes from dualism, materialism and psychicalism, the latter has clear advantages. It is the more intelligible monism.

To the six theological mistakes described in Chapter 1 we can now add a seventh: theology should not accept the idea of mere, insentient, lifeless, wholly unfree matter. Materialism and an absolute mind-matter dualism are implicitly atheistic doctrines.

The Mistakes Briefly Presented

I introduce, with a minimum of criticism or argument, six ideas about God which have been held by a great number of learned and brilliant philosophers and theologians through many centuries and in many religious traditions, but which I and many others, including some distinguished modern theologians and philosophers, have found quite unacceptable. In other words, what we attack is an old tradition, but we attack it standing within a somewhat newer tradition. In this newer tradition there is a partial appeal (with reservations) to still a third tradition which is old indeed, expressed in various sacred writings, including the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. For it is our contention that the ''theological mistakes" in question give the word God a meaning which is not true to its import in sacred writings or in concrete religious piety. This result came about partly because theologians in medieval Europe and the Near East were somewhat learned in Greek philosophy and largely ignorant of any other philosophy. This happened in both Christianity and Islam, to a somewhat lesser extent in Judaism. In all three religions there was a development of mysticism, which was different still and in some ways partially corrective of the all-too-Greek form taken by the official theologies.

In section B, I develop at length my arguments against the six mistakes, which together form what I call classical theism (the one too strongly influenced by Greek philosophy as medieval scholars knew that philosophy) and in favor of what I sometimes call the

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new theism, sometimes process theology, sometimes neoclassical theism which is my version of a general point of view that has had a good many proponents in recent times.

First Mistake: God Is Absolutely Perfect and Therefore Unchangeable. In Plato's Republic one finds the proposition: God, being perfect, cannot change (not for the better, since "perfect" means that there can be no better; not for the worse, since ability to change for the worse, to decay, degenerate, or become corrupt, is a weakness, an imperfection). The argument may seem cogent, but it is so only if two assumptions are valid: that it is possible to conceive of a meaning for "perfect" that excludes change in any and every respect and that we must conceive God as perfect in just this sense. Obviously the ordinary meanings of perfect do not entirely exclude change. Thus Wordsworth wrote of his wife that she was a ''perfect woman," but he certainly did not mean that she was totally unchangeable. In many places in the Bible human beings are spoken of as perfect; again the entire exclusion of change cannot have been intended. Where in the Bible God is spoken of as perfect, the indications are that even here the exclusion of change in any and every respect was not implied. And where God is directly spoken of as strictly unchanging ("without shadow of turning"), there is still a possibility of ambiguity. God might be absolutely unchangeable in righteousness (which is what the context indicates is the intended meaning), but changeable in ways compatible with, neutral to, or even required by, this unswerving constancy in righteousness. Thus, God would be in no degree, however slight, alterable in the respect in question (the divine steadfastness in good will) and yet alterable, not necessarily in spite of, but even because of, this steadfastness. If the creatures behave according to God's will, God will appreciate this behavior; if not, God will have a different response, equally appropriate and expressive of the divine goodness.

The Biblical writers were not discussing Greek philosophical issues, and it is at our own peril that we interpret them as if they were discussing these, just as it is at our peril if we take them to be discussing various modern issues that had not arisen in ancient Palestine. It may even turn out on inquiry that perfection, if taken to imply an absolute maximum of value in every conceivable respect,

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does not make sense or is contradictory. In that case the argument of the Republic is an argument from an absurdity and proves nothing. Logicians have found that abstract definitions may seem harmless and yet be contradictory when their meanings are spelled out. Example, "the class of all classes." Similarly, "actuality of all possible values," to which no addition is possible, may have contradictory implications. If perfection cannot consistently mean this value maximum, then the Platonic argument is unsound. Nor was it necessarily Plato's last word on the subject. (See Chapter 2B.)

Second Mistake: Omnipotence. God, being defined as perfect in all respects must, it seems, be perfect in power; therefore, whatever happens is divinely made to happen. If I die of cancer this misfortune is God's doing. The question then becomes,, "Why has God done this to me?" Here everything depends on "perfect in power" or "omnipotent.'' And here, too, there are possible ambiguities, as we shall see.

Third Mistake: Omniscience. Since God is unchangeably perfect, whatever happens must be eternally known to God. Our tomorrow's deeds, not yet decided upon by us, are yet always or eternally present to God, for whom there is no open future. Otherwise (the argument goes), God would be "ignorant," imperfect in knowledge, waiting to observe what we may do. Hence, whatever freedom of decision we may have must be somehow reconciled with the alleged truth that our decisions bring about no additions to the divine life. Here perfect and unchanging knowledge, free from ignorance or increase, are the key terms. It can be shown that they are all seriously lacking in clarity, and that the theological tradition resolved the ambiguities in a question-begging way.

It is interesting that the idea of an unchangeable omniscience covering every detail of the world's history is not to be found definitely stated in ancient Greek philosophy (unless in Stoicism, which denied human freedom) and is rejected by Aristotle. It is not clearly affirmed in the Bible. It is inconspicuous in the philosophies of India, China, and Japan. Like the idea of omnipotence, it is largely an invention of Western thought of the Dark or Middle Ages. It still goes unchallenged in much current religious thought.

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But many courageous and competent thinkers have rejected it, including Schelling and Whitehead.

Fourth Mistake: God's Unsympathetic Goodness. God's "love" for us does not, for classical theists, mean that God sympathizes with us, is rejoiced or made happy by our joy or good fortune or grieved by our sorrow or misery. Rather God's love is like the sun's way of doing good, which benefits the myriad forms of life on earth but receives no benefits from the good it produces. Nor does the sun lose anything by its activity (we now know that this is bad astronomy). Or, God's beneficial activity is like that of an overflowing fountain that remains forever full no matter how much water comes from it, and without receiving any from outside. Thus it is not human love, even at its best, that was taken as the model for divine love but instead two inanimate phenomena of nature, fictitiously conceived at that. Bad physics and astronomy, rather than sound psychology, were the sources of the imagery.

In short, argument from an insufficiently analyzed notion of perfection and a preference for materialistic (and prescientific) rather than truly spiritual conceptions were for almost two thousand years dominant in Western theology.

Fifth Mistake: Immortality as a Career after Death. If our existence has any importance for God, or if God loves us, He-She will notit was arguedallow death to turn us into mere corpses. Hence, many have concluded, a theist must believe that we survive death in some form, and that the myths of heaven and hell have some truth in them. Here the assumption is that a mere corpse on the one hand and on the other hand survival in a new mode of heavenly or hellish existence (in which our individual consciousnesses will have new experiences not enjoyed or suffered while on earth) are the only possibilities. There is, however, as we shall see, a third possibility, quite compatible with God's love for us.

It is notable that in most of the Old Testament, for instance in the sublime Book of Job, individual immortality is not even mentioned. To this day, religious Judaism is much more cautious about affirming, and it often denies, such immortality. In the New Testament Jesus says little that seems to bear on the subject, and

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according to at least one very distinguished theologian (Reinhold Niebuhr), even that little is not decisive in excluding the third possibility just mentioned.

Sixth Mistake: Revelation as Infallible. The idea of revelation is the idea of special knowledge of God, or of religious truth, possessed by some people and transmitted by them to others. In some form or other the idea is reasonable. In all other matters people differ in their degree of skill or insight. Why not in religion? In the various sciences we acknowledge some people as experts and regard their opinions as of more value than those of the rest of us. The notion that in religion there are no individuals whose insight is any clearer, deeper, or more authentic than anyone else's is not particularly plausible. In all countries and in all historical times there have been individuals to whom multitudes have looked for guidance in religion. Buddha, Lao Tse, Confucius, Moses, Zoroaster, Shankara, Jesus, Muhammed, Joseph Smith, and Mary Baker Eddy were such individuals. New examples are to be found within the lives of many of us. Pure democracy or sheer equalitarianism in religious matters is not to be expected of our human nature. Some distinction between leaders or founders and followers or disciples seems to be our destiny. But there is a question of degree, or of qualification. To what extent, or under what conditions, are some individuals, or perhaps is some unique individual, worthy of trust in religious matters? It is in the answer to this question that mistakes can be made. Only a few years ago such a mistake sent hundreds to death, partly at their own hands, at Jonestown in British Guiana.

In religions that think of God as a conscious, purposive being, the idea of revelation can take a special form. Not simply that some are abler, wiser, than others in religion, as individuals may be in a science or in politics, but that divine wisdom has selected and so controlled a certain individual or set of individuals as to make them transmitters of the very wisdom of God to humanity. Since God is infallible (can make no mistakes), if no limitations are admitted to this conception of revelation, the distinction between fallible human beings and the infallible God tends to disappear. And so we find letters to newspaper editors in which the writer claims that his or her quotation from the Bible supporting some

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political position has the backing of "God almighty." Thus the essential principle of democracy, that none of us is divinely wise, that we all may make mistakes, is compromised.

One defense of claims to revelation is the reported occurrence of miracles. The fact, however, is that in every religion miracles are claimed. Hence the mere claim is not enough to establish the validity of the revelation. Buddha is reported to have spoken as a newborn infant. Was Shotoku Taishi, ruler-saint of seventh century Japan, shown to be of superordinary status by the fact that his death brought forth "rain from a cloudless sky"? Unless one believes (or disbelieves) all such accounts, how does one know where to stop?

What Went Wrong in Classical Theism

Two Meanings of "God Is Perfect and Unchanging."

The word 'perfect' literally means "completely made" or "finished." But God is conceived as the maker or creator of all; so what could have made God (whether or not the making was properly completed)? 'Perfect' seems a poor word to describe the divine reality.

To describe something as "not perfect" seems a criticism, it implies fault finding; worship excludes criticism and fault finding. God is to be "loved with all one's mind, heart, and soul." Such love seems to rule out the possibility of criticism. Suppose we accept this. Do we then have to admit that God cannot change? Clearly yes, insofar as change is for the worse and capacity for it objectionable, a fault or weakness. God then cannot change for the worse. The view I wish to defend admits this. But does every conceivable kind of change show a fault or weakness? Is there not change for the better? We praise people when they change in this fashion. All healthy growth is such change. We are delighted in growth in infants and children. Is there nothing to learn from this about how to conceive God?

It is easy to reply that, whereas the human offspring starts as a mere fertilized single cell and before that as an unfertilized one, God is surely not to be so conceived. However, no analogy between something human and the worshipful God is to be taken in simple-

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minded literalness. There still may be an analogy between growth as a wholly good form of change and the divine life. For it is arguable that even an infinite richness may be open to increase. The great logician Bertrand Russell expressed this opinion to me, although Russell was an atheist and had no interest in supporting my, or any, theology.

The traditional objection, already mentioned, to divine change was that if a being were already perfect, meaning that nothing better was possible, then change for the better must be impossible for the being. The unnoticed assumption here has been (for two thousand and more years) that it makes sense to think of a value so great or marvelous that it could in no sense whatever be excelled or surpassed. How do we know that this even makes sense? In my view it does not and is either a contradiction or mere nonsense.

Bishop Anselm sought to define God's perfection as "that than which nothing greater (or better) can be conceived." In other words, the divine worth is in all respects strictly unsurpassable, incapable of growth as well as of rivalry by another. The words are smoothly uttered; but do they convey a clear and consistent idea? Consider the phrase 'greatest possible number.' It, too, can be smoothly uttered, but does it say anything? It might be used to define infinity; but I am not aware of any mathematician who has thought this a good definition. There are in standard mathematics many infinities unequal to one another, but no highest infinity. "Infinite" was a favorite word among classical theists; but they cannot be said to have explored with due care its possible meanings. In any case "not finite" is a negation, and the significance of the negative depends on that of the positive which is negated. If being finite is in every sense a defect, something objectionable, then did not God in creating a world of finite things act objectionably? This seems to me to follow.

Do or do not finite things contribute something to the greatness of God? If so, then each such contribution is itself finite. Does this not mean that somehow finitude has a valid application to the divine life? Consider that, according to the tradition, God could have refrained from creating our world. Then whatever, if anything, this world contributes to the divine life would have been lacking. Moreover, if God could have created some other world instead of

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this one, God must actually lack what the other world would have contributed. If you reply that the world contributes nothing to the greatness of God, then I ask, What are we all doing, and why talk about "serving God," who, you say, gains nothing whatever from our existence?

The simple conclusion from the foregoing, and still other lines of reasoning, is that the traditional idea of divine perfection or infinity is hopelessly unclear or ambiguous and that persisting in that tradition is bound to cause increasing skepticism, confusion, and human suffering. It has long bred, and must evermore breed, atheism as a natural reaction.

It is only fair to the founders of our religious tradition to remember that their Greek philosophical teachers who inclined to think of deity as wholly unchanging also greatly exaggerated the lack of novelty in many nondivine things. The heavenly bodies were unborn and undying, and changed only by moving in circles; species were fixed forever; the Greek atomists or materialists thought that atoms changed only by altering their positions. Heraclitus, it is true, hinted at a far more basic role for change, and Plato partly followed him. Plato's World Soul, best interpreted as an aspect of God, was not purely eternal, but in its temporal dimension "a moving image of eternity." However, Aristotle, in his view of divinity at least, was more of an eternalist even than Plato, and medieval thought was influenced by Aristotle, also by Philo Judaeus and Plotinus, who likewise stressed the eternalistic side of Plato. Today science and philosophy recognize none of the absolute worldly fixities the Greeks assumednot the stars, not the species, not the atoms. It more and more appears that creative becoming is no secondary, deficient form of reality compared to being, but is, as Bergson says, "reality itself." Mere being is only an abstraction. Then is there no permanence, does "everything change"? On the contrary (see later, under topic 5), past actualities are permanent. My childhood experiences will be changelessly there in reality, just as they occurred. Change is not finally analyzable as destruction, but only as creation of novelty. The old endures, the new is added.

There are two senses in which freedom from faults, defects, or objectional features, and perfection in that sense, may be applied theologically. The divine, to be worthy of worship, must excell any

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conceivable being other than itself; it must be unsurpassable by another, exalted beyond all possible rivals. Hence all may worship God as in principle forever superior to any other being. This exaltation beyond possible rivals applies to both of the two senses of perfection that I have in mind. There are two kinds (or norms) of excellence, which differ as follows. With one kind it makes sense to talk of an absolute excellence, unsurpassable not only by another being but also by the being itself. This is what the tradition had in mind; and there was in it an important half truth. The neglected other truth, however, is that an absolute best, unsurpassable not only by others but by the being itself, is conceivable only in certain abstract aspects of value or greatness, not in fully concrete value or greatness. And God, I hold, is no mere abstraction.

The abstract aspects of value capable of an absolute maximum are goodness and wisdom, or what ought to be meant by the infallibility, righteousness, or holiness of God (one attribute variously expressed). We should conceive the divine knowledge of the world and divine decision-making about it as forever incapable of rivalry and in its infallible rightness incapable of growth. God is not first more or less wicked or foolish (or, like the lower animals, amoral, unaware of ethical principles) and then righteous and wise, but is always beyond criticism in these abstract respects, always wholly wise and good in relating to the world. It is not in such attributes that God can grow. This is so because goodness and rightness are abstract, in a sense in which some values are not.

Put a man in prison. He is not thereby necessarily forced to entertain wrong beliefs, lose virtue, or make wrong decisions. What he is forced to lose is the aesthetic richness and variety of his impressions. He cannot in the same degree continue to enjoy the beauty of the world. Similarly, a person suffering as Job did is not a happy person, but is not necessarily less virtuous than before. We can go further: ethical goodness and infallibility in knowledge have an upper or absolute limit. Whatever the world may be, God can know without error or ignorance what that world is and can respond to it, taking fully into account the actual and potential values which it involves, and thus be wholly righteous. But if the world first lacks and then acquires new harmonies, new forms of aesthetic richness, then the beauty of the world as divinely known

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increases. God would be defective in aesthetic capacity were the divine enjoyment not to increase in such a case. Aesthetic value is the most concrete form of value. Everything can contribute to and increase it. An absolute maximum of beauty is a meaningless idea. Leibniz tried to define it. Who dares to say that he succeeded? Beauty is unity in variety of experiences. Absolute unity in absolute variety has no clear meaning. Either God lacks any aesthetic sense and then we surpass God in that respect, or there is no upper limit to the divine enjoyment of the beauty of the world.

Plato viewed God as the divine artist, Charles Peirce and A. N. Whitehead termed God the poet of the world. Is the artist not to enjoy the divine work of art, the poet not to enjoy the divine poem? The Hindus attributed bliss to the supreme reality, and many Western theologians have spoken of the divine happiness, but a careful inquiry into the possibility of an absolute upper limit of happiness has not commonly been undertaken. Plato did write about "absolute beauty" but failed to give even a slightly convincing reason for thinking that the phrase has a coherent meaning.

It is not a defect of a Mozart symphony that it lacks the precise form of beauty which a Bach composition has. Aesthetic limitations are not mere defects. The most concrete form of value has no upper limit; there can always be additional values. God can enjoy all the beauty of the actual world and its predecessors, but creativity is inexhaustible and no actual creation can render further creation superfluous. Absolute beauty is a will- o-the wisp, the search for which has misled multitudes. This is the very rationale of becoming, the reason why mere static being is not enough. Any actual being is less than there could be. There could be more, let there be more. To suppose that this has no application to God is to throw away such clues to value as we have, turn out the light, and use mere words to try to illuminate the darkness that is left.

Two Meanings of "All-Powerful."

The idea of omnipotence in the sense to be criticized came about as follows: to be God, that is, worthy of worship, God must in power excel all others (and be open to criticism by none). The highest conceivable form of power must be the divine power. So far so good. Next question: what is the highest conceivable form of power? This question was scarcely

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put seriously at all, the answer was felt to be so obvious: it must be the power to determine every detail of what happens in the world. Not, notice, to significantly influence the happenings; no, rather to strictly determine, decide, their every detail. Hence it is that people still today ask, when catastrophe strikes, Why did God do this to me? What mysterious divine reason could there be? Why me? I charge theologians with responsibility for this improper and really absurd question.

Without telling themselves so, the founders of the theological tradition were accepting and applying to deity the tyrant ideal of power. "I decide and determine everything, you (and your friends and enemies) merely do what I determine you (and them) to do. Your decision is simply mine for you. You only think you decide: in reality the decision is mine."

Since the theologians were bright people we must not oversimplify. They half-realized they were in trouble. Like many a politician, they indulged in double-talk to hide their mistake even from themselves. They knew they had to define sin as freely deciding to do evil or the lesser good, and as disobeying the will of God. How could one disobey an omnipotent will? There were two devices. One was to say that God does not decide to bring about a sinful act; rather, God decides not to prevent it. God "permits" sin to take place. Taking advantage of this decision, the sinner does his deed. Yet stop! Remember that God is supposed to decide exactly what happens in the world. If someone murders me, God has decided there shall be precisely that murderous action. So it turns out that "permits" has here a meaning it ordinarily does not have. Ordinarily, when X gives Y permission to do such and such, there are at least details in the actual doing that are not specified by X (and could not be specified, since human language can give only outlines, not full details, of concrete occurrences). But omnipotence is defined as power to absolutely determine what happens. I have Thomas Aquinas especially in mind here. God gives a creature permission to perform act A, where A is no mere outline but is the act itself in its full concreteness. So nothing at all is left for the creature to decide? What then is left of creaturely freedom?

The most famous of all the scholastics finds the answer, and this is the second of the two devices referred to above. God decides

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that the creature shall perform act A, but the divine decision is that nevertheless the act shall be performed "freely." Don't laugh, the saintly theologian is serious. Serious, but engaging in double-talk. It is determined exactly what the creature will do, but determined that he or she will do it freely. As the gangsters sometimes say, after specifying what is to be done, "You are going to like it"in other words, to do it with a will. If this is not the despot's ideal of power, what is?

What, let us ask again, is the highest conceivable form of power? Is it the despot's, magnified to infinity, and by hook or crook somehow reconciled with "benevolence," also magnified to infinity? This seems to have been the (partly unconscious) decision of theologians. Is there no better way? Of course there is.

After all, the New Testament analogyfound also in Greek religionsfor deity is the parental role, except that in those days of unchallenged male chauvinism it had to be the father role. What is the ideal parental role? Is it that every detail is to be decided by the parent? The question answers itself. The ideal is that the child shall more and more decide its own behavior as its intelligence grows. Wise parents do not try to determine everything, even for the infant, must less for the half-matured or fully matured offspring. Those who do not understand this, and their victims, are among the ones who write agonized letters to Ann Landers. In trying to conceive God, are we to forget everything we know about values? To read some philosophers or theologians it almost seems so.

If the parent does not decide everything, there will be some risk of conflict and frustration in the result. The children are not infallibly wise and good. And indeed, as we shall argue later, even divine wisdom cannot completely foresee (or timelessly know) what others will decide. Life simply is a process of decision making, which means that risk is inherent in life itself. Not even God could make it otherwise. A world without risks is not conceivable. At best it would be a totally dead world, with neither good nor evil.

Is it the highest ideal of power to rule over puppets who are permitted to think they make decisions but who are really made by another to do exactly what they do? For twenty centuries we have had theologians who seem to say yes to this question.

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Some theologians have said that, while God could determine everything, yet out of appreciation for the value of having free creatures, God chooses to create human beings to whom a certain freedom is granted. When things go badly, it is because these special creatures make ill use of the freedom granted them. As a solution of the problem of evil, this is perhaps better than the nothing that theorists of religion have mostly given us. But it is not good enough. Many ills cannot plausibly be attributed to human freedom. Diseases no doubt are made worse and more frequent by people's not taking care of themselves, not exercising due care in handling food, and so forth. But surely they are not caused only by such misdoings. Human freedom does not cause all the suffering that animals undergo, partly from hunger, partly from wounds inflicted by sexual rivals or predators, also from diseases, parasites, and other causes not controlled by human beings.

There is only one solution of the problem of evil ''worth writing home about." It uses the idea of freedom, but generalizes it. Why suppose that only people make decisions? People are much more conscious of the process of decision making than the other animals need be supposed to be; but when it comes to that, how conscious is an infant in determining its activities? If chimpanzees have no freedom, how much freedom has an infant, which by every test that seems applicable is much less intelligent than an adult chimpanzee? (One would never guess this fact from what "pro-lifers" say about a fetus being without qualification a person, so loose is their criterion for personality.)

There are many lines of reasoning that support the conclusion to which theology has been tending for about a century now, which is that our having at least some freedom is not an absolute exception to an otherwise total lack of freedom in nature, but a special, intensified, magnified form of a general principle pervasive of reality, down to the very atoms and still farther. Current physics does not contradict this, as many physicists admit. When will the general culture at least begin to see the theological bearings of this fact?

In philosophy of religion there is news, but newspapers know nothing of this. Nay more, periodicals of general interest know nothing of it. We have a population that inclines, in the majority, to be religious, but that shies away from any attempt at rational

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discussion of religious issues. This is an example of leveling down, rather than leveling up, democracy. People keep implying philosophical doctrines (why has God done this to me?) which philosophy of religion has largely outgrown, as also have the theologies which make some effort to be literate in philosophy and science.

Those who stand deep in the classical tradition are likely to object to the new theology that it fails to acknowledge "the sovereignty of God." To them we may reply, "Are we to worship the Heavenly Father of Jesus (or the Holy Merciful One of the Psalmist or Isaiah),or to worship a heavenly king, that is, a cosmic despot?" These are incompatible ideals; candid thinkers should choose and not pretend to be faithful to both. As Whitehead said, "They gave unto God the properties that belonged unto Caesar." Our diminished awe of kings and emperors makes it easier for us than for our ancestors to look elsewhere for our model of the divine nature. "Divine sovereignty" sounds to some of us like a confession, an admission that it is sheer power, not unstinted love that one most admires.

From childhood I learned to worship divine love. God's power simply is the appeal of unsurpassable love. Again Whitehead put it well: "God's power is the worship he inspires." It is not that we hear Zeus's fearful thunderbolt, see the lightning, and fall down at the sight of such power. No, we feel the divine beauty and majesty, and cannot but respond accordingly. Even the other animals feel it; what they cannot, and we can, do is to think it. Whitehead again: God leads the world by the "majesty" of the divine vision of each creature and its place in the world. God "shares with each actual entity its actual (past) world." "God is the fellow sufferer who understands."

Whitehead read in Plato and Aristotle the wonderfully enlightened doctrine that it is the divine beauty that moves the world. And what is the divine beauty, beyond all other beauties? A thousand voices, alas not quite audible in ancient Greece, have said it; but we still scarcely believe, much less understand, these voices: the beauty beyond all others is the beauty of love, that with which life has a meaning, without which it does not. The Greeks, however, had an argument, a subtly fallacious one, for denying that love is the ultimate principle. Love implies, they saw, that one fails to

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have in oneself all possible value and hence looks to another for additional value. Overlooked was the questionbegging assumption that it even makes sense to "have in oneself all possible value," as though value is something that could be exhaustively actualized in one being all by itself. Were that possible, of course its possessor would not need another to love but would exist in solitary glory, incapable of enhancement in any way. And thus the one clue we have to life's meaning is cast away in favor of a merely verbal ideal of the exhaustive realization of possible good.

The novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder ends his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey with the statement, "Love is the only meaning." In a later work, the play The Alcestiad, Wilder says, "Love is not the meaning. It is the sign that there is a meaning." In context both statements are valid. The love which, in the play, is not the meaning is the love of one human individual for another of the opposite sex. Certainly this is not the meaning, and certainly also it is, or can be, a sign that there is a meaning beyond the love in question. But a meaning beyond all love, human or otherwisethat is a will-o-the-wisp. Higher than one form of love is only a superior form. Grasp of this truth can be found in Ancient Egypt (Ikhnaton), India, China, and Palestine. In Ancient Greece it was not quite seen, and in Medieval Europe there was confusion between the Greek worship of mere eternity or mere "perfection" and the Palestinian worship of unstinted love.

Since any possible world, other than an utterly dead one (if that even makes sense, and some of us doubt it), must involve a multiplicity of individuals each making its own decisions, it follows (though for two thousand years it was not considered proper to say so) that there is an aspect of real chance in what happens. Aristotle and Epicurus knew this, and Plato implied it. But classical theism, supported by the Stoics among the Greeks, held that chance is merely a word for our ignorance of the ways of God. And classical science, until a few generations ago, inclined to hold that even apart from God, whatever happens is determined to happen by the situation in which it happens. The past, whether with or without God but including the laws of nature, determines what happens. The past, with or without God, is omnipotent, or has alldetermining power. Our notion of deciding is illusory; heredity

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and environment decide for us. The psychologist Skinner says so. He may or may not believe in God; what is clear is that he does not believe in freedom, except so far as merely doing what we "like" to do constitutes freedom.

Byron wrote, as last line to his "Sonnet on Chillon," "For they appeal from tyranny to God." But how is it if God is the supreme, however benevolent, tyrant? Can we worship a God so devoid of generosity as to deny us a share, however humble, in determining the details of the world, as minor participants in the creative process that is reality?

To fully clarify our case against "omnipotence" we must show how the idea of freedom implies chance. Agent X decides to perform act A, agent Y independently decides to perform act B. So far as both succeed, what happens is the combination AB. Did X decide that AB should happen? No. Did Y decide the combination? No. Did any agent decide it? No. Did God, as supreme agent, decide it? No, unless "decide" stands for sheer illusion in at least one of its applications to God and the creatures. The word 'chance,' meaning "not decided by any agent, and not fully determined by the past," is the implication of the genuine idea of free or creative decision making'creative' meaning, adding to the definiteness of the world, settling something previously unsettled, partly undefined or indeterminate. The combination AB, in the case supposed, was not made to happen by any intention of a single agent but by the chance combination of two intentions. Nor was it made to happen by the past; this is the idea of causal laws that physics is getting rid of and that some philosophers long ago gave good reasons for rejecting.

The new idea is that causal order is not absolute but statistical. It admits an element of chance or randomness in nature. Many of the leading physicists of recent times are quite explicit about this. But they were preceded in principle by some great Greek philosophers, some French philosophers of modern times, and the three most distinguished of purely American philosophers, Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey. All events are "caused," if that means that they had necessary conditions in the past, conditions without which they could not have happened, however, what is technically termed "sufficient condition," that which fully deter -

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mines what happens, requires qualification. Where there is little freedom, as an inanimate nature, there are often conditions sufficient to determine approximately what happens, and for most purposes this is all we need to consider. Where there is much freedom, as in the behavior of higher, including human, animals, there are still necessary conditions in the past, but sufficient past conditions only for a considerable range of possibilities within which each decision maker finally determines what precisely and concretely happens at the moment in the agent's own mind, that is, what decision is made. Even God, as the French Catholic philosopher Lequier said more than a century ago, waits to see what the individual decides. "Thou hast created me creator of myself." Many decades later Whitehead, also a believer in God, independently put the point with the phrase "the self-created creature"; and the atheist Sartre in France wrote of human consciousness as it own cause, causa sui.

Determinists claim that what makes us free is that our "character" as already formed, plus each new situation, determines our decisions. So then the child was determined by the character already formed in its infant past and by the surrounding world, and this character by the preceding fetus and world, and that by the fertilized egg? What kind of freedom is that? By what magic do people miss the fact they are misusing words? Skinner is right; once accept determinism and all talk of freedom is double-talk. The word 'voluntary' (liking it) is good enough for the determinist's freedom; why not stick to it, without trying to borrow the prestige of the glorious word 'freedom'? One's past character is now a mere fact, part of the settled world, almost like someone else's past character. One may be capable of creating a partly new and better character by using the genuine freedom, some of which one has already long had but perhaps has too little or too ill made use of.

Our rejection of omnipotence will be attacked by the charge, "So you dare to limit the power of God?" Not so, I impose no such limit if this means, as it seems to imply, that God's power fails to measure up to some genuine ideal. All I have said is that omnipotence as usually conceived is a false or indeed absurd ideal, which in truth limits God, denies to him any world worth talking about: a world of living, that is to say, significantly decision- making,

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agents. It is the tradition which did indeed terribly limit divine power, the power to foster creativity even in the least of the creatures.

No worse falsehood was ever perpetrated than the traditional concept of omnipotence. It is a piece of unconscious blasphemy, condemning God to a dead world, probably not distinguishable from no world at all.

The root of evil, suffering, misfortune, wickedness, is the same as the root of all good, joy, happiness, and that is freedom, decision making. If, by a combination of good management and good luck, X and Y harmonize in their decisions, the AB they bring about may be good and happy; if not, not. To attribute all good to good luck, or all to good management, is equally erroneous. Life is not and cannot be other than a mixture of the two. God's good management is the explanation of there being a cosmic order that limits the scope of freedom and hence of chancelimits, but does not reduce to zero. With too much freedom, with nothing like laws of nature (which, some of us believe, are divinely decided and sustained), there could be only meaningless chaos; with too little, there could be only such good as there may be in atoms and molecules by themselves, apart from all higher forms. With no creaturely freedom at all, there could not even be that, but at most God alone, making divine decisionsabout what? It is the existence of many decision makers that produces everything, whether good or ill. It is the existence of God that makes it possible for the innumerable decisions to add up to a coherent and basically good world where opportunities justify the risks. Without freedom, no risksand no opportunities.

Nothing essential in the foregoing is my sheer invention. I am summing up and making somewhat more explicit what a number of great writers have been trying to communicate for several centuries, or at least and especially during the last one hundred and fifty years.

The medieval doctrine of God's power was in fact virtually refuted i n its own time, by an Islamic scientist, philosopher, and poet Omar Khayyam, freely butas an Arabic scholar has shownessentially correctly translated by the superb English scholar-poet Edward Fitzgerald. As so often happens, the world did not fully

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grasp what had happened in the publication of his poem. It could be only a question of time until a new effort would have to be made to find a better way of interpreting the divine power.

We are . . .
But Helpless pieces of the Game He Plays
Upon this Checker-board of Nights and Days;
Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays. (Verse 69)

Oh Thou, who didst with pifall and with gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with Predestined Evil round
Enmesh, and then impute my Fall to Sin. (Verse 80)

The theology Omar knew was Islamic; but Christianity at the time (eleventh century) was at best ambiguous on the issue of creaturely freedom that Omar was discussing. No theologian was ever more committed to the concept of omnipotence that I, like Omar, am criticizing than the Christian Jonathan Edwards. And he thought, with considerable justification, that he represented the tradition.

Of course Omar's comparison of a conscious animal with "pieces" in a game is nonsensical. But then so is the theology which supposes that such an animal can be entirely preprogrammed, or that its decisions can simply duplicate those made for it by another decision maker. Isaiah Berlin reports J. S. Austin as saying that while many talk about determinism, no one really believes it, "as we all believe that we shall die." This latter belief we take into account in our decision making (not enough, to be sure, but still we do take it into account). In contrast, it is impossible to take determinism into account, for it has no consistent practical meaning. Before I decide I may claim to know that my decision will be fully determined, whether by heredity and environment, or by God, but in what way can my decision take this alleged knowledge into account? After the decision I can say, See what I was preprogrammed to decide! But this in no way or degree helped me to make the decision. It was an idle retrospective application of a useless doctrine. The application in decision making is always too late.

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The pieces on the chessboard are not decision makers, the reason being that they are not true singularities but crowds of singularities (molecules or the like). What such crowds "do" is shorthand for what its members do; they are the decision makers. And even classical physics over a century ago began to give up the attempt to conceive molecules as preprogrammed individually. Clerk Maxwell and C. S. Peirce took this to cast doubt on the deterministic idea, but they were geniuses; even after quantum theory there are those who still dream of a deterministic science. Einstein was perhaps the last genius to do this.

I feel that I ought to inform the reader, if he or she is not a philosopher, that today many philosophers defend the doctrine called "compatibilism," holding that determinism is compatible with human freedom. The reason they can do so is that they think of deciding merely as a psychological process of considering various ways of acting with the motives or reasons favoring or disfavoring the ways, and, without any sense of being constrained by anyone, adopting one of the ways. They do not seriously ask what objective significance the process has in the cosmos, what it does to the causal structure of the world. Moreover they are rather vague as to what the causal structure might really be.

Karl Popper says that when a physicist speaks of determinism he has a fairly precise idea of what he is talking about, but when a psychologist or philosopher talks about it "all precision vanishes." Peirce made similar charges. The causal structure of the world was in physics taken to be such that from the state of the whole universe (or an isolated system in it) in two successive moments all earlier and all later states follow exactly, given the natural laws really obtaining. Only ignorance of the previous successions of states and the laws would then explain our uncertainty about future states. But this is all talk about fairyland. We could not conceivably not be in partial ignorance, at least about previous states, if not also about the laws. Maxwell saw this over a century ago and remarked that since only God could possibly have the knowledge in question, and it is not the business of physics to discuss theological questions, determinism was not a proper doctrine of physics.

Maxwell probably did not knowfew did in his timethat there are theologies which deny even to God knowledge of laws implying

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determinism, not because of divine limitations but because such laws describe no coherently conceivable world. They leave no room for genuine individuality, that is, for truly individual actions; and without individuals there are also no crowds or aggregates. To be is to act; to be individual is to act individually, that is, as not fully determined by another individual or set of individuals, past or eternal, according to strict law. From the universal to the fully individual there can be no deduction, no necessity. Laws are universals. If they have any role in reality it can only be to limit individual actions without fully determining them. They do forbid individuals to act in certain ways. This is true of many legal laws and moral principles. The principle of kindness does not tell us what in particular to do, but forbids whole classes of unkind actions. The "motives" that psychological determinism says determine actions are always more or less universal. We want to be "helpful" to someone we like, but no abstract idea like "helpful" can be as particular as what we actually do. Always finer decisions are left open by motives, ideals, or laws.

The idea of God fully determining, without constraining, our decisions can appeal to certain analogies. There is the hypnotic analogy. I take an actual case. The hypnotist says, "You will (later on) open the window." It is a cold day, the room is not in the least overwarm. You do open the window, giving some ingenious reasons for this. Has the hypnotist preprogrammed a particular piece of decision making? Not really. He has limited the options, at least as a matter of probabilities. (There is no proof that opening the window was certain to happen; there might have been a slight probability of its not happening.) But there are countless particular, subtly differing ways of opening a window. And those ingenious reasons for an odd action were not preprogrammed at all, so far as the data can prove. They were the real decisions, along with the exact timing, eact motions of the arm, and the like.

Again we can put pressure on people, or exert charm or more or less subtle suggestions, to get people to do what we want them, or think they ought, to do. But the actions themselves are always more particular than the wanting, or the idea of moral obligation.

There is no analogy that unambiguously supports determinism. It is a leap in the dark. No matter how brilliant a hypnotist, no

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matter how charming or subtly suggestive, God may be, the creature's concrete, fully definite decision has to be made by it, not by God. Whitehead's terminology is the most exact in history, by a good margin, to express the point. The creature must "prehend" God's "initial subjective aim" proposed to it. The proposed aim is in terms of universals called by Whitehead "eternal objects"my own view does not eternalize universals to the extent Whitehead doesbut the final subjective aim, which is the creature's fully particular decision, cannot follow or be uniquely specified by the initial subjective aim, which is really an outline, not an exact qualitative duplicate of the final aim.

Peirce, Bergson, and Whitehead realize, as may do not, that the ultimate freedom is not in "behavior" but in experience, just how that particular experience prehends its past, including in that past God's decision, already made, for the particular occasion. No matter what motives the past, including me as past, and other actualities offer me-now, I-now must still decide the precise concrete way in which I respond to this offering, just what relative prominence this or that factor receives in my experience of it. "The many become one and are increased by one." My past is a many of events or experiences, including my previous experiences; what is called my character as already formed is simply an aspect of the past history of experiences constituting a sequence of the type that used to be called one's stream of consciousness, the members of this stream having special prehensive relations to previous members and to that complicated society of societies of subhuman actualities making up what is called one's body. (More of this in Chapter 2.)

When determinists talk about freedom as action determined by one's own character, they are blurring together several factors which need distinguishing (illustrating Popper's lack of precision in nonphysicists). If the character in question is your or my present quality as experiencer, that and the present experience are simply two aspects of one actuality. Self-determination in that sense does not imply determinism; but, on the contrary, it means that my character as definite before the decision does not determine but only influences (via present prehension) the present character, decision, or experience.

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The question of freedom as a merely psychological process, taken in abstraction from cosmology, is a rather trivial matter. The significance of freedom is in its role in the causal structure of the world. We face certain theoretical options. Either all that exists necessarily exists, or there is contingency. Spinoza and the Stoics explored the first option and it may well be left to them. (Few logicians see any merit in that way of viewing things.) If there is contingency, then either the transition from what could be to what is takes place by 'freedom', 'spontaneity', 'creativity', three words at least two of which are used by a number of thinkers (Bergson, Berdyaev, Peirce, and others), also 'decision' (Whitehead's favorite word here), or the transition does not take place by freedom but is just pure chance. It is, it might not be, c'est tout. This amounts to giving up any effort to throw light on contingency by any positive aspect of experience. Decision (on more or less conscious levels) we seem to experience. If chance or contingency are merely decision viewed from without or behavioristically, and as not fully determined by the past, we have explained a negation by something positive, which is pure gain as I see it.

Supposing that freedom or decision is the positive secret of contingency, that is, lack of necessity, we ask, ''Whose freedom, who or what is the decision maker? Is it God, deciding for all?" Then, while God's decision is contingent, it might, it seems, leave no further contingency for any other being. All might in their supposed decisions necessarily duplicate their portions of the one Divine Decision. And then natural laws might, it seems, be more than approximate or merely statistical. For centuries thinkers leaned toward this theory more or less strongly. It was a bizarre idea. God, being supremely free, decides to have creatures not in the least free so far as this means resolving open options. For the One Decision has closed them, once for all, in eternity. Bizarre, bizarre!

The remaining theoretical option is that God, being supremely free, decides for creatures that are less than supremely, but still somewhat, free. Thus no unqualified determinism. By this sacrifice (what really is lost by it?) we gainI am tempted to sayeverything. A "world" now means an ordered, but not absolutely ordered, system of decision makers, whose decisions will have some chance aspects, with their mixtures of risks and opportunities. A world,

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any world, will be exciting, since in it agents really decide things every moment that previously (or from any purely eternal standpoint) were not decided. In any world, at every moment, even God encounters novelties, so that 'becoming' (in total abstraction from which no being can be anything but an empty cipher) applies even to God. In such a world there will be conflicts and frustrations. There is no longer the classical problem of evil. The question now is only, Is there not too much freedom, too great risk of evil, to be justified by the opportunities also open to the freedom? Thus the question becomes one of degree, and then the ancient defence, we are not wise like God and probably not in a position to secondguess divine decisions, becomes at least far stronger than it could be under the old idea of all-determining power (dealing only with the powerless). And at least we are no longer living in fairyland. We can recognize our world as a specimen of what has been abstractly described.

An interesting special case of the omnipotence problem is Abraham Lincoln's thought about it during the Civil War. "The will of God prevails," he said, and derived from this, though with some hesitation, that the war would last exactly as long as God willed it to last, since God, by "working in quiet" on the minds of men could determine it to end at any time. It is not clear just how far Lincoln went toward absolute theological determinism. Perhaps he thought that God made definite decisions only about fairly largescale matters like the ending of a war. He suggested that a long war might mean God's will that the monstrous crime of slavery should be adequately punished. Yet "God's purposes are not our purposes." Lincoln also speaks about "the attributes we attribute to God," presumably referring especially to power and goodness. Like many theologians he seems somewhat more willing to confess our possible ignorance of God's goodness than of his power. Or is he about equally modest in both respects? Surely, unless we are to worship power more than goodness, it is at least as important that we should have a meaning applicable to God for 'goodness' as for 'power'; and what does ''God is good" mean if the kind of purpose it implies is hopelessly opaque to us?

What use could Lincoln really be making of his view that God would determine the exact length of the war? How would it illu-

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minate his own actions? Consider, too, that at the end of the war some Northerners would be much concerned to see to it that the South suffered as its rebellion made it "deserve" to suffer. If a long war occurred in order, in the divine judgment, to adequately punish the South (or the South and the North), this would not tell Northerners anything about what to do to prolong or shorten the war. For, only after the end came could one know what God willed in the matter. And if, after the end, one concluded that God had evidently willed the South's suffering to end, this would really be illogical, since other ways to make the South suffer than in war would be quite possible. So Lincoln's forgiveness of the South might be against the will of God? Ah, but wait and see! The will of God prevails. Then was the assassination divinely willed so that the punishment of the South could continue? Where do we stop in this second-guessing of God?

The only livable doctrine of divine power is that it influences all that happens but determines nothing in its concrete particularity. "Knowing" afterwards exactly what God has willed to happen is useless. We can, I believe, know the general principle of God's purpose. It is the beauty of the world (or the harmonious happiness of the creatures), a beauty of which every creature enjoys its own glimpses and to which it makes its unique contributions, but each created stage of which only God enjoys adequately, everlastingly, and as a whole, once it has been created.

Lincoln was a noble soul, supremely great, and he made no bad use of the theology he knew. But he could perhaps have gained something from a better theology. Still more could many souls, less wise and strong, gain what they sorely lack if they were spared useless riddles about divine power and could focus on the inspiration of seeing life as, even in its least moments, permanent contributions to the stores of beauty available selectively and partially to future moments and inclusively and fully to God. Also of believing in God as ideally powerfulin whatever sense this is compatible with having free creatures whose satisfactions and dissatisfactions are divinely participated in God, who can hurt no one without vicariously suffering Him-Her-self, and can gratify no one without vicariously enjoying this gratification. So God's purpose is the welfare of the

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creatures as the means, finally, to increase the divine happiness, whose value is no absolute maximum but an ever-enriched infinity.

As a final verbal clarification, I remark that if by 'all-powerful' we mean that God has the highest conceivable form of power and that this power extends to all things not as, with us, being confined to a tiny corner of the cosmos and if this is what the word 'omnipotent' can be understood to mean, then yes, God is omnipotent. But the word has been so fearfully misdefined, and has so catastrophically misled so many thinkers, that I incline to say that the word itself had better be dropped. God has power uniquely excellent in quality and scope, in no respect inferior to any coherently conceivable power. In power, as in all properties, God is exalted beyond legitimate criticism or fault finding. In this power I believe. But it is not power to have totally unfree or "absolutely controlled" creatures. For that is nonsense.

Two Meanings of "All-Knowing."

The word 'omniscient' seems somewhat less badly tarnished by its historical usage than 'omnipotent.' Whereas having all power (of decision making) would be a monopoly, implying that the creatures had no such power, having all knowledge has no monopolistic implications. Only one agent can genuinely make a certain concrete decision; in contrast, many agents can know one and the same truth, e.g., that two and three is five, or that Julius Caesar was assassinated by Brutus. Hence that God knows all truth is quite compatible with you or your brother knowing many truths.

With omniscience there is one difficulty: either knowing about the future differs essentially from knowing about the past, and hence even God knows our past decisions in one way and knows about the future of our decision making in another way, or else it is merely our human weakness that for us the future is partly indefinite, a matter of what may or may not be, whereas God, exalted altogether beyond such a "limitation," sees the future as completely definite. If God is to be thought in every respect immutable it is this second option that must be taken; but have we any other reason for rejecting the old Socinian proposition that even the highest conceivable form of knowledge is of the past-and-definite as past-and-definite and of the future and partly indefinite

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as future and partly indefinite? Otherwise would not God be "knowing" the future as what it is not, that is, knowing falsely? As we have seen, the arguments for the complete unchangeability of God are fallacious; hence, the arguments for growth in God's knowledge, as the creative process produces new realities to know, are sound. Thus as Fechner, Berdyaev, Tillich, and, probably independently, Whitehead held (and Berdyaev most neatly formulated), our existence from moment to moment "enriches the divine life." And this is the ultimate meaning of our existence.

Is God all-knowing? Yes, in the Socinian sense. Never has a great intellectual discovery passed with less notice by the world than the Socinian discovery of the proper meaning of omniscience. To this day works of reference fail to tell us about this.

God's Love as Divine Sympathy, Feeling of Others' Feelings.

Throughout the Christian centuries there have been a few theologians who have rejected the conception of God as pure intellect or will, as knowing our feelings but feeling nothing, willing our good but not in any intelligible sense caring about our pleasures or sufferings. Most theologians rejected feeling as a divine attribute. For them it connoted weakness. True, the Church father Origen said that God felt compassion for humanity and therefore sent the Son as Redeemer. But Origen did not systematically develop the point into a significant philosophical doctrine. In general God was not thought of as sharing our griefs and joys. It was not clear at all that the divine knowledge of our feelings was itself feeling. Fechner, the nineteenth-century psychologist, was perhaps the first great exception to this tradition. The nonconformist English theologian A. E. Garvie was a more recent one. He wrote of the "omnipatience" of God, meaning the divine sympathy with our experiences.

The honor of presenting a worked-out technical philosophical system in which the idea of divine sympathy has its natural place goes to Whitehead, with Fechner the principal anticipator. According to Whitehead, the basic relationship in reality is "prehension," which in the most concrete form (called "physical prehension") is defined as "feeling of feeling,'' meaning the manner in which one subject feels the feelings of one or more other subjects. In other words, 'sympathy' in the most literal sense. And Whitehead

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used this word also. Moreover, God is said to know the world by physical prehensions, in other words by feeling the feelings of all the subjects composing that world.

In this philosophy it is not mere benevolence that constitutes the divine nature, it is love in the proper sense. Cruelty to other creatures, or to oneself, means contributing to vicarious divine suffering. Hence, of course we should love our fellows as we love ourselves, for the final significance of their joy or sorrow is the same as the final significance of our joy or sorrow, that they will be felt by God. Just so did Fechner see the matter. But the world paid no attention, as it had paid no attention to the Socinian idea of divine knowledge. Merely being right is not enough to impress the busy world, always wrapped up in its more or less unconscious preconceptions. To Whitehead some attention has been paid, but how little compared to the fuss made about Einstein! As Whitehead once remarked to me, Einstein had "all the marks of a great man." Nevertheless, the reason for his fame was not merely the greatness of his discoveries. It was also the fact that they had applications to our physical manipulations of nature, vast industrial and military implications. Theological discoveries are less obvious in their importance.

In fairness to the classical theologians, one thing needs to be said. They realized, quite rightly, that in thinking about God we are likely to apply to deity adjectives that are appropriate enough when applied to ourselves but are unworthy of application to the being exalted above all others, actual or conceivable, and because of this exalted status worthy of being worshiped. To use the word generally employed here, we must in theology beware of anthropomorphism, reading our own human traits into our portrait of deity. When theologians read about Jehovah being "angry," they said, "Surely God is above such emotions as anger, along with those of envy, jealousy, and the like!" All these indications of human weakness in the Biblical account of deity were set aside as concessions to the ignorance or innocence of ordinary people, incapable of the refinements of scholarship or philosophy. Human beings are theologically said to be "images of God"; but the danger of underestimating the vast difference between creatures and Creator is obvious. What seems so strange in the traditional, largely Greek,

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conception of God adopted in the Dark Ages and kept intact through the Middle Ages and beyond is partly explained by the vigorous andif kept within its proper limitsjustified effort to keep clear of anthropomorphic tarnishing of the description of God. Certainly, a being totally and in every respect immmutable and open to no increase in value is extremely different from ourselves; however, it is far from clear that anything is left of the "image of God" that is supposed to be in us, and that indeed must be in us if we are to have any idea of God.

What it comes to is that in retreating from popular anthropomorphism classical theology fell backward into an opposite error. Intent on not exaggerating the likeness of the divine and the human, they did away with it altogether, if one takes their statements literally. Using the word 'love', they emptied if of its most essential kernel, the element of sympathy, of the feeling of others' feelings. It became mere beneficience, totally unmoved (to use their own word) by the sufferings or joys of the creatures. Who wants a friend who loves only in that sense? A heartless benefit machine is less than a friend.

If anyone has been more learned in medieval thought than the Jewish scholar Harry Wolfson I have not learned his name. Wolfson's considered judgment was that the scholastic theology utterly failed to express the Biblical idea of God. Many Christian scholars, including the father of the author of this book, have agreed with Wolfson. Many more-or-less skeptical or agnostic philosophers have also agreed with the judgment. A well-meaning attempt to purify theology of anthropomorphism purified it of any genuine, consistent meaning at all. After all, the problem of anthropomorphism is not so simple that only one kind of mistake can be made in dealing with it. If an anthropomorphic idea is one that expresses our human nature, in what sense can we have a nonanthropomorphic idea? Said Emerson, "All of the thoughts of a turtle are turtle." Is it any less true that all of a human being's thoughts are human?

Human beings, unlike turtles, have not only ideas but ideas about ideas. We can make of abstractions things to talk about. If our ideas are all human, we are the ones who can say that this is so. Can the turtle say or in any way think the corresponding thought about itself? Probably not. What is the moral? Charles Peirce

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discussed the matter and came to the conclusion that human thought has no alternative to thinking in terms of partial analogies between human nature and nonhuman things.

Consider: a physicist formulates a system of concepts, mathematically definite, and observes nature to see if there is a correspondence between this system and predictable results of experiments. He is testing an analogy between his thinking and what goes on in nature. What the physicist does not do is to even consider the possibility of any analogy, close or remote, between his emotions and what goes on in nature. This does not prove that there are nothing like emotions in nature. At most it proves only that for the purpose of predicting observable, measurable changes in inanimate parts of nature, consideration of how things may or may not feel is superfluous or unhelpful.

In biology, and above all in psychology, however, the question of nonhuman emotions is bound to arise. Only the future will tell how far down the scale of animals toward one- celled organisms and perhaps farther the question can be pursued with scientifically significant results. At present only some philosophers and a few scientists in unofficial moments are paying much attention to the question. What this proves is at most only that the time is not yet ripe for a determined assault on the problem. It is a postponed topic on the agenda. (More of this in the next chapter.)

Among nonhuman things to be dealt with by thought that itself remains human, there are many gradations of difference from our human nature. The difference admits two opposite extremes. There is the extremely subhuman: how does an atom, a particle (or "wavicle"), differ from a human being? Obviously the difference is so vast as to stagger the imagination. At the opposite extreme, how does the uttermost form of the superhuman, the divine, differ from a human being? Here too the analogy seems extended to the breaking point. Indeed the difference is here incomparably greater. For deity is not merely vastly different from ourselves, the difference is more than quantitative or a difference of degree. God alone is conceived as unborn and undying, without possible beginning or termination of existence. Classical theists were impressed, and rightly so, by the radical nature of this distinction from all ordinary things. Yet they forgot that human thinking, even about God, cannot cut

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its human root. They made God, not an exalted being, but an empty absurdity, a love which is simply not love, a purpose which is no purpose, a will which is no will, a knowledge which is no knowledge. We are forced to make a new beginning, unprecedented except for a few exceptional and neglected figures, Socinus, Fechner, and some others.

Once more let us try to be fair. The theologians I am criticizing knew that they were skating on thin ice. So they skated warily around what seemed the thinnest places. Thus they said, "We know only what God is not, we do not know what God is positively." But of course they had to retreat now and then from complete consistency with this merely negative position. Between good and bad they said that God is good. This goodness had to be something humanly intelligible to some degree. Otherwise why worship God? As F. H. Bradley sarcastically suggested we cannot worship the Unknowable on the ground that "we do not know what the devil it may be. Being too was attributed to God, with some such proviso as "being itself," or ens a se, self-sufficient being, self- existing being. Also God was regarded as causing or creating the world, so creative action was positively asserted.

Moreover, it is not correct to regard negative statements as necessarily more modest or safe than positive ones. To assert that that is no change in any respect or of any kind in Godas it were, to forbid God to changeis to imply: either there is no essentially good kind of change, the lack of which would be a defect, or else God suffers from this defect. Do we know that there is no essentially good kind of change, lack of which would be a defect? I say that we do not know this. If we know anything in these matters, we know that there is an essentially good kind of change, which is an increase in the aesthetic richness of one's knowledge, as the aesthetic richness of what exists to be known increases. And the idea of an absolute maximum of aesthetic richness is contradictory or meaningless. Hence no world that God knew could actualize for him all possible aesthetic value. The conclusion is that the alleged modesty of "the negative way" in theology was definitely overrated. It was a species of presumption after all.

Paul Tillich's assertion that all statements about God are merely "symbolic" is a variant of the negative way in theology. He does

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qualify it by saying that God is literally Being Itself. That this has a good meaning is easily seen from the consideration that if God infallibly knows all truth, then to be is to be-for-God (as known to Him- Her). But, alas, Tillich deduces from this that "God is not a being," an individual. Is God then a mere universal, an empty abstraction? Overlooked by Tillich is the consideration that, although 'a being' suggests one being among others like it, God's being an individual does not have to mean this. God can be, not simply a being, but the being, essential to all, strictly unique in status. For this being is universally relevant, the Subject to whom all individuals are infallibly known objects, and upon whom all individuals depend.

Two Meanings of "Immortality."

One of the penalties of being the freely thinking animals that we are is that, whereas the other animals probably do not consciously know that they are fated to die, we do know it. If "All's well that ends well" is a sound principle, what are we to make of the apparent facts that a human life ends in death and that being dead seems as far as possible from being well? Confronted with this riddle, human beings everywhere have tended to tell themselves tall stories about what being dead is really like. Only the ancient Jews and some of the ancient Greeks were nearly free from this flight from what, for all we really know, is the human condition. In the sublime Book of Job, where the human destiny is reflected upon with great depth and nobility, there is not a word about survival of death. Job worships God, not because God will grant him bliss beyond the grave, but simply because God is worshipful, because worship is the appropriate response to the supreme Creative and Receptive Spirit of the cosmos. A rather different attitude is found in Dante's powerful, beautiful poem splendid literature, but is it sound theology?

As usual, there are ambiguities in the statement of the problem. Life "ends in death" has more than one possible meaning. If "ends in" means "becomes nothing but," then the statement is an absurdity. A conscious state of life cannot become an unconscious state of being dead. Consciousness is consciousness, unconsciousness is unconsciousness, the one cannot be the other. When we write the biography of a person we are not describing a corpse or a heap

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of dust. We are describing a stream of experiences and bodily activities, of none of which a corpse is capable. Are we describing a mere nothing; is what we say of the deceased person's life not true; or if true what is it true of? What is the past anyway? It is almost beyond belief how little most philosophers have dealt with this question. What is history about if yesterday's or last year's or last century's events are now simply unreal? It is now that we try to speak truthfully about the past; there must be something to make our statements true if we succeed.

I had a rather happy childhood. Where and what is that child's happiness? I have only a few faint memories of it now. Surely they are not what make it trueif it is truethat I experienced thousands of happy hours, as well of course as some not so happy! Go to the town where I spent my childhoodyou will not find my happy hours there. Yet they are not nothings, they are still definite realities, constituents of the total reality about which true statements can still be made.

If Julius Caesar is now nothing, then how could any statement about him be truer than any other? Nothing has no definite characteristics. Is history only about, not what did exist, but what still survives by way of documents, records, monuments? Most historians think history is about more than such relicts. (I am quoting one of them.)

The structure of time can be conceived in a few basic ways among which we need to choose. We often speak as though only what "exists now" has any reality at all, and what merely did exist is simply nonexistent. Yet a little reflection shows us that apart from our knowledge of the past we know virtually nothing. What exists right now is what we have not yet had time to know. Sounds take seconds at least to reach our consciousness, and even sights are perceived only after an interval spanned by the speed of light. Conscious knowledge is of the past or nothing. Beware then of lightly dismissing the past as candidate for the status of reality! If it is unreal, what reality is there?

It happens that a few philosophers have reflected with care upon the status of the past. They include Bergson in France, the American Peirce, and the Anglo-American Whitehead. Peirce put it neatly: "The past is the sum of accomplished facts." Or again, "It is the

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past which is actual." If actuality is what acts upon us, relativity physics tells us that effective actions (apart at least from some extremely slight quantum influences) take time to pass from agent to patient. What is now happening elsewhere has yet to effectively influence us. Whitehead has put the matter in terms of his doctrine of "the objective immortality of the past." Once an event has occurred it is a permanent item in reality. The "accomplished facts" that constitute the past cannot be deaccomplished or nullified. If they could, historical truth would be impossible or meaningless.

The permanence of the past in every subsequent present is made to some extent concrete by considering memory and perception. What we just felt or thought is still somehow there in our experience by immediate memory, which is different from recollection, that is, recalling to consciousness what for a time has been forgotten. Primary memory is having awareness of an experience before it has been dismissed from consciousness. Perception (at least of things at a distance), as already pointed out, relates us to the past, at most reaching the present with the speed of light. These are the human ways in which the past pervades the present. If these human forms of possessing the past are all that there are, then indeed is the past severely limited in reality.

At this point one of the advantages of believing in God becomes apparent. What in us is extemely partial, feeble retention of the past may in God be complete, ideally vivid and adequate retention. My happy childhood was a gift the world and my parents offered to God. God does not lose what God has once acquired. So what makes history true, if it is true, is the really preserved past as it is in God, who is the final "measure of all things," and notin spite of Protagorasour human mode of thinking and knowing. One of some six reasons I have for belief in God is that it makes intelligible, as nothing else does, how there can be historical truth.

Does life end in death? A book ends with its last sentence or last word; however, the book does not become the mere silence or blank page following that word. The book of life is all its "words" (actions, experiences), and these form an imperishable totality, as adequately retained in the divine life. A conscious life remains that forever, it can never be mere unconsciounsess. But lives (other

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than God's), like books and works of art generally, have beginnings and endings, they are finite entities. Only so can they have definite form and distinctiveness. Those who want to go on being themselves forever and yet pass on to additional experiences after death are either asking for unbearable monotony, endless reiterations of the same personality traits, or they are asking for a unique prerogative of God, ability to achieve self-identity through no matter how great and diverse changes and novelties. Unconsciously they either want to be bored to death, so to speak, or to be God. This is the only way I can see the conventional idea of personal immmortality. I am not alone in this. Nevertheless, there must be a good meaning for immortality. Death is not destruction of the reality we have achieved. It is this reality's achievement of final definiteness, the full completion of it as gift to the world and the divine life. (The sense in which death is destructive in particular cases will be discussed later.)

If we now return to the argument, "God who loves us will not destroy us," we shall find several things wrong with this argument. First, it assumes that the past is unreal. Accordingly, what a person is just before death is all that death "destroys." In most cases this would be a rather insignificant loss. Indeed, if we are really beings with an infinite future before us, and in that sense like God, what does death amount to? From an infinite sequence of experiences death deprives us of a small finite number on this earth and substitutes a comparable addition in a perhaps better place. The traditional Western view of immortality, making us infinite in one respect and in that respect rivals of deity, really ruins any sensible perspective on human affairs.

Second, the argument seems to assume, falsely, that it is God who decides when and how we shall die. This, of course, involves the very idea of omnipotence, the absurdity of which has been shown earlier. When and how we die is decided by no single agent, but by innumerable creatures, including ourselves, other people, and countless subhuman agents, such as bacteria, molecules, and the cells of our own bodies, all interacting in partly chance fashion. There is no scapegoat, no single agent who decides the details of creaturely existence. Anthropology shows us clearly how inclined human beings are to find a scapegoat, someone to blame. What is it all but superstition and unwillingness to face reality?

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If we are truly mortal animals, then our lives are finite in time as well as in space. What is indeed immortal (the reality of the past) is precisely this finite series of experiences and deeds. Death subtracts not an iota of the lives we have already enjoyed before the moment of death. What death does nullify are the not yet actualized possibilities of living. This can be a cause of grief, and, in the case of homicide, of blame. Just because our careers are finite the loss of many years of significant living can be tragic. Instead of a rounded career, such as many fortunate persons have enjoyed, there is a truncated half career, in which much that has been purposively prepared for can never be realized. We are animals who "look before and after"; we live in part for our earthly futures. To know that at any moment, either by chance or by malicious intention, our careers may come to an end, gives a tragic tinge to our existence.

What is the alternative? Is it that the world should be so absolutely controlled that there would be no chance of premature death? This implies that it makes sense to talk of absolutely controlled individual creatures. In terms of current metaphysics of process an individual is to some extent self-controlled or nothing. Is the alternative that we should be immortal, incapable of having our careers terminated? This means that we would, in one respect, our future, be as infinite as God is. Why then should we not, like God, be ubiquitous in space? It is not enough to say that we are "finite" spatially. We are mere fragments of the spatial whole. And that such fragmentary creatures should have temporally infinite futures is not an immediately reasonable proposition.

Consider now the idea that a loving God would not establish natural laws that make eventually dying a certainty for animals such as we are. God loves us, this I believe. But as what does God love us? I answer, God loves us as what we are, a certain very distinctive species of mortal animal, finite spatially and in careers. We are each divinely loved as rendered individual and definite by this finitude. Moreover, and here I agree with the German philosopher Heidegger and his admirers, it is precisely as finite in this sense that we should love ourselves and our human fellows. As such I have for fifty-four years loved a wife, as such I love a daughter, grandson, and granddaughter. I need no tall stories about

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a supernatural kind of animal to love these persons, and many others as well. Nor do I need such stories to love God as the allsurpassing form of love.

Of course the immortality of the past in God does not give people everything they may happen to want. Creatures indistinctly aware of God (even when they verbally call themselves atheists) are also aware of desires that the real world partially frustrates. We have been enjoying a spouse, a son or daughter, a friend, and our capacity for such enjoyment is not exhausted. So we may find it pleasant to think of continuing the relationship after death. However, if we know anything at all about the human condition it is that things do not always go as we might wish. Also we know that in this life the wicked are not alwaysif even usuallypunished in proportion to their misdeeds, nor are the good rewarded in proportion to their good deeds. However, because of freedom in the creatures, without which they would not exist, an element of chance interaction is inevitable; it follows that some disappointments will occur. Nothing in all this appears a sufficient reason to demand a supernatural arrangement according to which, in some unimaginable way, and in spite of the freedom without which there could be neither evil nor good, the eventual satisfaction of all wishes will be guaranteed, or at least the full rewarding and punishment of all good and bad deeds. Freud, I must confess, seems to me to have given the bottom line concerning such an idea when he remarked, ''The world is not a kindergarten." And indeed, even in the best-managed kindergarten some wishes are frustrated.

Revalation, "Infallible" as from God, "Fallible" as Humanly Received.

It seems that there are persons who have better insight into religious truth than most of us do. The extreme way to put this is to say that while most of us guess and grope and wonder, these persons simply and absolutely know. If they write, their words impart absolute truth. The opposite extreme is to say that, in religious matters, no one knows any better than anyone else, that we are all equally at a loss (or else that only the atheists and skeptics are right). Between these extremes there are various gradations. In general it is rational to be suspicious of extremes. Indeed, in the

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five topics previously considered, I have been arguing for a view that mediates between extremes. Let us see this in some detail.

In topic number 1 the classical view was the extreme possible version of the assertion of absolute, unsurpassable, and unchangeable divine perfection. The opposite extreme is to deny that any being is strictly unsurpassable or unchangeable in any respect. The view defended was that there is indeed unsurpassable, unchangeable divine perfection, but it is only an abstract aspect of deity, which concretely is self-surpassable yet not surpassable by others, and changeable only for the better. And this view is defended on the ground that the idea of a value in every sense or by every valid criterion unsurpassable is either a contradiction or without any clear meaning.

In topic number 2, one extreme is the assertion of a highest conceivable creative and controlling power that is capable of monopolizing decision-making, of fully determining the details of the world, leaving no matters open for decision by the individuals constituting the world. At the opposite extreme is the denial that there is any highest conceivable or supreme form of power creative of and controlling the world, or the assertion that, given any power, a greater power is conceivable. The mediating position is that there is a highest conceivable or supreme power, creative of and controlling the world, but it does not and could not achieve the absurdity of monopolizing decision-making; rather, it is creative of and controls individuals with some decision-making power of their own, some ability to settle details left undetermined by the highest power. The argument is that only in this form is the highest power either consistently conceivable or worthy of worship.

In topic number 3, one extreme is the idea of a highest conceivable or divine knowledge, which correctly and changelessly surveys events throughout time and in this sense is free from error or ignorance. The opposite extreme is the denial that there is any highest conceivable form of knowledge, free from error or ignorance. The mediating position is that there is a highest conceivable or divine knowledge, free from error or ignorance; however, since events in time do not form a totality fixed once for all, but are an endlessly growing accumulation of additional actualities, to view all time in a changeless fashion would be an erroneous view and not at all the highest conceivable or divine form of knowledge. As the So-

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cinians said, once for all, future events, events that have not yet happened, are not there to be known, and the claim to know them could only be false. God does not already or eternally know what we do tomorrow, for, until we decide, there are no such entities as our tomorrow's decisions. Jules Lequier in France, acquainted with the Socinians' doctrine, went over the problem with great care and came to the same conclusion they had. In Germany Fechner and the theologian Pfleiderer, probably independently, reached the same result. In Italy, England, and the United States, somewhat later, a number of thinkers dealt with the same set of problems, reaching similar conclusions.

In topic number 4, one extreme is the classical view that God, though said to be loving, is without anything like emotion, feeling, or sensitivity to the feelings of others and is wholly active ("actus purus," a fine example of a seemingly clear but yet absurd formula) rather than passive in relation to the creatures. Aristotle said it first: God is mover of all things, unmoved by any. At the opposite extreme is the polytheistic view found in Greek mythology whose superhuman beings, the gods, are capable of all sorts of emotional disturbances; they are jealous, easily offended, desirous sexually, and yet immortal. The mediating view is that God is loving in the sense of feeling, with unique adequacy, the feelings of all others, entirely free from inferior emotions (except as vicariously participated in or sympathetically objectified), entirely steadfast in the constancy of the divine care for all, but, in response to the novelties in the creatures, with ever partly new experiences. What never changes is the adequacy of the divine feelings of creaturely feelings; however, adequate response to a world lacking you or me, for example, would not be adequate response to a world with you or me. The contention is that only such a view can do justice to the biblical message at its best, and that, quite apart from the Bible, only such a view is really a coherent, intelligible way of conceiving God in terms of human experience, yet as in principle surpassing not only human nature but any conceivable animal nature, or any positively conceivable super-animal nature, other than God as so conceived.

The first four topics have concerned the nature of God, not in relation to the human species in particular, but in relation to

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creatures in general. Topics 5 and 6 introduce special relations between God and the human species.

In topic number 5 one extreme view is that after death a human career goes on forever in some supernatural realm; the other extreme view is that after death a human career is not only terminated but that the entire career, with all its joys and sorrows, all its actual beauty and richness, is reduced to nothing, as though it had never been. Of course no one consistently holds this, but innumerable people vaguely approach such a view in their minds and many a philosopher seems little wiser. The mediating view is that an entire career, with all its concrete values, is an imperishable possession of deity, "to whom all hearts are open and from whom no secrets are hid," including emotional secrets and hidden beauties of a person's inner life. (Strange that the quoted lines from the Anglican prayer book have meant so little to theologians as they evidently did for some centuries.)

We come at last to the sixth topic, revelation. Is it not clear that the two opposites here are, on the one hand, that there is an absolutely infallible, yet humanly accessible, special source of knowledge in religion, and on the other, that there is no source of such knowledge deserving of any trust or confidence whatever? We should remember that scientists do not claim any result of science as absolutely certain as it stands, yet our engineers apply many such results with confidence. Similarly, granted that there are no absolutely infallible sources of religious knowledge, this does not imply that any Tom, Dick, Susan, or Mary is as likely to be of help as the saints or religious founders of history, or that any book you please is as likely to be wise religiously as the Bible, the Buddhist Sutras, or the Bhagavad Gita. Between no revelation and absolutely certain and reliable revelation there can be many gradations.

Of all claims to infallibility, those made by fundamentalist Christians seem the most extreme. Certainly they are the most complex in their implications. With the religion of Islam, for instance, one only has to believe in the divine inspiration of one man as absolutely reliable. But with Christianity there are, for instance, the four authors of the Gospels, none of whom, as I recall, explicitly claims infallibility, several writers of Epistles, the author of the Acts of the Apostles, and many authors of the Old Testament. All must

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be supposed infallible, though again they do not clearly claim this status for themselves, so far as I can see. What does it mean to regard authors as incapable of error? The writers must, it seems, be supposed absolutely controlled (when writing) by divine power. This notion of absolute control is the notion of omnipotence criticized under topic 2. I suggest that it is a nonidea. That we can learn about God from a book is one proposition, that we can learn to be infallible about God from a book, or from anything else, is a very different proposition. From an infallible God to an infallible book (to an infallible reader of the book?) is a gigantic step. For many of us it is a step from rational faith to idolatry. No book in a human language written by human hands, translated by human brains into another language, can literally be divine, "the word of God." What we know is that it is the word of human beings about God. The beings may be divinely inspired but they are still human.

In one of the Pauline letters the writer says that not all of his opinions come from Christ. This implies that some of the opinions may be mistaken. In general, claims of infallibility made for the Bible seem stronger than any made in the Bible.

The medieval Christian theologians were in their way scholars. Their view of biblical truth was less naive than the view of some fundamentalists. Not the Scriptures, as interpreted by someone who has merely been taught to read, are definitive of truth but the Scriptures as interpreted by the popes under carefully prescribed conditions. So it comes down finally at a given time to one human being in a special role in one human institution. Having read a Catholic Encyclopedia article on Infallibility, I still find the case for the view a weak one. The argument is that since human beings need a definitive guide in religion; a wise and benevolent God would give them what they need. The counter-argument is that humanity is the species of freely thinking animals who cannot simply set aside their thinking powers, frail and mistake-prone as these are, and directly and infallibly incarnate divine wisdom. What such animals need is to learn methods, as in the sciences or philosophy, of cooperation and mutual correction by which they can at least approach the truth, and methods of give and take, mutual respect, compromise, and kindness, by which they can compose their con-

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flicting purposes without unnecessary frustrations and injury to one another.

A notable feature of the classical or medieval view was the belief that in Greek philosophy there had been an approximation, by human reason without special revelation, to the truths of revealed religion. So when the Church Fathers read the Scriptures they expected to find what they took to be the essential principles of the Greek way of thinking, with some additional truths peculiar to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Biblical texts, admittedly with some qualifications, were expected to have a meaning that made sense in terms of the only philosophy these men knew. Among the especially relevant texts were those that referred to God as perfect or as unchangeable.

In the English Bible there are many occurrences of the words 'perfect,' 'perfectly,' or 'perfection.' Most of these are used to describe, not God, but certain human individuals, either as they are or as they ought to be. They are perfect, not in every conceivable respect, but in ethical or religious goodness, faithfulness in living by the religious code. Perfection in physical beauty, skill, or worldly knowledge is simply not in question. Thus the all-round metaphysical meaning of absolute value is not intended. How is it with the rare uses of 'perfect' or 'unchanging' to describe God? In every case the context implies something other than the Greek metaphysical idea of "in no respect capable of change or increase." Thus, the Malachi passage (3:6), "I Jehovah change not," where 'perfect' does not occur, clearly asserts the absolutely reliable, unwavering goodwill of Jehovah toward the people of Israel. (Turn again to me and I shall . . ."). Similarly, "Ye shall be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matt. 5:48) is far from the use of words to indicate an absolute difference between divine and human forms of being, the one simply perfect, the other simply imperfect.

God, to be sure, is in goodwill entirely, always, and without possibility of failure beyond criticism, while we are so only inconstantly and more or less. The essential point concerns, not change as such, in ethically neutral or positive, as well as negative, respects, but only change from good to bad (or mediocre) and back again. The metaphysical question is not raised. Biblical authors were not

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metaphysicians. But the Church scholars, for instance Augustine, steeped in Greek philosophy, looked for metaphysics everywhereand thought they had found it. Yet in fact the concept of supreme or divine reality as "unmoved mover" (Aristotle) was not a topic in New or Old Testaments.

"Without shadow of turning" (James 1:17) is preceded and followed by discussions of ehtical matters and of God as the One from whom all good things come. The beneficence of deity is thus the topic. Again this is not metaphysics, or a general definition of God. Spinoza was right, the Bible is no treatise in philosophical theology. The Malachi passage even suggests that, without prejudice to the divine goodness, there is divine change, for if Israel returns to fulfilling the divine commandments God will correspondingly, that is, will change in ways entirely appropriate to the change in Israel. Many parts of the Bible, interpreted reasonably, imply this.

For the Church Fathers divine knowledge eternally, timelessly surveys all events in time, whether past or future to us. Much in the Old Testament seems to imply a quite different view, and no Biblical passage, I believe, definitely and unambiguously implies a completely unchanging divine survey of all time. The Biblical scholar Oscar Cuhlman has dealt with this matter. The new theism can come closer to biblical ideas than was possible in the Dark or Middle Ages.

Classical theology was a compromise between a not-very-wellunderstood Greek philosophy and a not-very- scholarly interpretation of sacred writings. Omnipotence as many construed it is not asserted (indeed it is denied) by Plato and Aristotle, nor is it unambiguously affirmed in Scriptures. As for immortality (as the denial that a human career terminates at death) Plato held the doctrine but Aristotle did not. Moreover, Plato's (or Socrates') argument for his view on this point is not considered impressive by very many philosophers today. In most of the Old Testament the view is not affirmed but by implication denied.

The classical view of revelation is not convincing to very many scientists, philosophers, or humanists of our time. As we learn more about the claims of the non-Christian, non-Judaeic religions, it becomes ever harder to see how the extreme doctrine of infallible sacred writings can be sound. To insist upon that doctrine imposes

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a fearful burden on our democracy. It was not an accident that the founders of our republic were far from fundamentalist Christians. Jefferson, Franklin, Ethan Allen, Lincoln, and still others were believers in God but not in the infallibility of any book or human institution. The same is true of Emerson, our great poet whose prose was more poetic than most verse. It holds also for Peirce, James, and Royce, three of our greatest philosophers. Is it desirable that religion should seem more and more an affair of the intellectually undistinguished or mediocre?

The Principle of Dual Transcendence

The first four of the mistakes dealt with above are "one-sided" views in that they seek to distinguish God from all else by putting God on one side of a long list of contraries: finite-infinite, temporaleternal, relative-absolute, contingent-necessary, physical-spiritual, and still others. But this is a species of idolatry, implying that what we worship is infinity, eternity, absoluteness, necessity, mere spirituality, or disembodied mind. But these are empty abstractions. So is love, if you only mean the mere quality of lovingness. What is really worshipful is the love which is infinite in whatever sense that is an excellence and is finite in whatever sense that, too, is an excellence. God contrasts with creatures, not as infinite with finite, but as infinite-and-finite (both in uniquely excellent ways, beyond all possible rivalry or relevant criticism) contrasts with the merely fragmentary and only surpassably excellent creatures. God contrasts with creatures, not as the merely absolute contrasts with the relative, but as the absolute-and-relative in uniquely excellent ways contrasts with the creatures as neither relative nor absolute, except in senses in which they are surpassable by others. God is similarly both eternal and temporal in all-surpassing ways; God alone has an eternal individuality, meaning unborn and undying, and God alone has enjoyed the entire past and will enjoy all the future. He-She is both physical and spiritual, and the divine body (see the next chapter) is all-surpassing and all-inclusive of the creaturely bodies, which are to God as cells to a supercellular organism. His-Her

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spirit embraces all the psychical there is with all-surpassing, unstinted love.

The idea of omnipotence, as usually construed, contradicts dual transcendence; for it means that God is wholly active, independent, or absolute in relation to the creatures and that the creatures are wholly passive in relation to God. It means that God does either everything or nothing. If everything, then the creatures do nothing and are nothing. The divine excellence is a uniquely excellent way of interacting with others, of being active and passive in relation to them. We do things to God by deciding our own being, with necessary help from God, as setting limits to the disorder inherent in freedom, and as inspiring us to take our place in the cosmic order as best we can. God loves us as we partly make ourselves to be, not simply as we are divinely made to be. To say that a lover is uninfluenced by a partly self-made loved one is nonsense or contradiction. Omnipotence was often taken in a way that amounts to that contradiction.

The formula "dual transcendence" is mine. The basic idea is in Whitehead and still others, but in some respects less sharply formulated. The criticism, made for instance by a conservative English theologian, that it is contradictory to attribute both finitude and infinity, for example, to the same deity is nothing but the neglect of an elementary logical truth, which is that the description of something as both P and not-P (where P is some predicate or property) is contradictory only if the predicate and its negation are applied in "the same respect" to the something in question. And dual transcendence does not make or permit such an application. Moreover, it offers a definite explanation of how the difference in the two respects is possible. The absolute, infinite side is abstract and concerns the divine potentiality or capacity to have values, while the finitude or relativity concerns the divine actuality. If you or I had made different decisions, God would have enjoyed (or suffered) these other decisions. Anything that could be actual God could divinely have, but what God actually has depends partly on creaturely decisions. This is the social structure of existence. The primacy of love means that there is no possible value that any being could have simply in and by itself, or simply by its own decision.

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Aristotle said that the abstract or universal is real only in the concrete and individual. But he failed to realize how abstract and merely universal was his idea of God, defined as unmoved mover changelessly thinkingthinking what? The divine thinking, Aristotle said, was simply thinking thinking itself. Particular things or individuals, such as you or me, are not worth knowing about. Only eternal essences, universals, are worth knowing. And so if we know both the universal essence human, and this or that particular human person, we know what God does and something more besides. The Greek fascination with abstractions and disparagement of the concrete could not have been better displayed than in this paradox. Of course few theologians, least of all Christian theologians, could so disparage the worth of individuals when even a sparrow is said in the Gospels to be of interest to the Heavenly Father. But the theologians failed, on their part, to realize what Aristotle had seen very clearly, that if, contrary to Aristotle's opinion, God is aware of particular individuals and their careers, then the entire fullness of reality must be embraced in divine knowledge. But this concrete fullness is not eternal, it receives new items moment by moment. Also some at least of the items are contingent, results of free decisions, divine or creaturely, or both. Hence it will no longer do to hold that God is exclusively eternal and necessary, rather than also temporal and contingent. Like it or not, the door to the doctrine of dual transcendence has been opened.

We do not contradict ourselves if we say that a certain person is unchanging in being always (reasonably) "kind," although of course in concrete particulars responding differently to take changing circumstances into account. The idealized form of this contrast can be applied to God, who alone can unfailingly conform to the ideal of kindness.

That there are really different aspects of the divine nature, as dual transcendence implies, will be rejected by some thinkers on the ground that God is "simple," a traditional doctrine. But as used against dual transcendence, this argument would be purely question- begging. God is both simple and complex, the one in abstract, the other in concrete aspects. For instance, the divine cognitive infallibility is not really different (illustrating simplicity) from the divine ethical infallibility. But the aesthetic value actualized

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in God is no mere infallibility of the divine aesthetic capacity to respond. Aesthetic value, unlike merely cognitive or ethical value, depends in part upon what is responded to. It is concrete. There is a real difference (illustrating complexity) between the absolutely unsurpassable cognitive perfection of God's knowing, or the absolute rightness of the divine decision-making about the creatures, and the beauty of the actual, cosmic poem (the ''verses" of which are partly self-decided) as divinely enjoyed.

Paul Tillich's "God is being but not a being," that is, universal but not individual, violates dual transcendence and is open to the objections to be made against all such violations, that they either make God an empty abstraction, or else make Him-Her a fetish, a merely finite, relative, and changeable individual . A merely finite God of course will not do. The only infinity some of us can see as making sense we do attribute to God, but not the meaningless, contradictory, or empty mere infinity of the traditional view.

Since the fifth and sixth mistakes are not about the uniquely exalted nature or function of God but about the special nature or status of our human species, dual transcendence does not apply to these latter topicsunless our species is indeed transcendent, an infinite exception in nature, supernatural in the sense in which God is. And that is precisely the issue between the traditional view and the new view of immortality. Like all animals we have finite careers between birth and death; but the old view of immortality holds that we have infinite careers after death. This is an extreme view. The opposite extreme is that after death our careers become less than finite, they become reduced to zero. As corpses we have no sequence of live experiences, finite or infinite. We are dead and unconscious. What was something is now nothing. Yet how can the same reality be both something and nothing? The modest but positive view of immortality is that our years of aliveness will always be just that.

Ask yourself, what is Julius Caesar now? That Caesar is "not now alive" means that while Caesar's experience and action are still having influence on our present world and ourselves, we and our world are having no influence on Caesar. Our contemporaries are those we can interact with; our ancestors still do things to us, but never can we do anything to them. This is the meaning of the

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will always be just that. The full value of this can be appreciated only by a believer in God, for whom the whole past is as vividly still enjoyed as a second ago is for us, or rather, more vividly than that.

The question of revelation also involves two extremes or one-sided views, with the truth intermediate. God, who is infallible, communicates with us, who are fallible. The message sender cannot err, but the message receiver can err. Result, the message as received is neither absolute possession of truths about God nor absolute nonpossession of such truths. It is fallible, suggestive, vague, but still genuine possession of more or less definite truth. It is a help to our weak, uncertain, partial awareness of what God is. To know God as certainly and distinctly as God knows God is a divine privilege, not a human one. Let us not pretend to be other than human.

Our distinction, compared to the other animals, is not that we have infinite careers while they have finite ones, or absolute knowledge of God while they cannot have any sense of God. It is that we alone enjoy the conscious understanding of our finitude, we alone definitely distinguish ourselves now from ourselves a year ago and yet see a partial identity between the two selves, we alone can definitely plan our careers, relate them (however inadequately) to the career of the human species and to God; we alone can be conscious in this life that after death our lives as lived will everlastingly remain still vividly real to God in whatever beauty they had. We alone can have definite thoughts about God and can reasonably believe that these thoughts are approximations to at least partial truths about God. Our superiority to the other animals is not absolute (only God is absolutely exalted above others), but ours is an immense relative superiority, as the mass of all human poetry ever written is immense compared to the no-poetry-at-all (unless in some extremely attenuated sense) of the other animals. Or consider the mass of human music (during who knows how

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many thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands, of years) compared to the much simpler music of birds and those few mammals who can be said to sing (gibbons, humpbacked whales, and a few others), not to mention the extremely limited singing of insects, frogs, toads, and a few lizards. Our superiority, viewed soberly, is sufficient, without our feeling it necessary to resort to fairy tales to enhance it. Consider the vast distance between any knowledge the chimpanzees could be said to have of the world around them and our sciences, surveying the cosmos over billions of light years and back to the Big Bang. How conceited do we have to be to try to claim more preeminence than that which we know of ourselves in this life?

The supernatural is real; but the supernatural is God, not humanity. In the supernatural reality of God, unbounded in space, unborn and undying, the bounded, fragmentary reality of each of us is imperishably included, a definite quantum in the Life which is all-in-all, or in which "we live and move and have our being" (Acts of the Apostles: 17, 28).

The occasion which led to the writing of this book was somewhat sudden and quite concrete. It was the near coincidence of two conversations, each with an intelligent, educated lady, different in the two cases, who was troubled by what she felt were absurdities in the idea of God with which she was familiar. In this way I was made more aware than ever before of a large number of people (represented by these two) who, not trained but seriously interested philosophically and theologically, know little or nothing about some important but relatively recent changes in the philosophy of religion. The objections that the two, and many others like them, make to a traditional and still widely accepted form of theology (which I call "classical theism") have been felt also by a number of penetrating, technically trained philosophers and theologians, especially in the present century, and these writersnot all of them as famous as they should behave been working out, with increasing clarity and competence, a revised form of theism which some call "process theology" and I call "neoclassical theism," applying this term especially to my own version of the doctrine. This book is an attempt to present and defend the revised idea of God as simply and forcefully as I can. It is not written primarily for trained philosophers or theologians, although, to be candid, I should be surprised and disappointed if they could not learn from it, especially if they want to be able to meet a widespread need in contemporary society.

Since philosophers as well as theologians disagree, and no consensus is in sight, what they can honestly offer lay persons is not a doctrine to be accepted on their authority, but a clarification of the options for reasonable belief and of the arguments for and against these options. The final decision has to be individual, by each person at his or her own peril. Multitudes of people today are told by newspapers, and popular magazines or books, about options in nonreligious matters, but they are told little or nothing about the options in religion. The accessibility of options for belief is part of what religious freedom ought to mean. The options should be made more generally accessible than has been the case in the past. In this book it is one option that is directly presented, but it is defended against one vastly more widely known and for this reason may furnish a new opportunity to a fairly large class of people.

I have learned from responses to my previous writings that lives can be changed by showing that some of the traditional problems of belieffor instance how to reconcile the power and goodness of God with the evils we encounter in lifeare genuinely solved, or at least greatly allievated, by the view presented in this book. In writing it I have tried to avoid needless technicalities and professional paraphernalia in order to communicate with a wider circle of readers.

This is a candid book. I am not a fundamentalist in religion, and I make this entirely clear. But I definitely believe in God, in divine love as the key to existence, in love for God as (ideally) the all-in-all of our motivation, and in love for fellow creatures as valuable and important, judged by the same principle of value-to-God as we should judge ourselves by. In other words I accept what Jesus said was "the Law and the Prophets," that is, the gist of religion. If that makes me religious I think I am as religious as anybody. But it does not cause me to look down upon pious Jews (and there are some Jews who like my ideas), or upon Unitarians (ditto), or members of many other religious groups. I express thanks to Colleen Kieke, whose typing, equal to the best encountered in a long writing career,

I have for some years been enjoying. A superb typist, what a blessing that is!

As usual, but more than ever, I have reason and readers will have reason to thank Dorothy C. Hartshorne for her editorial help in the making of this book, the rapid writing of which made this help all the more necessary. It is the only book that I have ever written (apart from fine details) in five weeks. The book that preceded it and the one that is to follow it required many years to compose. Qualitative differences accompanying this quantitative difference are for others to judge.

C. H.

In preceding chapters, I considered two of the three main ways in which our central question is usually answered—namely, exclusivism and pluralism. So far as exclusivism is concerned, the results of this consideration were strongly negative, since it proved to be not only incapable of validation as credible in terms of common human experience and reason, but also deeply inappropriate to Jesus Christ. In the case of pluralism, the results of my consideration were skeptical rather than negative. I argued that there are a number of difficulties with the case that pluralists make for it and that these difficulties are sufficiently serious to make one question its validity. Certainly unfounded, I held, is the claim that pluralism is the only consistent alternative to exclusivism. In point of fact, the position that there are many true religions is logically as extreme as the contrary position of exclusivism that there can be only one; and so invalidating exclusivism, and inclusivism as well, would in

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no way validate pluralism, since both positions, being contraries, could very well be false, even though both could not be true. Still other difficulties pertaining to the evidence and argument that pluralists offer and, above all, to establishing more than merely formal similarities between different religions raise doubts whether they have yet succeeded in making their case.

Assuming now that these results are sound, we might be tempted to conclude, in the light of our analysis of the usual options, that it is to the third option of inclusivism that we should look for a valid answer to our question. After all, it is significantly different from both of the other positions; and considering what I have said about the common difficulty of logical contraries, we might expect it to provide something like a mean between the two extremes. We would be encouraged in this, naturally, by inclusivists, who tend to think of themselves as occupying just such a third, mediating position between the other more extreme positions. But there is a problem in agreeing with them about this, as should be clear from what has already been said— namely, that inclusivism in its way is also an extreme position. Significantly different as it is from exclusivism in asserting that a decision for Christ’s salvation is in some way a universal possibility for each and every human being, it is nonetheless essentially similar to exclusivism in its monistic insistence that Christianity alone is the formally true religion. Like exclusivists, inclusivists hold that the only religion that even can be true in this sense is

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the religion established by God in the unique saving event of Jesus Christ. Therefore, even though they allow that non-Christians can be saved by Christ anonymously and unknowingly outside ofthe visible church and that any religion transformed by his salvation can itselfbe substantially true and a means of salvation, they still maintain that his is the only salvation and that it is mediated explicitly and knowingly as such solely by the Christian religion. To this extent, inclusivists are no less extreme than exclusivists or pluralists in their answer to our question.

Here, again, of course, I am speaking in terms of an ideal type oftheological position, not ofthe positions actually held by this or that theologian or group of theologians. What I mean by inclusivists are simply those who hold the theological position that I have just defined, however they may otherwise be identified or identify themselves. Essential to the inclusivistic position thus understood, however, is the same logically extreme claim essential to exclusivism, to the effect that there not only is but can be only one true religion, in the sense that Christianity alone can validly claim to be formally true. Recognizing this, we may well hesitate to conclude that inclusivism is the option we are seeking. And such hesitation will seem the more prudent if we reflect that in the case of many a disputed question the usual options for answering it are not the only answers that are logically possible. On the contrary, nothing is more common than disputes that stubbornly persist precisely because the disputants insist upon both themselves choosing and forcing others to choose between only some of the possible

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options, any one of which is about as good or as bad as the others.

That something like this may be true of the question before us in these chapters appears to me extremely likely. The several parties to the current discussion more and more tend to assume that the only ways open for answering it are the usual options of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism. Even so, there is at least one other way of answering it that is a distinct alternative to all three of these usual ways, although it has not been clearly recognized, much less carefully considered, in the discus¬ sion up to now. It will be apparent, I am sure, that it is this fourth way that I judge to be the relatively more adequate option open to us. But whether or not I am right in this judgment, we can hardly expect to be clear about the issue raised for theology by the challenge of pluralism unless we at least take account of all ofthe main possibilities for answering our question. The purpose of what follows, then, even as of the preceding chapters, is not to settle this issue, by finally arguing for the answer to the question, but, rather, to clarify the issue itself, by at last attending to this neglected possibility for answering the question beyond the usual options.

I begin with a summary characterization of the fourth option in relation to the other three. At one extreme, we have religious, or, more exactly, Christian, monism in its two forms of exclusivism and inclusivism respectively. Common to both monistic positions is the claim that there not only is but can be only one true religion because Christianity alone can validly claim to be formally true. At the other

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extreme is religious, or Christian, pluralism, with its logically contrary position that there not only can be but are other religions whose claim to be formally true is as valid as Christianity’s. Now, as I showed in the last chapter, there is no need to assert Christian pluralism in order to make a complete break with Christian monism, whether exclusivistic or inclusivistic. What one needs to assert to counter monism is not that there actually are many true religions, but only that there can be, this being the logical contradictory of any position that there cannot be because Christianity alone can be true. But if this assertion is clearly as distinct from pluralism as it is contradictory of monism, it could also be true even if the assertion of pluralism were false or the case for it still had to be made. One could hold, in other words, that religions other than Christianity can also be formally true even if, in point of fact, none of them actually is true or has as yet been shown to be so in a reasoned way.

This is the position that I take to be the fourth option open to Christians and theologians for answering our central question. What I want to do in the remainder of the chapter is to explain what is and is not involved in holding it, at least in the form in which I should wish to do so. In doing this, I shall be further elaborating its differences from the other options, especially inclusivism, whose claims to validity remain to be considered. The essential difference between the two monistic options, on the one hand, and the fourth option, on the other, is that they deny what it affirms— namely, that religions other than Christianity can as

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validly claim to be formally true as it can. If we ask now what underlies and explains this essential difference, the answer can only be a difference in christology. By this I mean that, while in each case there is a way of thinking and speaking about Jesus as of decisive significance for human existence, there is nonetheless a difference between these two ways amounting to a difference in christological type. One way of trying to formulate this difference is to distinguish between a “christocentric” and a "theocentric” type of christology. But an obvious objection to this formulation is that both types of christology are, in their ways, christocentric as well as theocentric. Both understand Christian faith to be nothing other or less than faith in the one true God in whom alone is salvation, even as they both affirm that the only true God is the God who has in fact acted to save explicitly and decisively through Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, there is a crucial difference between their respective understandings ofthe unique saving event ofJesus Christ, which I prefer to formulate as follows: whereas for Christian monists, whether exclusivists or inclusivists, this event not only represents the possibility of salvation but also in some way constitutes it, for those holding the fourth position, this event in no way constitutes the possibility ofsalvation but only represents it.

I trust that the distinction I have employed here between a constitutive and a representative event is already familiar, in substance if not also under these particular labels. But if an ordinary example of it is needed, I know of none better than that provided by the old story about the conversation between the

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three baseball umpires. The youngest and least experienced umpire allows, “I call 'em as I see ’em.” Whereupon the second umpire, being older and more sure of himself, claims, ‘T call 'em as they are." But to all this the oldest and shrewdest umpire responds with complete self-confidence, “They ain't nothin' till I call 'em!" By an event constitutive of the possibility of salvation I mean an event that is like the third umpire’s calls in that the possibility of salvation is nothing until the event occurs. On the contrary, what I mean by an event representative of the possibility of salvation is an event similar to the calls of the second umpire in that it serves to declare a possibility of salvation that already is as it is prior to the event's occurring to declare it.

Another example of a representative event drawn from the explicitly religious context is a minister’s solemnizing the marriage of a man and a woman. Since it is generally understood that a marriage is constituted as such by the man and woman themselves, each pledging troth to the other, the office of the minister is properly to represent or declare their union, in no way to constitute it. This is evident from the formula customarily used by the minister in performing the service: “Forasmuch as so and so have consented together in holy wedlock, ... I pronounce that they are husband and wife together.” To be sure, other acts performed by Christian ministers are commonly thought to have a constitutive, rather than a merely representative, significance even with respect to salvation. This is particularly true of preaching the word and administering

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the sacraments, where they themselves are understood, as they typically are by exclusivists, to be constitutive of the possibility of salvation. Baptizing a person, for instance, may be viewed as itself effecting her or his transition from a state ofsin to a state of grace, so that she or he could be expected to affirm, in the words of a well-known catechism, that baptism was the event “wherein I was made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.” But even for Christian inclusivists, any such view of baptism, or of any other means of salvation, is mistaken. Even in their understanding, all acts of the church's ministry and, for that matter, even the church itself are representative of the possibility of salvation rather than constitutive of it—whence their rejection of the claim of exclusivists that there is no salvation outside of the church.

An alternative view of baptism that I have long found instructive was resourcefully defended already in the nineteenth century by the Anglican theologian, Frederick W. Robertson. Like others of his contemporaries, such as Frederick Denison Maurice and Charles Kingsley, Robertson particularly struggled to understand the language of the Anglican Catechism to which I just alluded and according to which one is “made” a child of God in baptism. Believing, as he put it, that “baptism could not make me a child of God unless I were one by reason of my Humanity already,” he sought to identify uses of the verb “to make” that were supportive of his belief. The results of his search are well represented by the teaching he prepared for his

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candidates for confirmation, in the questions and answers on baptism:

Q. What is baptism?

A. The authoritative declaration of a fact.

Q. What fact? A.

That I am God’s child.

Q. Why then do you say that I am so made, in baptism?

A. Being made, I mean—declared to be.

Q. Explain what you mean.

A. As soon as a king dies, his successor is king. Coronation declares the fact but does not make him king. He was one before, but it corroborates, declares, affirms, seals the fact by a recognized form used for that purpose.

Elsewhere, Robertson uses the same illustration slightly differently, arguing that “a sovereign is made king by coronation, but only because he was de jure such before.” And he confirms a similar sense of “to make” by means of a further illustration: “At mid-day, at sea, after the observation of the sun's altitude has been taken, the following form takes place: The commander asks, what is the hour? The reply is, 12 o'clock. He then rejoins, make it so! No act of his can literally determine mid-day; that is one of the facts of the universe, but that authoritative declaration in a most important sense does make it 12 o'clock, it makes it 12 o'clock to them; it regulates their hours, their views, the arrangement of their daily life, their whole course. ... So does baptism—pronouncing the fact in God's name to exist, make that real on earth which, in itself real before, was unreal to those to

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whom the ratification had not been shown" (Brooke, 269, 513, 336, 513f.).

The most striking thing about Robertson’s view is the analogy he clearly suggests between baptism thus understood and the Christ event itself. "The great fact for which the Redeemer died,” he says, is “that all mankind are, de jure, God’s sons, and that He bids them become such de facto. ’’ If this kind of statement is evidently consistent with the traditional doctrine of the death of Christ as the “meritorious cause” of our salvation, Robertson’s more characteristic way of making the same point is to say simply that the fact of our being God’s children, which belongs to all humanity, “was revealed by Christ.” “Christ revealed the fact that all men are God’s children,” and as the gospel which proclaims this is “the message to the world, ” so “baptism is that message to the individual.” “Baptism is the grand special revelation to an individual by name. A, B, or C, of the great truth Christ revealed for the race, that all, Greeks and barbarians, are the children of God. It is the fact which they are to believe, a fact before they believe it, else how could they be asked to believe it?” (337, 336, 268). Robertson does not also say, to be sure, that this fact was true before Christ’s revelation of it, and without his revelation. But this seems to be the clear implication of his analogy between baptism’s revelation of the fact to the individual person and Christ’s revelation of it to the world.

Of course, it is the whole point of analogy to allow for difference as well as similarity. And one might entirely agree with Robertson’s view of

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baptism even while holding that the significance of the Christ event for salvation is different precisely in being somehow constitutive of its possibility rather than merely representative of it. This, in fact, is just the position typically taken by contemporary inclusivists, some of whom can be quite radical in their insistence on the strictly representative significance of all that is specifically Christian.

Thus Clodovis Boff, for instance, vigorously protests against the traditional identification of salvation, on the one hand, with revelation and faith, on the other. Just as in general there is "a distinction between the real and the known,” so one must clearly distinguish between "salvation” and "consciousness or awareness of salvation (revelation, faith, church, sacraments, theology, and so on).” “Salvation touches every person, whereas revelation is specific to those alone to whom it has been given to become aware of this same salvation—to Christians.” Accordingly, Boff proposes “a recasting of ‘salvation history’ as revelation history—as the history of the revelation of salvation. . . . ‘Salvation history' would then be the history of salvation manifested, acknowledged, proclaimed—not the history of salvation as such.” At the same time, revelation would be conceived as "a derived moment in the global history of humankind—a second moment, a moment ‘with a lag.’” Far from reaching human beings universally, “it would perhaps pertain to its essence to be, and necessarily, a sectorial phenomenon only—charged, however, with a metonymic (pars pro toto), symbolic (sacramentum salutis) value” (Boff, 97, 99).

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Boff realizes, naturally, that any such recasting raises “the towering question” of “the function of the economy of salvation.” But this question can be answered, he believes, if, although only if, “it is possible to demonstrate that scripture, and the events reported there, as well as the whole salvific order of the church, are, where salvation is concerned, not of the order of its constitution, but of the order of its manifestation. ” In that event, “we would be dealing with a hermeneutic of salvation, not a history of salvation. Christianity would then be the interpretation of the salvation of the world, and not the salvation of the world itself, or even the exclusive instrument of this salvation” (97f.).

Having said this, however, Boff immediately blocks any inference that his is a representative type of christology. “More delicate,” he says, “is the particular, and central, case ofJesus Christ, whom faith confesses as savior, and not merely as prophet, sage, or saint.” True, “we must recognize that the church began very early to theologize the salvation brought by Jesus in less than totally intimate linkage to its proclamation (revelation) and explicit acceptance (faith).” Even in the New Testament there are “universalizing interpretations” that divorce salvation from revelation, and this position has remained “a constant in the history ofChristian thought” from the church fathers right up to our own time. Recognizing this, “we are . . . led to admit of a salvation antecedent and exterior to revelation —antecedent to and outside the historical Jesus—not, however, independent of the Kyrios of glory” (98). But if all this seems ratherto support a representative christology

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than to tell against it, there are clear indications elsewhere that this can hardly be Boff's intention. On the contrary, he speaks of “a constitutive reference of the human being to the person of Jesus Christ,” and asserts that "the single real order of salvation” is “the christic order,” which is "an ontic dimension, established in and for human beings, on the plane of their divine calling, and independent of their awareness.” Thus "the Christian is precisely that human being in whom this constitutive reference emerges on the plane of consciousness. In the Christian, the ontic dimension is rendered onto-logical: the implicit reference becomes explicit, the latent reality becomes patent. . . . Thus the Christian is the person who knows. Christians know their reference to Jesus Christ, and know that all human beings have this same reference” (122).

For Boff, then, the event of Jesus Christ clearly is a special case, as compared with Christians and Christianity and all that is specifically Christian, whether faith and revelation or church and sacraments. Unlike the history of the church and all the rest of “salvation history,” this event, at least, really is history of salvation, as distinct from its "revelation,” its "hermeneutic,” or its "interpretation.” In the terms of Boff's own distinction, Jesus Christ is of the order of the constitution of salvation, not merely of the order of its manifestation.

This same position, as I have said, is typically taken by other Christian inclusivists, Protestant as well as Roman Catholic. Recognizing with Boffthat Christian faith confesses Jesus Christ "as savior, and not merely as prophet, sage, or saint,” they uphold a

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constitutive, rather than a representative, type of christology. They hold that the event ofJesus Christ somehow constitutes the possibility of salvation, which is nothing until this event occurs. But this contention that the Christ event is, in some way, the cause ofsalvation is open to a decisive objection.

This is the objection that, for any appropriate understanding of the Christ event, it is so far from being the cause of salvation as to be its consequence. The only cause of salvation, the argument goes, is the primordial and everlasting love of God, which is the sole primal source and the sole final end of anything that is so much as possible. Because of this love, which is nothing merely accidental in God but God’s very essence, the same God who is the Creator and Consummator of all things is also the Savior of all men and women, as well as, presumably, of any other beings who, having misused their freedom, would likewise stand in need of salvation. But, then, no event in time and history, including the event ofJesus Christ, can be the cause of salvation in the sense of the necessary condition of its possibility. On the contrary, any event, including the Christ event, can be at most a consequence ofthe salvation, the sole necessary condition of the possibility of which is God's own essential being as all- embracing love. Theologians who develop this argument commonly formulate it over against the so-called satisfaction theory ofthe atonement, according to which salvation becomes possible only because of the obedience of Jesus Christ, especially the passive obedi¬ ence of his death on the cross. Thus Paul Tillich, for

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instance, rejects the claim that "in the Cross” salvation “becomes possible” on the ground that it necessarily implies that God “is the one who must be reconciled.” Since the message ofChristianity, on the contrary, is that “God, who is eternally reconciled, wants us to be reconciled to him,” the only appropriate thing to say is that "through the Cross” salvation “becomes manifest” (Tillich 1957, 169f., 175f.). But, however the argument is developed, the objection to inclusivism is the same, and it clearly seems decisive. The Christ event cannot be the cause of salvation because its only cause, and the cause of this event itself, is the boundless love of God of which this event is the decisive re-presentation.

Not the least reason for being confident about this is that certain inclusivists themselves concede the decisiveness of the objection and go to great lengths to try to show why the constitutive christology they uphold is not vulnerable to it. This is particularly striking in the work of Karl Rahner, who entirely agrees that the saving event ofJesus Christ must be understood rather as the consequence than as the cause of God's universal will to save, at least if “cause” is understood in the usual sense of bringing about a physical or a moral change. Like the other theologians already mentioned, Rahner is especially critical in this connection of the satisfaction theory of the atonement on the ground that it “all but inevitably insinuates the idea of a fundamental change of mind in God, which is metaphysi¬ cally impossible, and obscures the origin of the cross as a consequence of God's forgiving love” (Rahner, 262).

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At the same time, Rahner accepts the traditional teaching according to which salvation is granted to men and women intuitu meritorum Christi—“in view of the merits of Christ” (263f.). Consequently, he is constrained to argue for a constitutive type of christology, which can understand the cross and the Christ event as a whole as being at least in some sense a cause with respect to salvation. The conceptuality he employs to do this involves, on the one hand, distinguishing between “efficient” and “final” causality and, on the other hand, elaborating an analogy between the kind offinal causality proper to sacraments in general and the unique causality of the “primal sacrament” Jesus Christ. His thesis, then, is that, while the Christ event neither is nor can be the efficient cause of God’s universal will to save, it is nonetheless the final cause of God’s will, in that it is its definitive and irreversible sign and as such “the universal primal sacrament of the salvation of the whole world” (271).

Without claiming to offer an adequate criticism of Rahner’s characteristically subtle and nuanced argument for this thesis, I can say that I find it by far the most ingenious defense of the constitutive type of christology underlying inclusivism of which I have any knowledge. If I were to be an inclusivist, it would be because his reasons for being one seemed to me to be good and sufficient reasons. But, as it is, I do not find his argument convincing. Despite his efforts, in effect, to avoid the choice between a constitutive and a representative type of christology, I do not see that he ever demonstrates a

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real, as distinct from a merely verbal, alternative. If there is a real and not merely a verbal difference in the Christ event's not being the efficient cause of God's saving will, but being its final cause instead, then, so far as I can see, the Christ event is not really constitutive of salvation after all, but only representative of it, similarly to the way in which sacraments in general are thus representative. If, on the contrary, the Christ event is different enough from sacraments generally not only to represent God's saving will but also to really constitute it, then, in my view, there is not a real, but only a verbal, difference in its being called the final cause of God's will to save instead of its efficient cause.

Therefore, my conclusion from Rahner's argu¬ ment is that one can meet the decisive objection to the constitutive type of christology underlying inclusivism only by opting for a representative type of christology. But does this mean, then, that one can consistently think and speak of Jesus, not as savior, but merely as prophet, sage, or saint? I do not believe so, despite the widespread assumption to the contrary on all sides of the usual discussion. Of course, if all that could be properly meant by Jesus' being savior is that he not only represents the possibility ofsalvation, but is also somehow constitutive of it, then one could not consistently think and speak of him as savior if one opted for a representative type of christology. But that one's only option, then, would be to think and speak of him merely as one more human being who bore witness to salvation or actualized it in his own life is

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not so self-evidently true that one can simply assume it. On the contrary, there are good reasons for rejecting it as false.

This should be clear enough from the analogy already before us between the sacraments or means ofsalvation and the event ofJesus Christ. This analogy is clearly suggested, it will be recalled, by Robertson’s statement that baptism is the revelation to an individual person of the same truth that Christ revealed to the race—namely, that all, without exception, are already children of God de jure by reason of their humanity. On the face of it, the similarity that this analogy asserts is that the Christ event, like baptism, is not constitutive of the possibility ofsalvation, but representative of it, while the only difference it asserts is that baptism represents this possibility particularly to the individual, whereas Christ represents it universally to the world. But this difference evidently implies the further one, that baptism depends upon the Christ event in a way in which the Christ event does not depend upon baptism. In fact, we may say that the Christ event is constitutive of baptism, whereas baptism is only representative of the Christ event. Thus, notwithstanding that baptism and the Christ event are similar in that both represent the possibility ofsalvation but do not constitute it, they are also significantly different in the ways in which they represent this possibility. Recognizing this, one can well appropriate the conceptuality of Rahner and other inclusivists and think and speak of the Christ event as the primal Christian sacrament. In doing so, naturally, one

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must deny any inclusivistic implication that this primal sacrament is somehow constitutive of the possibility of salvation itself. But there is no need to deny, and every reason to affirm, that the event of Jesus Christ is constitutive of the specifically Christian understanding of this possibility, and thus of all Christian sacraments and means of salvation as well as of the visible church and everything specifically Christian. For this reason, the Christ event cannot be thought and spoken of as a Christian sacrament, but only as the Christian sacrament, the one representation of the possibility of salvation upon which all other Christian representations of it, and Christian faith itself, are by their very nature dependent.

This means, however, that one not only cannot, but also need not, think and speak of Jesus merely as prophet, sage, or saint. One can not so think and speak of him because prophets, sages, and saints can never be constitutive of a faith or religion, in the way in which Jesus is constitutive of Christianity. In the nature of the case, they are always only one among others, dependent for their authority upon the explicit understanding of existence that alone is thus constitutive of the faith they represent. In the specific case of Christianity, however, this explicit understanding is not, in the first instance, some law or teaching or word of wisdom, but Jesus himself, through whom the meaning of ultimate reality for us is decisively re-presented. Consequently, the only way in which Jesus can be thought and spoken of consistently with his constitutive significance for the Christian religion is not as one more authority among others, even the first and foremost thereof.

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but as the primal authorizing source by which all Christian authorities, be they prophets, sages, or saints, are explicitly authorized as such.

But Jesus also need not be understood otherwise, since there is the obvious alternative of thinking and speaking of him with Rahner and others as the primal Christian sacrament. By "sacrament” here, of course, I mean what is better referred to more generally as “means of salvation.” In my view, at any rate, sacraments in the ordinary sense are rightly thought of together with word as equivalent means of salvation in that they are equally valid ways of representing Jesus Christ as the explicit gift and demand of God’s love. Thus it would be equally appropriate to develop an analogy between the word of preaching and Jesus and to think and speak of him, accordingly, as the primal Christian word, rather than as the primal Christian sacrament. In either case, the point of the analogy would be to assert both the similarity and the difference between ordinary means of salvation and Jesus Christ. Like both word and sacraments, he does not constitute God’s love, but represents it. But whereas they represent God’s love by also representing him, he represents God’s love by also constituting them. Because this analogy is undoubtedly available, however, there is no need to think and speak of Jesus merely as prophet, sage, or saint. On the contrary, one can very well think and speak of him as savior, in the precise sense that, being the primal Christian word and sacrament, he has a significance for the specifically Christian religion and economy ofsalvation that is not merely representative but constitutive.

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Even so, it is of the essence of the fourth option to insist that the possibility ofsalvation itself, as distinct from the specifically Christian representation of it, is constituted solely and sufficiently by God's primordial and everlasting love. This means, as I understand it, that, just as it is of the essence of God's love to create creatures and to consummate them by accepting them into God's own all-embracing life, so it is also essential to God's love to save sinners by being the necessary condition of the possibility of their salvation. I do not mean by this, naturally, that God could not exist as God without the existence of sinners needing salvation from the guilt and the power of sin. Even if it is necessary to God's existence ever to create and to consummate some creatures, no particular creature could be thus necessary to God and still be a creature in more than name only. Therefore, that sinners do in fact happen to exist is nothing necessary to God, but is as utterly contingent as is the fact that there happen to be beings for whom existence in the self-misunderstanding of sin is always a possibility. But once given God's creation ofsuch beings and their misuse oftheirfreedom to actualize this possibility, God must be their Savior as surely as God is their Creator and Consummator; for God is love, and there is no way for God to love sinners except to do all that could conceivably be done to save them from theirsin. In this sense, the possibility ofsalvation that is decisively re-presented through Jesus Christ is always already constituted for each and every sinner by God's very being as love.

But if the Christian witness is true that it is just this love of God that is the strictly ultimate reality

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with which every human being has to do as soon and as long as she or he exists humanly at all, then not only Christianity but other religions as well can validly claim to be formally true. They can do so because all that is constitutive of the possibility of salvation and, therefore, also of any true religion is the boundless love of God that is and must be presented at least implicitly in every human existence. Provided, then, that a religious praxis is so transformed by God's love as to represent the possibility that it constitutes as our authentic self-understanding, it is, from a Christian standpoint, substantially true, and its claim to be formally true can be a valid claim, even if it is not the claim that Christians as such would have any reason to make.

Of course, to say that religions can validly claim to be formally true insofar as they explicitly represent God's love is a specifically Christian way of explaining this possibility. But to be a Christian and to take Christianity to be the formally true religion are one and the same thing. Every religion claims implicitly or explicitly to be formally true, and the adherents of any religion are bound to employ what it, in turn, specifies as formally normative as exactly that in judging all claims to religious truth. This need not mean, to be sure, that Christians today have to do this in the same dogmatic, uncritical way in which most religious believers have undoubtedly done it throughout the history of religion. There is the distinct alternative of recognizing the truth claim of the Christian religion to be exactly that—a claim—and of being willing to critically validate it through unrestricted dialogue and common

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inquiry, whenever it is rendered problematic by counterclaims to religious or existential truth. In fact, Christians today can frankly acknowledge that the only way in which they can continue to be Christians is to accept the possibility and the risk of ceasing to be such in face of experiences and reasons that on the whole invalidate their claim instead of validating it. Even so, they cannot really be Christians at all, as long as they are such, without thinkng and speaking of themselves and others and of reality generally in specifically Christian concepts and symbols.

This means that they cannot think and speak of the strictly ultimate reality that alone constitutes the possibility of salvation as anything other than the love of God decisively re-presented through Jesus Christ. It also means that they cannot think and speak ofsalvation, wherever it may occur, except as the radical transformation in self-understanding that is effected by God's love as and when it is accepted through faith. If persons are saved, it can only be because or insofar as they so entrust themselves to God’s love as thereby to be freed to live in loyalty to it, in returning love for God and for all whom God loves. But, then, there are excellent theological reasons why Christians should think and speak of any such persons, however they may explicitly understand themselves, as fellow Christians—if not explicit Christians like themselves, then what Rahner and others have called “anonymous Christians.” Just as Christians can consistently think and speak of nothing whatever except as a creature of God destined to be consummated by God's love, and

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of no human person except as created in God's image and thereby given and called to exist as God's child, so they can consistently think and speak of no one who actualizes an authentic self-understanding except as either implicitly or explicitly a Christian.

And yet if the fourth option is valid, there is always the real possibility that adherents of another specific religion could just as validly explain why religions can be formally true by taking theirs to be the formally true religion. I do not mean by this simply that adherents of any religion have the right as well as the responsibility to think and to speak of religion and religions as well as of everything else in the concepts and symbols that their specific tradition provides. I can only suppose that Buddhists, for example, both may and must think and speak of anyone who actualizes an authentic self-understanding as a fellow Buddhist, even if only an implicit or anonymous one. Therefore, when one of my Buddhist dialogue partners inquires whether I may not be an "anonymous Buddhist" or, at least, someone whose “Buddha nature” implicitly gives and calls him to be such, I can only applaud my partner's clearheadedness and forthrightness about her or his religious faith. My point, however, is that the truth of my Christian explanation of why religions can validly claim to be formally true need not preclude the truth of the very different explanation of the same possibility that would be offered by my Buddhist partner. On the contrary, provided the self-understandings made explicit in the two explanations are substantially the same, both explanations can be true even though only Christians have

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reason to offer the one and only Buddhists have reason to offer the other.

But if in allowing for this possibility the fourth option is essentially different from inclusivism, it is no less essentially different from pluralism in not claiming that there in fact are many true religions or ways of salvation. Just as asserting the universal possibility of salvation does not require one to assert that salvation itself is universal, so one can claim with the fourth option that there can be many true religions without having to claim that there actually are such. All that the fourth option claims a priori, in advance of actually encountering specific religions and validating their claims to truth, is that, if the Christian religion itself is true, then any and all other religions can also be true in the very same sense, because or insofar as they give expression to substantially the same religious truth. This fully allows for holding, as Christians certainly have good reason to hold, that there is not a little falsehood and distortion in all religious praxis, including that of persons who think and speak of themselves as Christians. At the same time, it warrants a certain optimism about all of the specific religions, even as about human existence and praxis otherwise. Indeed, it gives one every reason to look for signs of the actuality of the pluralism whose possibility is securely grounded in the completely universal reality of God's love, which is savingly present throughout all human existence and, therefore, is also at work in all religions. Such, then, is the other, hitherto largely neglected, option for answering the question of this

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book. My judgment, as I have said, is that it is, of all the options, the least problematic and, therefore, the most likely to offer a valid answer. But whether I am right in thisjudgment or not, I trust that I have at least shown that there are, in fact, four possible ways of answering the question, instead of only the three that alone are usually considered. And the importance of this seems clear. If the fourth option is indeed valid, one can not be either an exclusivist or an inclusivist and one need not be a pluralist—even if one would always have the possibility of becoming such, provided that the case for pluralism were actually to be made. On the other hand, one can affirm instead that, because of the utterly universal and allembracing love of God decisively represented through Jesus Christ, there is a universal possibility of salvation for each and every human being and that, for the same reason, there is a corresponding possibility of as many true religions as there are religions so transformed by God's love as to be constituted by it and representative of it.

Whether or to what extent any religion is true, even Christianity, is, in my view, always a theological question. But if the Christian claim to truth is valid, and if the same can be said for the fourth option, there is at least one true religion, and, because it is true, there can be many.

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The burden of the last chapter was to show that the case against exclusivism is exceptionally strong—and that this is true not only because exclusivism is an incredible theological position, being incapable of validation in terms of common human experience and reason, but also because it is deeply inappropriate to Jesus Christ. Implying, as it does, a double standard for obtaining salvation, exclusivism creates a form of the problem of evil that is insoluble. If it were true, the only inference from the fact that Christians alone are saved would be either that God is not good enough to want to save all others or that God is not powerful enough to make their salvation possible. Either way, the understanding of God implied by the assertion that Jesus is the Christ could not be consistently upheld.

If this argument is sound, we have good reason to look to some option other than exclusivism for the answer to our central question. It is by no means

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obvious, however, that it is to pluralism that we should look. We have seen, to be sure, that pluralists are wont to claim over against inclusivists that their position is the only consistent alternative to exclusivism. But there are difficulties with their argument for pluralism, not the least of which is why this claim itself should be thought valid (cf. Ogden 1988).

To see why I say this, we need to recall just what it is that Christians and theologians who contend for pluralism understand by it. I argued at the end of Chapter 1 that, contrary to what might be supposed from the recent statements of certain pluralists, the position they hold is not only that there can be many true religions, but that there actually are. Thus the assertion typical of pluralism is that Christianity is not the only true religion, but, in John Hick's words, “one of a plurality of contexts of salvation . . . within which the transformation of human existence from self-centeredness to God- or Reality-centeredness is occurring.” Such an assertion, Hick claims, is the “logical” (or “natural”) conclusion of the trajectory whose path can be traced “from an exclusivist to an inclusivist view of other religions” (Hick and Knitter, 23, 16, 22). But how valid is this claim?

In the earlier discussion of exclusivism and inclusivism as both forms of religious monism, I noted that the reason for their claim that Christianity alone is the true religion is the, for them, very good reason that it alone can be formally true. Because in their views the only religion that can be true in this sense is the religion established by God in the unique saving event ofJesus Christ, they can

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confidently assert that the Christian religion alone is true in this sense because there simply cannot be many ways of salvation of which the Christian way is only one. But, then, this is the assertion, common to both monistic views, that has to be countered if there is to be a complete break with monism, whether exclusivistic or inclusivistic. To counter it, however, in no way requires one to assert with pluralism that there actually are many ways of salvation of which Christianity is but one. All that one needs to assert is that there can be these many ways, even if, as a matter of fact, Christianity should turn out to be the only way of salvation there is.

For this reason. Hick's claim is unfounded. Pluralism is not the logical conclusion of a consistent movement away from exclusivism, but is an independent assertion to be evaluated on its merits. Exclusivism and inclusivism could both be invalidated without in any way validating pluralism as the answer to our question. Unfortunately, this is not the only logical difficulty with the typical case for pluralism. Among other fallacious arguments that pluralists sometimes offer is that genuine interreligious dialogue is possible only on the basis of a consistent pluralism. Thus Alan Race, for instance, commends “pluralism in the Christian theology of religions” because it “seeks to draw the faiths ofthe world’s religious past into a mutual recognition of one another's truths and values, in order for truth itself to come into proper focus” (Race, 148). But no such mutual recognition of one another’s truths and values is

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logically required in order for truth itself to come into proper focus. All that is necessary to this end is a mutual recognition of one another's truth- and value-claims as exactly that—claims to validity that are equally in need and equally deserving of critical validation in terms of our common human experience and reason. Implied by such recognition, no doubt, is the further recognition of one another as persons, who can make and validate such claims and who are, therefore, entitled to a distinctive kind of moral respect. But such mutual respect for one another as persons in no way depends upon asserting that the claims to truth and value of either person are valid claims. I can be wrong, and so can my partner; and yet both of us can and should be open to one another in genuine dialogue and in a common inquiry into the true and the good.

In short, the case for pluralism can no more be made by arguing for interreligious dialogue than by arguing against religious monism; and to reason in either way on the contrary supposition is to reason fallaciously. Pluralism is not the logical conclusion of a consistent movement toward the other religions, but is an independent assertion that must stand or fall on its own. Interreligious dialogue could very well be validated without in the least validating pluralism as the answer to our question (cf. Lochhead). Nor can validating it ever be easy by the very logic of such an answer. Whether any religion at all is true must, in the nature of the case, be more or less difficult to determine. We noted one ofthe principal reasons for this already in the first chapter, when we considered the procedures necessary to

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determine religious truth. Because these procedures require verifying the necessary implications of a religion for both belief and action, they unavoidably involve all the well-known difficulties of both metaphysical and ethical verification. For this reason alone, one might well hesitate to pronounce any religion true, much less a plurality of them.

But not only are there such philosophical difficulties; there are historical and hermeneutical difficulties as well. Every religion is a historical emergent, and it is available concretely, asjust this or that specific religion, only in and through the religious praxis of some particular social and cultural group. Furthermore, every religious tradition is to some extent self-defining in that it specifies certain of its elements as normative for some or all of the others. But these normative elements, no less than all the rest, are thoroughly historical and are accessible as such only empirically, through historical experience and inquiry. Thus what counts as formally normative for a particular religion both in principle and in fact must be determined historically by actually encountering its particular tradition. And such determination may very well be complicated by the fact that there is no consensus in the religion about what is normative for its tradition. Indeed, its tradition so-called may turn out to be little more than a plurality of religious traditions, each specifying what is normative for it in a somewhat different way. Yet even after one determines what is to count as normative for a religion, there remain the by no means minor difficulties of rightly interpreting its norms so that they can perform their proper

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function. No norm can function as such except by being somehow understood; and yet how it is to be rightly understood is likely to be even more controversial than whether it or something else is really normative. This would be true, in fact, even ifthere were agreement, as there is not, that religious claims are properly analyzed as existential claims and as therefore having an existential kind of meaning and truth. Exactly what it means to say this, and thus how religious claims are and are not related to other logically distinct kinds of claims, continue to be matters of controversy among philosophers and students ofreligion as well as theologians. In any event, whether what this or that specific religion offers as its answer to the existential question is true cannot be determined merely philosophically. As also in part a properly historical and hermeneutical question, it can be answered only by actually encountering the specific religion and rightly interpreting what it asserts or implies about the meaning of ultimate reality for us.

Naturally, to be a religious believer is one and the same with claiming either explicitly or implicitly that one's own religion is true. But, aside from the fact that this is simply one more claim to religious truth, whose validity also has to be determined along with that of every other, all that its being validated would allow one to affirm a priori about the truth of any other specific religion is that it either can or cannot be true. Thus, even assuming that, from a Christian standpoint, not only exclusivism but inclusivism also could be shown to be invalid, the most that a Christian could possibly know, prior

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to actually encountering the many religions and rightly interpreting them, is not that they in fact are true, but only that they at least can be true.

Of course, it is not particularly difficult to undertake the empirical study ofreligion, or ofspecific religions, and to do this, as we say, comparatively. In this way, one can learn, for example, that human beings quite generally, after a certain amount of social and cultural development, seem to feel the need for some sort of radical transformation of their own individual existence in relation to ultimate reality. Thus not only Christianity but all of the other axial religions as well are evidently addressed to this need and present themselves asthe means ofjustsuch ultimate transformation. But learning only this about the axial religions entitles one to make no more than a purely formal statement about them—to the effect that they all exhibit the same essential structure both in focusing the existential problem in the individual person and in seeking to solve it by radically transforming her or his self-understanding. Such a statement in no way excludes, but obviously allows for, a wide range of material differences, not excluding substantial contrariety and contradiction, between one religion and another in their respective understandings of human existence. The great difficulty for pluralists, however, is to get beyond this purely formal statement in a reasoned way. If there are many true religions, the similarities between them, notwithstanding all their differences, must be material as well as formal, matters of content as well as of structure. In other words, with whatever differences in concepts

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and symbols, they must express substantially the same self-understanding, the same way of understanding ourselves in relation to others and the whole. And this means, for reasons explained in the first chapter, that they must also have substantially the same necessary implications, both metaphysical and ethical. But if my own experience of interreligious dialogue is any indication, it is likely to remain exceedingly difficult, even after the most extensive study and first-hand experience of another person’s religious claims, to knowjust where, or even whether, one's own religion expresses the same religious truth.

This has come home to me with particular force during the course of my involvement in Buddhist- Christian dialogue. For over a decade now, I have been engaged, in one way or another, in extended discussion with Buddhists, especially with certain members of the Kyoto School of Japanese Zen Buddhism. As this discussion has deepened, I have become increasingly convinced that, for all of the obvious differences between the formulations of our respective positions, there are striking similarities between the understanding of human existence for which my Zen Buddhist partners typically argue and what I as a Christian theologian understand to be our authentic self-understanding as human beings. I realize, of course, that my understanding of authentic existence is not the only Christian understanding of faith in God, any more than their understanding of authenticity is the only Buddhist understanding of the realization of emptiness. But fully recognizing that the discussion between us is

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only part ofthe larger Buddhist-Christian dialogue, I am still struck by the convergence between their self-understanding as Buddhists and my own as a Christian. In fact, when I apply my existentialist equivalent of a pragmatist criterion of meaning— according to which different formulations that make no difference in how one must understand oneself to appropriate them are insofar only verbally different—I strongly incline to think thatsuch real differences as there may be between our two self-understandings can only be rather subtle and hard to pin down.

Thus I am quite unable to share the view often expressed by other Christians and theologians that, despite their obvious formal similarity as axial religions, or religions of ultimate transformation. Buddhism and Christianity are deeply opposed understandings of human existence. Contrary to the claim that, for Buddhism, the human problem is focused on our sheer existence as fragmentary beings, I find that Buddhist talk ofthe deepest level of human suffering identifies it as an ignorance of our essential condition which is not merely a matter of fate, but for which we are each in some way responsible. To this extent, there is a clear parallel, if not a convergence, between the Buddhist understanding of suffering as the consequence of ignorance and the Christian understanding of death as the wages of sin. This is clear, at any rate, if we avoid not only a naturalistic misunderstanding of what Buddhists mean by ignorance but also a moralistic misunderstanding of what Christians mean by sin. Provided sin is understood, as it

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should be, not as moral transgression, but as the deeper refusal of one's existence as a creature of God, it is not merely one among the many options of our freedom, but our “natural" condition, the basic state of existence, or way of understanding ourselves, in which we ordinarily exist. Thus, in the Christian understanding, existence in sin and death is, in its way, a matter of destiny as well as of freedom, even as, in the Buddhist view, existence in ignorance and suffering is, in its way, a matter of freedom as well as of destiny.

Likewise, I do not find that the Buddhist understanding of authentic existence is the kind of ahistorical and world-denying understanding that it is commonly taken to be. On the contrary, I see my Buddhist colleagues being at least as concerned as Christians are with the whole range of human needs, of body and mind as well as of soul and spirit, and hence as turned toward the world and history, not away from them. Nor am I able to explain this simply by their being modern women and men who have been shaped as much as modern Christians have by historical consciousness and by the resultant sense of responsibility to transform the entire setting of human life, social and cultural as well as natural. As much as they have indeed been influenced by modern secularity, they have the confidence, which I take to be entirely justified, that the deepest roots of their commitment to transforming social and cultural structures as well as individual persons lie in their own religious tradition as Buddhists. Just as for Christians any living faith cannot fail to be active in love, so for Buddhists the wisdom that overcomes

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our ignorance must inevitably express itself in compassion. Given a modern sense of historical responsibility, then, compassion, like love, must concern itself not only with meeting human needs within societies and cultures, but also with transforming their basic structures so as to overcome injustice and oppression (see Habito; Ray).

Consequently, when my Buddhist colleagues talk of what it means to exist authentically, they seem to point to something like the same genuinely dialectical, or “paradoxical,” way of existing to which I seek to point as a Christian. On the one hand, it is an existence in radical freedom from oneself and the world, in which one is inwardly released from clinging to them in ignorance and suffering or in sin and death; on the other hand, it is an existence in radical freedom for oneself and the world, in which one is inwardly released to affirm and to further them in compassion or in love (see Park). True as all this is, however, I still have not been able to conclude that Buddhism and Christianity are really only different formulations of the same understanding of existence. Subtle as their real differences may be, there nonetheless seem to me to be such; and up to now, at least, I have not found any way of reducing them. This becomes particularly clear whenever I consider not only Buddhist and Christian self-understandings as such, but also their metaphysical implications. Of course, one has to be careful at this point to distinguish clearly between the metaphysical implications of a given self-understanding and the metaphysical consequences of some particular

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formulation of it. Just as a self-understanding is one thing, its explicit formulation in particular concepts and symbols, something else, so the necessary implications of a self-understanding ought never to be confused with the consequences that follow, given certain concepts and symbols in which it happens to be formulated. This means, among other things, that one must always allow for the possibility that what are widely supposed to be the metaphysical implications of a self-understanding are not really that at all, but are simply the metaphysical consequences of a particular way of formulating it, or ofthe assumptions made in doing so. Thus, for example, it is at least arguable that the traditional Christian doctrine of the impassibility of God follows, not from a Christian self-understanding as such, but rather from certain metaphysical assumptions about who God has to be that were made more or less uncritically by the church fathers who classically formulated it. But even if one allows that something like this may also be the case in Buddhism, the fact remains that what are widely supposed to be the metaphysical implications of Buddhist self-understanding are really and significantly different from what I, for one, take to be necessarily implied by a Christian understanding of existence.

This is clear enough from the differences indicated by Christian theism, on the one hand, and Buddhist nontheism, on the other. Whereas for Christians, the self-understanding of faith necessarily implies the reality of God as the sole primal source and the sole final end of all things, for

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Buddhists, the self-understanding ofwisdom is held to imply, rather, the dependent coorigination of all things and their essential emptiness. So, according to Christianity, the world and history develop irreversibly from the past into the future, and the relations between things are external as well as internal, grounding real differences between them. According to Buddhism, on the contrary, nothing whatever is or can be independent and self-existing, because everything is of necessity interdependent with, and interpenetrated by, everything else. But if this is the ultimate metaphysical truth about things, then any development from the past into the future is reversible, and either there are no relations between things at all or else all relations between them are internal only, and any differences between things sufficient to ground differential thought and action with respect to them are ultimately delusive.

With this, however, the rationale for responsible thought and action in and for the world clearly seems to be undercut. For if it need not imply that we are to be concerned for nothing at all, it does imply something hardly less stultifying of responsible thought and action—namely, that we are to be equally concerned for everything. Thus there at least appears to be a basic contradiction between the kind of metaphysical monism that Buddhist selfunderstanding is widely supposed to imply and this self-understanding as such, especially the development of it by contemporary Buddhists who are clearly as concerned as modern Christians are with responsibly making history and transforming the world (cf. Ogden 1990).

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whether or not such a contradiction is real, or how it is to be resolved, is not my present concern. I have gone into it only to explain why, on the basis of my own continuing encounter with Buddhism, I am still not able to say that its understanding of existence is materially the same as Christianity’s. For all of theirstriking similarities, they still seem to me to be really different, at least as they have been formulated up to now. Therefore, I have more and more found myself agreeing with the observation of Clifford Geertz that "what all sacred symbols assert is that the good for man is to live realistically; where they differ is in the vision of reality they construct” (Geertz, 130). Clearly, a serious difficulty in making any case for pluralism is coming to terms with this difference.

There are still other difficulties, however, pertaining to the evidence and argument that at least some pluralists offer to support their claim that there are many true religions or ways of salvation. Thus John Hick, notably, assumes that the evidence appropriate to validating the claim is provided by “the fruits of religious faith in human life,” and so by the extent of individual and social transformation effected by the different specific religions (Hick and Knitter, 23-24). As a matter of fact. Hick appears to feel confirmed in his pluralistic position primarily on the negative ground that none of the axial religions, taken as a whole, proves to be superiorto the others when they are all assessed in terms of their effectiveness as contexts ofsalvation or liberation, both individual and social (Hick 1989, 297- 380). But this way of arguing for the equality, or

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“rough parity,” of the axial religions, and hence for pluralism, will not stand up under close scrutiny.

This is clear, first of all, from the fact that there is no valid inference from the so-called fruits of religious faith in human life to the reality or presence of such faith itself. It is indeed the case, for reasons explained in the first chapter, that any religious faith as an understanding of human existence has necessary implications for ethical action as well as for metaphysical belief. And its ethical implications may very well extend to transforming the structures of society and culture as well as to the transformation of individual moral behavior. But to do what faith would do, or to act as faith would act, is not necessarily to exist in faith itself, any more than believing what faith would believe is possible only for a person of faith. And this is true even if we prescind altogether from the case of insincere or hypocritical action. Even if one does what faith would do, or acts as it would act, in all sincerity, one may or may not understand oneself in faith and act on the basis of it instead of something else. Thus, in the well-known passage from his correspondence with the Corinthians, Paul can say of even the apparently most radical expressions of love that one can give away all that one has and even sacrifice one’s life, and yet "have not love” (1 Cor 13:3). I realize, naturally, that what Paul and other Christians can say about the radical transformation of faith working through love applies, in the first instance, to Christian faith, rather than to religious faith more generally. But I have the distinct impression that much the same thing could be said about

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the radical transformation to which any of the other axial religions points in its own understanding of human existence. Although any such trans¬ formation must indeed bear fruits both in individual moral behavior and in the structures of society and culture, it itself takes place solely in our innermost self-understanding, and, therefore, can never be either simply identified with its fruits or validly inferred from them, however validly they can be inferred from it.

There is another closely related objection to this whole way of reasoning. Granted that individual and social changes can indeed be observed to occur in the context of a specific religion, how does one rule out the possibility that changes thus associated with the religion have nonetheless occurred independently of it or been effected less because of it than in spite ofit? One of the striking things to me about the behavior of human beings in extreme situations is that their specific religious or philosophical affiliations seem to make relatively little difference. During the Nazi time in Germany, for instance, the resistance against Hitler included persons of the most diverse religious and philosophical persuasions, even as the same was true of those who passively supported his regime or actively collaborated with it. I submit that the case is not likely to be different in other more or less similar situations familiar to all of us. But, then, what force can there be in arguing for the truth of a specific religion from changes occurring in either individuals or societies in its particular context?

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The still deeper difficulty, however, is with the underlying assumption of any such argument— namely, that the truth of a specific religion could be logically determined from its effectiveness as a context of salvation or liberation. To make this assumption is to fall into a serious logical confusion—as serious, indeed, as if we were to suppose that the truth of ordinary judgments of fact could be determined from their effectiveness in getting themselves sincerely believed. To believe ever so sincerely that a factual judgment is true is to do nothing whatever from which its truth could be determined. If it is true, it is not because it is believed, but because it is worthy of belief, even if no one ever believed it; and whether this can or cannot be said depends entirely upon whether or not it can be validated by the procedures appropriate to verifying judgments of fact. In the same way, one may most sincerely understand oneself as a specific religion calls one to do without providing even the least reason for thinking that the religion is true. If it is true, it is not because one so understands oneself, but because one ought so to understand oneself, even if one were to fail to do so; and whether this is or is not the case entirely depends upon whether or not one's self-understanding can be validated by the procedures appropriate to determining religious truth. For this reason, the extent to which a specific religion is effective in securing even the most committed adherents is logically irrelevant to validating its claim to be formally true.

Yet even if pluralists were to take account of this and were to support their claim only by

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evidence and argument appropriate to doing so, they would still face a fundamental difficulty in making their case. This is so, at any rate, on the assumption that pluralism is indeed to be distinguished from complete relativism, by which I mean the position according to which all religions are formally true. According to Alan Race, “the pertinent question mark which hovers over all theories of pluralism is how far they succeed in overcoming the sense of ‘debilitating relativism’ which is their apparent danger.” Thus Race explicitly rejects “the view that all faiths are equally true, or of equal value, or are ultimately saying the same thing,” and insists that pluralists, in their way, in the way of genuine interreligious dialogue, must participate “in the search to distinguish the more from the less profound, the more from the less ‘true’ religious belief” (Race, 90, 143f.). In his clear intention to avoid complete relativism. Race seems to me to be representative of most of his fellow pluralists, even if, as I noted in an earlier chapter, a few of them have claimed, perhaps carelessly, that all religions are equally true or adequate. In any event, what I take pluralism to mean is significantly different from relativism in allowing that there at least can be specific religions, or ways of salvation, that are false rather than true.

But if pluralism does indeed allow this, there is no way of making a reasoned case for its claim that there are many true religions except by employing, either tacitly or openly, some norm of religious truth. If at least some specific religion can be false, no specific religion can be judged to be true without

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reason, which is to say, without appropriate evidence and argument. Necessarily entailed by such argument is some norm for judging true religion, whether it be the formal norm already given simply by some specific religion or theology or, alternatively, a norm derived from philosophy, in the sense of critical reflection on all religions as well as on all secular forms of culture. This means that pluralists must either employ such a norm and give a convincing account of their reasons for doing so or else content themselves with making no more than the purely formal statement about religions that, as we saw earlier, falls far short of their pluralistic claim.

To recognize this is to understand why pluralists who want to avoid relativism cannot finally escape what they often seem to regard as a difficulty peculiar to inclusivism—the difficulty, namely, of taking some one specific religion to be formally true, and hence the norm for determining all other religious truth. To be sure, they do have the alternative of looking to philosophy to provide their norm, rather than to some specific religion or theology. But here, too, there are difficulties. For one thing, any sound philosophical analysis itself confirms that it belongs to the very nature of a religion to make or imply the claim to be formally true. It thus claims to be the formal norm not only for all other true religion, but also for any other existential truth whatever, including that of philosophy. Even if one allows, then, that a philosophy, also, makes or implies the claim to tell the truth about human existence, and hence to be formally normative for determining the truth of specific religions, one cannot simply ignore their

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claim to be formally true. On the contrary, one must allow that the truth in any philosophy not only has to confirm that in any religion, but also has to be confirmed by it. So, pending the inquiry necessary to validate both of their claims to truth, one cannot look simply to some philosophy to provide one's norm, but must assume, rather, that any specific religion is as much the source of normative judgment as its object, while any particular philosophy is as much the object of such judgment as its source (see also Ogden 1986, 84-93).

Quite aside from this difficulty, however, there is no essential difference at the crucial point between employing a norm derived from philosophical reflection and employing the formal norm of some specific religion or theology. In the first case as much as in the second, one takes some explicit understanding of human existence to be formally true, and hence the norm for determining all other religious truth. In either case, the essential difficulty remains, and there is no escaping it as long as one wishes to claim in a reasoned way that any religion is true. That this is so is made abundantly clear by the development over the years of the case for pluralism. Early on in this development, pluralists like John Hick contended for their pluralistic position by arguing for a “theocentric,” as over against an “ecclesiocentric,” or a “christocentric,” understanding of Christianity and the other religions. Indeed, the “Copernican revolution" in theology for which Hick originally called involved “a shift from the dogma that Christianity is at the centre to the

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realisation that it is God who is at the centre, and that all the religions of mankind, including our own, serve and revolve around him” (Hick 1973, 131). But as many critics have been quick to point out, a God-centered norm for determining the truth of specific religions is still “Ptolemaic,” or is only slightly less so than a Christ- or church-centered norm. To argue that many religions are true because or insofar as they serve and revolve around God is still to make some one religion or philosophy normative for all religious truth. This is so, at any rate, as long as the term “God” is understood in anything like its ordinary Christian or theistic signification and is not taken in a purely formal sense as synonymous with “ultimate reality.” Provided “God” represents one way among others of thinking and speaking about ultimate reality, which is materially different from, even if formally similar to, other such ways, a “theocentric” understanding of religions must be as problematic in principle as a christocentric one. Thus the theocentric pluralist is still faced with the same essential dilemma: either to avoid employing a norm of judgment, and thus never to get beyond the purely formal statement that all religions claim to be true; or else to make a reasoned judgment about their truth, but only by employing, openly or tacitly, some one of them, or some philosophy, as the norm required to make it.

Recognizing this, as well as other difficulties in theocentrism, pluralists have more recently argued their case in other terms. Hick himself now speaks, not of “God-centeredness,” but of “Reality-

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centeredness,” thereby acknowledging that “God” is but one of two main ways in which the different axial religions think and speak about "the Ultimate” or “the Real” (see Hick 1989; Hick and Knitter, 16-36). But important as this development certainly is in contributing toward a more adequate, because less tendentious, conceptuality in which to think and speak about religions in a purely formal way, it does not overcome the essential difficulty in making the case for pluralism. Either the concept of “Reality-centeredness” is purely formal and heuristic, in which case it provides no norm for judging the truth of religions, and thus leaves pluralism a sheer unsupported assertion; or else it serves to support pluralism by providing such a norm, but only because it has the material and determinate sense given it by some one specific religion or philosophy.

The same is true of the other recent development in which Paul Knitter especially has taken the lead. Influenced, as he is, by the theologies of liberation, he has increasingly argued for “a liberation theology of religions." Whereas in his 1985 book No Other Name? he described the evolution in Christian attitudes toward other faiths as moving from ecclesiocentrism to christocentrism and then to theocentrism, he has since called for them to move on to “what in Christian symbols might be called ‘kingdom-centrism,’ or more universally, 'soteriocentrism.’” “For Christians,” he argues, “that which constitutes the basis and the goal for interreligious dialogue, that which makes mutual understanding and cooperation between the religions possible (the

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‘condition of the possibility’), that which unites the religions in common discourse and praxis, is not how they are related to the church, ... or how they are related to Christ, . . . nor even how they respond to and conceive of God, but rather, to what extent they are promoting Soteria (in Christian images, the basileia)—to what extent they are engaged in promoting human welfare and bringing about liberation with and for the poor and nonpersons” (Hick and Knitter, 187).

Here, again, it seems to me that many of the intentions of pluralists are sound and that they have a contribution to make to our common theological task. In fact, I am particularly appreciative of Knitter’s efforts because, in a rather different way from Hick’s, they can help to develop a more adequate conceptuality in which to think and speak about religion and religions in a purely formal sense. The problem with the kind of existentialist conceptuality that I have developed and employed in these chapters is that it may be thought to isolate all that is properly religious from the specifically political aspect of praxis and culture with which Knitter and other liberation theologians are rightly concerned. By interpreting religion as explicit self-understanding at the level of primary culture, it allows well enough for the metaphysical and ethical implications of religion, but without making clear that its ethical implications always have a specifically political aspect. One value of Knitter’s expressly, although not exclusively, political understanding of “soteria ” is that it can help to clarify this, so that one can say, as I have stressed

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elsewhere, that the existentialist interpretation of religion must always be also its political interpretation (see Ogden 1982, 89-96, 148-68; 1986, 143-50).

But the point of Knitter's soteriocentrism is clearly more than any such purely formal point. Anomalous as it may seem for a pluralist to do so, he undoubtedly formulates the norm by which he proposes to judge the truth of all specific religions. If pluralism in his view is valid, it is because there is not only one religion that satisfies this norm, but many—many religions that are more or less equally engaged in promoting human welfare and liberating the poor and oppressed. As a matter of fact. Knitter goes so far as to make this norm "the basis and goal for interreligious dialogue” and the “condition of the possibility” of "mutual understanding and cooperation between the religions.” But this only shows the more clearly that in this respect, at least, the difference between his soteriocentric pluralism and the inclusivism that he rejects is not a difference in principle but only a difference in fact. Whereas in- clusivists appeal to the salvation constituted by the event of Jesus Christ, Knitter appeals to the salva¬ tion to be realized by following the historical Jesus in his service of God’s kingdom, and thus in promoting liberation and transforming the world (Knitter 1988, 33-48). In both cases, however, the norms appealed to are provided by some one specific religion or philosophy, which is thereby made normative for all the others. There is, to be sure, this significant difference between Knitter's Christian pluralism and Christian inclusivism: whereas for inclusivism there not

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only is but can be only one religion that is formally true, for pluralism there not only can be but are many religions that are true in this sense. Thus Knitter is express in saying that it is “for Christians” that the norm of religious truth is as he formulates it, leaving open the possibility, which inclusivism precludes, that persons of other faiths express substantially the same truth even while validly formulating different formal norms forjudging it. But important as this difference certainly is, it in no way alters the fact that Knitter employs a norm of judgment as surely as inclusivists do and that his norm, like theirs, is derived from some one religion or philosophy, as distinct from any of the others that may express substantially the same religious truth.

The moral ofthis whole development seems obvious. Claims of pluralists to the contrary notwithstanding, pluralism in no way offers an alternative to employing some norm of religious truth, and thus to making some one religion or philosophy normative for judging all the rest. Provided that pluralism is distinct from complete relativism, there is simply no other way to make good its claim that more than one specific religion is formally true. The relevant question, then, is not whether a norm is to be employed, but only how: openly and critically, with the clear recognition that even one's norm may be problematic and need to be validated; or, rather, tacitly and uncritically, without allowing for the possibility that validating one's norm itself may also be required. And here, ironically enough, a pluralist like Knitter can speak of his norm as itself the “basis and goal for interreligious dialogue,"

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while an inclusivist such as Gavin D'Costa can allow that the "possibility and risk” of abandoning his Christian beliefs and even being converted "cannot be discounted if dialogue is genuinely open and trusting” (D’Costa, 121).

At any rate, it should now be clear that there are a number of difficulties with the case for pluralism and that they are sufficiently serious to make it doubtful whether it can be a valid answer to our question. Like exclusivism, it is logically an extreme position. This is evident from the fact that it counters exclusivism’s claim that there cannot be more

than one religion that is formally true, not with the contradictory claim that there can be, but with the contrary claim that there is, that there are many religions that are true in this sense of the word. The difficulty with extreme contraries on any issue, however, is that, while both cannot be true, both can be false. Therefore, it is entirely possible that pluralism's claim that there are many true religions is as false as the claim of exclusivism that there cannot be more than one, which, as we have seen, is the real meaning of its contrary answer to our question.

If the argument of this chapter is sound, one may well ask whether this is not, in fact, the case. But, then, one must look beyond pluralism as well as exclusivism for the answer to our question, as I propose to do in the concluding chapter.

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