1 of 1- John West
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Very Much Like a Human Being
In David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) Demea says to Cleanthes that he would rather be a “mystic” than an “anthropomorphite.” Cleanthes insists on thinking of God as very much like a human being. Demea resists this approach and, at one point, takes it to be incompatible with “that perfect immutability and simplicity, which all true theists ascribe to the Deity.”
It seems obvious to me that in this debate Aquinas would have sided with Demea against Cleanthes, for (like other classical defenders of the doctrine of divine simplicity) Aquinas thinks that, if there is a God who creates, if there is one who makes to be all that exists (apart from itself), one who exists by nature, then there have to be radical differences between God and creatures, some of which Aquinas tries to document when teaching that God is simple. Aquinas reasons that we cannot think of God as being something material and changeable. We cannot think of him as being one of a kind of which there could be others. And we cannot think of him as owing his existence to anything.
One might resist these conclusions (which, I repeat, do not amount to a “description” of God) by appealing to what the Bible says. After all, it sometimes speaks of God as though he were a material individual belonging to some kind (a father, a husband who has been cheated on, a woman in labor, a judge, and so on). Medieval theologians always take such ways of speaking to be exercises in metaphor. Many contemporary theologians would agree with them, though many of them do not. Many of them (the dissenters here) deny that God is simple in the sense that Aquinas thinks that he is. Why so?
Could it be that they are mesmerized by the formula “God is a person”? I suspect that many of them are, and that by God is a person they mean that God is an invisible being (like Descartes’s “I”), very like a human one, though lacking a body. If that is what they do mean, however, they are seriously out of step with what might be called the traditional Jewish/Islamic/Christian concept of God.
Brian Davies, Simplicity.
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Re: Very Much Like a Human Being
Alexander wrote:
While I agree with a lot of what Brian Davies says here, I think the dissenters have a point and he misses it. Some defenders of classical theism go so far in the "mystical"* direction, that it becomes difficult to see how their God can: have a will to be obeyed, call a people to himself, hate sin, forgive the sinner - these "personal" (and, for Christians, very important) characteristics are what the dissenters fear is missing from the "mystical" view of God. They are not (or not necessarily) advocates of anthropomorphism. They are defending the ability to relate to God as a "Thou", a "someone" who can be addressed, not just as a transcendent "One".
This is exactly right. The truth is the reverse of Cleanthes accusation: the personal dimension of the human being—his "I," his freedom, his spirit—is an ontological theomorphism of man rather than the personhood of God being a conceptual anthropomorphism of the divine. I think part of Davies's error here is thinking of "person" and "human being" as roughly synonymous so that "person" amounts to just another concrete kind, but this is not the sense in which Christian personalists insist that "God is a person."
- John West
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Re: Very Much Like a Human Being
Obviously I don't think a classical theist has to deny this [...]
I agree, on the condition that it doesn't require assuming terms apply univocally to both God and man.*
*I'm not sure even more “via negativa-influenced” conceptions of God need be impersonal. (I write this realizing you likely uphold a doctrine of analogy.) Like you say, mystics report having extremely personal experiences.
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