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Philosophy of Religion, Diablo Valley College , Dr. Peter Krey July 20, 2004

David Hume lays some heavy skepticism on people who believe in God. He writes in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion:

Our ideas reach no farther than our experience:

We have no experience of divine attributes and operations:

I need not conclude my syllogism: you can draw

the inference yourself.

Now after the first shock of reading such an argument, the question arises whether it is valid. First, it came as a relief to notice that there were two negative premises, and Hume may have been counting on the fact that few people know the rules that determine the validity of syllogisms. None are valid with two negative premises.

But that proves too easy a solution, because the first premise really needs to be translated into a positive universal.

No ideas are thoughts that reach farther than experience.

All ideas about divine attributes and operations are thoughts that reach farther than experience.

Therefore no ideas are ideas about divine attributes and operations.

Symbolized it becomes

No I are E. ———-EAE Figure II

All D are E ———-Valid Syllogism: Cesare.

———-No I are D.

Thus the only way to disagree with Humes‘ skepticism is to challenge his premises. The fact that there are a priori ideas show that they can come before experience and be independent of experience. Thus his first premise is untrue, and therefore the conclusion does not follow.

Another translation:

All ideas are representations of experience.

No divine attributes and operations are representationsof experience.

Therefore no ideas are about divine attributes and operations.

Here I use children’s books, the interference of pictures in deciphering hieroglyphic writing, iconoclasm, and incarnation to illustrate what Hegel means by bringing thought to the concept. I scanned the ten page study and hope that it is enjoyable reading.

(For some reason it is not coming in.)

Copy and paste the following URL address above and my piece will appear in a .pdf file.

http://peterkrey.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/img1172.pdf

Paul Krugman (New York Times, 8/1/08, Op Ed page A-23) put my position on global warming into words very well:

“While there’s a chance that we’ll act against global warming only to find that the danger was overstated, there’s also a chance that we’ll fail to act only to find that the results of inaction are catastrophic. Which risk would you rather run?”

I used to argue this point in the classroom using Pascal’s wager in the negative. The argument of the wager proper is based on probability and goes:

1. If you believe in God and there is a God, then you have eternal life.

2. If you believe in God and there is no God, then you do not have eternal life.

3. If you do not believe in God and there is God, then you do not have eternal life.

4. If you do not believe in God and there is no God, then you do not have eternal life.

Thus only your belief in God stands you the chance of receiving the eternal benefit. Pascal then argues for taking the risk and making that wager. He complicates his probability theory by his inclusion of infinites.

A wager could be seen as pretty paltry in terms of pledging your whole life on believing, having faith, and trusting God. Still like in the musical “Guys and Dolls,” a gamble was just the faith involved in taking the risk to marry a partner.

Taking the wager in the negative is like the positive one of the benefit of an infinite heaven and eternal life, because scientists say that it would take 65 million years to recover from a planetary eco-collapse.

Here’s the sentence: If we act against global warming because we believe the scientists and it is not a hoax that the human destruction of the CO2 cycle causes it, then there will be no catastrophe.

Here is the wager in shorthand:

1. If we act and it’s not a hoax and it’s not overstated, there will be no catastrophe.

2. If we act and it is a hoax and it is overstated, there will be no catastrophe.

3. If we do not act and its not a hoax and its not overstated, there will be a catastrophe.

4. If we do not act and it is a hoax and its overstated, there will be no catastrophe.

The third possibility here is the only negative infinite, because the duration of 65 million years of time would spell the end of the world as we know it. So it has to be avoided, just like belief in God has to be accepted as the only positive result of Pascal’s Wager.

Possibility 2. has the residual benefit of improving our environment, while possibility 4. has the negative one of harming our environment further. Pascal’s Wager in the negative shows that possibility 1. is the only responsible choice and possibility 3. is the height of irresponsibility. As Krugman asks, “Which risk would you rather run?”

Once in training for Cincinnati Vacation Church School and Day Camp (1969 or 1970), one of the counselors said, “Hey!” – standing up in the very motion of the word. His whole body was one with his instantaneous expression. Ever after watching his whole body standing right up in his word, I have had an appreciation for spontaneity.

I think the fellow was in a zone, because a body could not move that fast in ordinary time. I’ve known for a long time that we can make time go fast. Andrew Marvel’s poem “To his Coy Mistress” ends

Thus though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.[1]

That happens when we are really into something, having a good conversation, or experiencing something we like very much. But after reading W. Timothy Gallwey’s book, The Inner Game of Tennis,[2] I’ve now discovered that we can make time go slowly, when we get into the zone. Gallwey notes that there are 1,000 milliseconds in a second, when you are completely focused in the now (page 95). He also reports how Bill Russell described playing in the zone with the Boston Celtics. It was as if they were playing in slow motion (page 99). He could sense where every play would develop before it happened and felt that he not only knew every one of the Celtics players by heart, but even the opposing players, knowing what each would do. “We can be focused. We can be conscious.” he said (Page 99). At that special level, the milliseconds fill our now and it is not as if a short second goes right by.

I remember the slow-motion picnic in the movie, Bonnie and Clyde, especially because I experienced time changing into slow motion on the last day of one of our Vacation Church School Day Camps, when the children were playing king-of–the-mountain in the sand dunes of Jones Beach. We were grilling sloppy Jo’s, eating together, and feeding the children. When they started to play in the dunes, suddenly everything went into slow motion. I don’t think I was the only one who experienced it, because usually the bus drivers would push to beat the traffic home, counselors wanted to get the children back in the buses to get off. Suddenly everything went into what to me seemed like the transfiguration of our whole group, until time came back to its normal pace, and we all set about our chores to get the camp back to Coney Island.

I just revised what I thought was a contradiction between Luther’s concept of the whole person versus his threefold depiction of the self in the Magnificat. In reading Ernest S. Wolf, Treating the Self: Elements of Clinical Self Psychology, (New York: The Guilford Press, 1988), p. 47; Ernest Wolf and Heinz Kohut make a sharp distinction between the interpersonal and the intra-psychic self. Because Luther’s theology is concretely expansive, these kinds of nuances have to be taken into account. His threefold partition of the self, using the metaphor of the temple, belongs to his depiction of the deep self (Robert Bellah’s term), the intra-psychic self; whereas in speaking about the whole self, referring to St. Paul’s concepts of the flesh and spirit, he is describing the interpersonal or extensive self (again Bellah’s term). I believe the latter can also be referred to as the relational self, but that would not be the same as a group self, which would refer to some collectivity having some identity.

Thus I rewrote the last paragraphs of Blogging about the Soul from last month (June 25th, 2008).

March, 2005 Dr. Peter Krey, Berkeley, California SOLI DEO GLORIA!

Reading the wonderful Isaiah chapters again, I was impressed by something that began in the 40’s. I noticed a reversal of our secular assumptions. In prose of chapter 44, Isaiah describes the absurdity of idolatry – the same wood that is burnt to warm the people is used as fuel to bake bread, then used and shaped into an idol for worship.

That is a complete “fabrication” – to use the word in two senses. A self-deception made with one’s own hands and made with a confused mind.

Isaiah continues in poetry with verse 21:

Remember these things, O Jacob and Israel,

for you are my servant, I formed you.

You are my servant… I have redeemed you.

That means that we are the work of God’s hands, we are wonders, we are miracles, we are marvelously made, because we are formed by God, because we are God’s servants.

Idolatry places the focus on the work of our hands, an artifact, a fabrication, upon which we focus, rather than the envelope or radiance created by the divine, because we ourselves are the work of God’s hands.

The latter reversal can also be considered on other levels. This God is not a concept of human conceiving, but we are creations of God’s formation. Being the passive living sculptures made in heaven, makes us the purveyors of divine grace here on earth, because the divine active and passive do not make human beings passive and active – let me say it again: just because God is active and the human being passive coram deo, the human being is not passive coram hominibus, but in that forum and in the other fora (coram meipso et coram mundi) can be active on a whole new qualitative level. The person in that state of grace is mindful of the motion of happening in which being, doing, having, all play a role and the creativity involved is not given a reductionism to mere doing.

Thus if we consider taking the idolatry from the woodcarver or sculptor of Isaiah into the intellectual realm of religious conceptuality, i.e., our “God concept,” – then we do not conceive God as a fabrication for our self-deceptive comfort. God conceived us, and called us into existence. We are God’s concepts and God concepts, and not vice versa. The evidence lies in the wonder of this universe, its galaxies, black holes, nova, shining stars, our sun, this planet earth, and its silver moon and the wonder of life and love and redemption, that is not of our making, but presents itself as a given, a gift from the divine hand that made it.

Thus interpreting God as human projections of a father into the sky like Ludwig Feuerbach; or religion as an opiate of the people, because of its being a human fabrication or self-deception a la Marx – misses the whole wonder of what we are, the marvels of what God’s hand has formed and fashioned for us.

Isaiah is saying we cannot form God; God forms us, the God besides whom there is no other (43:11, 44:8b, 45:5, 14b, 21b, and 22b).

It would be interesting to study Luther’s faith creating God – the way Gerhard Ebeling presents it – and in what sense it does not violate these Isaiah’s passages as well as Karl Barth’s sensibilities.

Perhaps the line of reasoning would have to go this way. Faith is the power of God in us – faith is Christ in us giving us the conception of God, from having come to us from God in heaven. I would have to check this out.

Ebeling argues in his Lutherstudium Band III. (p 190 ff) that the scholastics divided faith into a pluralism of faiths: formata, actus, habitus, acquisita, infusa, above all, fides informis vs. fides formata. If faith justifies, Luther argued, St. Paul could never have spoken or understood faith in such a pluralism of forms.[1]

It had to be faith in a holistic form justified and not faith dissipated away in many different compartments.

Now here is why the Isaiah passage calls this Luther via Ebeling passage to mind. Luther writes that fides est creatrix divinitas, of divinity, not God, Ebeling argues. Faith creates divinity, because faith gives God the glory and it is impossible to do anything for God, except to make God our God. God shares Godself with us through faith. So in the power of God, divinity is created in us.

Not in person,

Not in substance, (194).

But in us. The justified has new life not in his/her person, not in se, but in Christ. The substance is in Christ. So by faith, God is making Christ become a reality in us. Jesus Christ is God becoming incarnate and human reality (197).

Thus reason, which cannot allow God to be God and cannot give God the glory, is overcome by faith – is killed (spiritually) by faith, dies by faith, and Christ is formed within us – and the incarnation is continued.

I can see from reading Ebeling again why I had such a high understanding of human activity subsumed into God, or really human beings, participating in divine action because of the reversal of faith and grace – that at the Wartburg Seminary Lecture they thought I was close to the Finnish Theosis.[2]

For example, in my Ebeling notes, I wrote: “There seems to be an overlap here, almost a reserve against Pelagianism. Human action and agency do not encroach on what is the divine prerogative; but faith reaches down and lifts the person, without subject, agent, free will, etc. into the divine action of God – that is, however, the furtherance of incarnation, or continuous creation” (p 26).

Thus in my “Grounding Missiology in Lutheran Confessions” lecture at the Wartburg – I can see that this study became a part of me and I was not even conscious that I was drawing on it.

Now this is not idolatry at all, to say that our faith makes Christ be within us, and I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

Diablo Valley College, Philosophy of Religion, Dr. Peter Krey

The Phenomenological Account of Religious Experience,

from Michael Peterson, William Hasker, Bruce Reichenbach, and David Basinger, editors,

Philosophy of Religion, Second Edition, (Oxford University Press, 2007), pages 56-63.

For Merold Westphal there are not merely three ways of experience, perception, and interpretation for religious experience. His is the holistic phenomenological way:

Self-transcendence, according to Westphal (p. 57) is the life-long task of life. He is looking at the whole self as we experience ourselves vís a vís the divine other. He does not just narrow himself down to how our senses operate in perception and experience. Life relating itself to itself relates itself to the other. An encounter with the sacred Ultimate mediates the old, false self and the new true self. The scope of religious experience is increased, like seeing the whole person from Spinoza’s sub species aeternitatis which means from the view-point of eternity. In the encounter with the sacred Ultimate the false self is left behind and the enlightened, mindful, and compassionate new self is entered. Westphal shows that there are various limitations, like false selfish prayer that is a “burning preoccupation with the self“ (p. 60) and on the other hand, there is the genuine article. The completely or totally other is God. Three ways to open oneself genuinely for the other and in the other person are:

A. To be open to the face-to-face encounter

B. To give the other the space to express themselves

C. To not see the other as an object, but to be with the

other in the I-Thou relationship

Westphal claims encounter with divine transcendence brings about de-centering self-transcendence. By “de-centering” Westphal means (p. 61 bottom) that we do not always need to be the center

and make others peripheral, but we can do the opposite: make ourselves peripheral and place others at the center. A de-centered Christian might see self-transcendence in Buddhism.

img051

This is the relevant excerpt from Philip and Peter Krey, Luther’s Spirituality, (New York: Paulist Press, 2007), pages 98-99.

We want to treat the words one after another: the first, “my soul.” Scripture divides the person in three parts.[1] St. Paul says in the last chapter of Thessalonians, “May the God of peace sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound…at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”[2] Each of these three parts as well as the whole person is further divided into two parts, called spirit and flesh. This division is not of human nature but of human qualities. That is, according to nature, there are three parts–spirit, soul, and body–which can be altogether good or bad, that is, flesh or spirit, which is not now our topic. The first part, the spirit, is the highest, deepest, and noblest part of the person, through which one can obtain untouchable, invisible, and eternal things. In short, it is the home of faith and God’s word. David speaks of it in Psalm 51: 10: “Create in me a clean heart…and…a new and right spirit,” that is, a righteous and unwavering faith. On the other hand concerning the unbelievers, he says in Psalm 78:37: “Their heart was not steadfast toward God, they were not true to his covenant.”

The second part, the soul, is this same spirit according to nature, but is seen to have the separate function of making the body alive and working through it. In the Bible it is often spoken of as life, because the spirit can live without the body but not the body without the spirit. Even in sleep we see the soul living and working without interruption. It is its nature not to understand the incomprehensible things but only that which reason can understand and consider. And it is reason that is the light in this house. Where the spirit in faith with its brighter light does not enlighten, the light of reason rules and it is never without error. It is too inferior to deal with godly things. The Bible attributes many things to these two parts, such as wisdom and understanding–wisdom to the spirit and understanding to the soul–and likewise hatred, love, delight, outrage, and the like.

The third part is the body with its members. Its work draw upon and apply what the soul understands and the spirit believes. To use an example from the Bible,[3] Moses built a tabernacle with three different courts. The first was called the holy of holies; here God dwelt and in it there was no light. The second was called the holy place; here stood a lampstand with seven arms and seven lamps. The third was the outer court; it was open to the sky and to the sun’s light. This is a metaphor for the Christian person, whose spirit is the holy of holies, God’s dwelling in the darkness of faith without light. For the Christian believes what is neither seen, nor felt, nor comprehended. The soul is the holy place with the seven lamps, that is, every form of reason,[4] discrimination, knowledge,[5] and understanding[6] of bodily and visible things. The body is the outer court that is open to everyone so that everyone can see what one does and how one lives.

Now Paul asks the God of peace, to make us holy, not in part, but entirely–through and through– so that the spirit, soul, and body may all be holy.[7] There would be much to say concerning the reasons for a such a prayer, but in brief, when the spirit is no longer holy, then nothing is holy. The greatest battles and the gravest dangers take aim at the spirit’s holiness, which stands only in the pure and simple faith, because the spirit does not concern itself with tangible things, as was said. False teachers come and draw the spirit outside. One proposes this work, the other that way of becoming righteous. When the spirit is not protected here and is not wise, it will come out and follow, and it comes upon the outer works and ways and thinks that it will be righteous in this way. Immediately faith is lost and the spirit is dead in God’s eyes.

June 25^th 2008 About the soul

Reading about the Soul Theorem in mathematics makes me think of the soul as such and whether or not it is an antiquated concept.

In the New York Times a few days ago,[1] I read the obituary of the mathematician, Detlef Gromoll, who worked out the ‘soul’ idea in his mathematical research. His Soul Theorem prepared some of the groundwork leading to the proof in 2003 of the Poincaré Conjecture, one of the most famous and intractable problems in mathematics. This proof was worked out by the Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman. (In essence, this conjecture says that any shape that does not have any holes and fits within a finite space can be stretched and deformed into a sphere – although Henri Poincaré was conjecturing about shapes and spheres in a higher dimension.)[2]

In the Soul Theorem published in 1972, Dr. Gromoll and Dr. Jeff Cheeger studied the properties of certain surfaces that could have flat regions or curves like the outside of a sphere but not regions shaped like saddles. “They found that the properties of such surfaces, infinite in extent and existing in any number of dimensions, could be deduced from a finite central core region.”[3]

Dr. Cheeger said that it was Dr. Gromoll who suggested calling this finite region the “soul” of the object, because it captured the essence of the infinite expanse around it. “Just like inside a person,” Dr. Cheeger said.

Dr. Lawson called it “a phenomenally beautiful theorem.”[4]

So far the article.

Interestingly enough, in Gestalt Therapy the person can also be represented as a sphere with a core region. Fritz Perls in Gestalt Therapy and his Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, both books of 1973, has a psychological anthropology that fits well with a holistic point of view. Philosophical anthropologies can be dualistic, tri-partite, or holistic, i.e., mind and body; mind, soul, and body; or the whole person, the totus hommo, the total human being in Martin Luther’s mature theology.

In alignment with the latter, Fritz Perls envisions a whole person or a self as a sphere with outside surfaces and an inner core. This perspective is like that of Martin Luther (1483-1546), who derived his concept of the total person from the Hebrew. For the whole person, the concepts of body, soul, and mind merely refer to the perspective from which one holistic person is being viewed.

For Perls the core of the self is where the four emotions explode, not tearing a person up, however, but integrating the person, as in the contained explosions driving the pistons of an finely tuned internal combustion engine. For Perls the four emotions involved are love, joy, fear, and grief, if I remember correctly.

If I can apply Gromoll’s soul theorem, then it does not matter whether the bodily form of a person is apple shaped, pair shaped, hour glass, or a person is a mesomorph, ectomorph, or what have you, the soul theorem could view the person as a sphere and the in-most self of that person, or of that self, as the region of the soul “capturing the essence of the infinite expanse around it.” Thus I am using Gestalt Therapy and Luther’s Hebrew understanding of the holistic person to explicate Dr. Cheeger’s point, “Just like inside a person.”

Understanding the soul from the holistic perspective may be more helpful than the Cartesian dualism of the body and mind or the tri-partite division of the body, soul, and mind of much philosophy and theology. A time came when no one knew what the soul was and the “soul” in the Bible tended to be translated by the word, “life.” We no longer tried to “save souls” in ministry, but save lives and present people with abundant and eternal life via the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I myself, pretty much, stopped using the word “soul.”

Then teaching philosophy with Socrates and Plato forced me to acquaint myself with what they meant by the term. Socrates did not believe that the body was the real person, but that the soul was. What good is it to keep polishing a shoe (the body), if your foot (the soul) inside it, is festering?[5] Why live with a worse self if you could live with a better self?[6] “Know yourself” Socrates commanded and also said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” I loved the way he challenged the Athenians in his Apology when he was on trial: “Ye men of Athens, are you not ashamed that you give more attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honor, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your souls?”[7]

Before Socrates the soul was considered a shadow, a breath of life, that was sometimes consulted after death, if their ghosts still hovered about, but the body was considered the real person. Socrates taught that the soul was the real person, not the body. In the holistic account both are part of the unity of the whole person and neither is disparaged, whether formerly the body or now the soul.

In the time of Socrates, they believed that there were disembodied souls in heaven waiting for a new birth, upon which occasion they could enter another body. This recycling of souls is called metempsychosis. In those days in Greece, they debated whether it would take twenty bodies or an infinite number of bodies to wear out a soul. In this kind of an argument, the soul must have been quite generic. It could have been universally real, but could not have been a really unique individual person. According to Nicholai Berdyaev, the Russian existentialist, Plato never did grasp the particular. For him it merely spelled the copy of an eternal form.

But a perfectibility of the soul, which we might call its greater maturity, was understood as possible. When the soul had died and gone to heaven it already knew everything, all the wisdom of heaven. Now in the theory of metempsychosis, it waited there to enter another body, and did so when a new baby was born. In the birth trauma, however, the soul forgot everything that it knew in its pre-existence and the whole of its life was then involved in a recollection of what it had forgotten. With each bit of dying, new insights and new maturity in knowledge and virtue could be achieved, until the body died again and the soul would regain omniscience and perfection in heaven.

For Aristotle, the soul was the form of the body. Although Ockham’s razor would be an anachronism, we could say that Aristotle used it on Plato’s theory of forms. (William of Ockham was born in 1280 C.E., while Aristotle died in 322 B.C.E., thus William of Ockham was born 1,602 years after Aristotle.) Aristotle also argued that forms could not be external to objects and persons. Forms for Aristotle were internal and dynamic. There were no heavenly realms filled with eternal forms, or souls, for that matter, and he shaved those realms a way, arguing that there was only a natural world, and we were smack in the middle of it.

The soul for Aristotle was the form of the body, internal and dynamic, because matter and form were required for substances, which themselves were composed of essences and accidents, the whole of it moving or maturing from the potential to actual teleology of the four causes.

Thomas Aquinas would accept Aristotle but not his position that the soul was not eternal. I believe that St. Thomas sometimes followed Plato or Biblical revelation, where Aristotle became problematic. St. Thomas combined the soul with the body and the body with the soul, but saying that for persons “it is a high dignity to subsist in a rational nature” and that “the person is what is most perfect in all of nature.”[8] When he cited Aristotle, he also said that the soul was the form of the body, “only the word ‘form,’” and here I’m citing Emonet, “is not to be understood in the sense of outer shape. It means inner, dynamic, formative, ‘principle’ (concrete basis), the molder of matter….‘the form of a natural body having life in potency,’ …the ‘first act of an organized natural body.”[9] (Thus when I spoke of pair-shaped and apple shaped bodies, I would have been misrepresenting Aristotle.)

But note how Aristotle’s “inner, dynamic, formative, ‘principle’” is somewhat like the central core region from which the surface properties of the sphere, “infinite in extent and existing in a number of dimensions could be deduced,” i.e., in the soul theorem.

I do not think that the controversy of whether the soul is more real than the body or the body is more real than the soul applies to a holistic anthropology, because the person is seen as a unity, with which even St. Thomas agrees.

Because Luther’s theology is concretely expansive, different nuances need to be kept in mind. I believe that his teaching about the whole person, the totus homo, applies to interpersonal psychic realities of the extensive self, and his tri-partite presentation of the spirit, soul, and body in the Magnificat, plummets the intrapsychic space of the deep self.[10] For the latter, he uses the three courts of the temple as a metaphor to explain it. (I will place a copy called “The Metaphor of the Temple and the Body, Soul, and Spirit in Luther” in my next posting so that you can refer to it.)

In terms of St. Paul’s flesh and spirit orientations, Luther speaks of the total person, interpersonally. Here he says, “This division is not of human nature but of human qualities.” He designates the intrapsychic as nature, the interpersonal as extending qualities of the self. Thus in the Magnificat (1520-1521) he presents the intrapsychic, threefold division of the spirit/soul/and body, while he describes the interpersonal, extensive self from the holistic perspective.

In the intrapsychic dynamics of the self, he explains that the spirit is the noblest and deepest part of the human being. The soul is the same as spirit, according to nature, but is seen to have a separate function of making the body alive and working through it. Wisdom belongs to the spirit, understanding to the soul; and the soul is the seat of the emotions, as well as being the part where reasoning takes place.

The outward body and all its members has the work of drawing upon and applying what the soul understands and the spirit believes. At this point Luther uses the metaphor of the three courts of the temple to explicate the spirit, soul, and body.

I think the long and the short of it is, that the whole person is saved, body, soul, and spirit – to use Luther’s terminology, and a kind of physicality will not be lost, if for the resurrection of the body, we follow St. Paul’s discussion of heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, sown as earthly bodies and raised as spiritual bodies (See 1 Corinthians 15:35-49).

June 5, 2008

Comment and Question for my Attributes of God Lecture:

Thank you for your article. How do you view Maimonides' use of absolute equivocation
in conjunction with his via negativa? I ask this because in his use of the via negativa,
Maimonides seems to possess some positive, non-equivocal knowledge of God that allows
him to judge that a given attribute should be discarded from God. Javier

I’m not familiar with the concept of Maimonides’ use of absolute equivocation, let alone in its conjunction with his via negative. Perhaps the former relates to some holding that he very subtly undermined Jewish theology to favor Aristotle’s philosophy, others that he undermined the philosophy of Aristotle in favor of the Torah’s theology. Remember that he says, “The Torah speaketh in the language of the sons of man” (Peterson, 3^rd Edition, page 138). I wonder if he considered the reasoning and logic of Aristotle superior to that human language? Others feel that he held a double truth like Averroës.

Donald Palmer (page 125) quotes Marvin Fox from Interpreting Maimonides: Studies in Methodology, Metaphysics, and Moral Philosophy, (page 21), Maimonides “records the duty to know God as the very first commandment….Yet when we examine it in the total context and full development of his own analysis, we seemingly must conclude that this ideal is not only impossible, but empty of content and meaning.”

Be that as it may, he is adhering to the Shema Y’Israel: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one!” (Deut. 6:4) Maimonides states that God is not compound and denies multiplicity and thus he certainly is not Trinitarian, like Christians, who speak of the relationality and perichoresis among the Three Persons of the Divine Majesty. Rublev, in his famous icon, places the chalice between them to signify the most holy communion in the unity of the Three Persons of the Trinity.

With that, I don’t know how John Scotus Eriugena could have championed the via negative (see Palmer pages 115-117). But he was Neoplatonic and tried to get at the source and ground of all existence, (to use the language of Tillich). God did not exist, because God was the source of all existence and more than existence, not to be set equal to the things that merely exist.

Maimonides was not Neoplatonist, but Aristotelian, and thus God cannot have affect (cannot be compassionate), because of the Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover? God cannot have a body, but then he says again and again that God is powerful, willing, and knowing. But he sees these activities of God as different from God’s essence. That fire cooks, burns, and melts things does not tell us what fire is. All those different things that fire does, go back to its simple heat, but we do not understand fire, I think Maimonides would say. Reason, similarly, is one faculty and yet it acquires the sciences, arts, and many crafts. Its activity must be differentiated from its essence and you cannot know who the captain is from describing his ship. (The captain and his ship are Maimonides’ analogy for the relation of God to the world that God governs.)

If God’s power, knowing, and willing are activities and God’s essence, which has no “thatness” or quiddity, lies beyond, what can be said? Perhaps Maimonides belief in some overflow:

We apprehend further that the existence of this being, which is its essence, suffices not only for His being existent, but also for many other existents flowing from it, and that this overflow – and unlike that of heat from fire and unlike the proceeding of light from the sun – is an overflow that, as we shall make clear, constantly procures for those existents duration and order by means of wisely contrived governance. Accordingly we say of Him, because of these notions, that He is powerful and knowing and willing (Peterson, page 141).

Perhaps Maimonides breaks through Aristotle at this point, like the Neoplatonists, having faith in the One who is in complete and utter darkness for our reason and comprehension, as Luther would say. (See Luther’s Commentary on the Magnificat.)

I would say, because to bring in the faith of Martin Luther, I have already left Maimonides, that God is not compassionate and loving, because God is the source of all compassion and love; God is not a body, because God is the source of all bodies and is more than body; that the Godhead is not a person, but more than a person, Three in One, because of the Incarnation of the Second Person, begotten, not created, and thus the uncreated Word or Logos, that created all things. Because of the Incarnation, we speak of the Three Persons, knowing, however, that God is beyond number.

I know I did not answer your question, Javier, but from these random thoughts I rehearse, perhaps you will see a little further. Just look at the rapture Augustine experiences with his mother, Monica. He predated Maimonides and John Scotus Eriugena:

St. Augustine conversing with his mother, Monica as related by Peter Brown from Augustine’s ninth book in his Confessions:

There we talked together, she and I alone in deep joy….and while we were thus talking of His Wisdom and panting for it, with all the effort of our heart we did for one instant attain to touch it; then sighing and leaving the first fruits of our spirit bound to it, we returned to the sound of our own tongue, in which words must have a beginning and end….What we said is this: “If to any man the tumult of the flesh grew silent, silent the images of the earth, sea, and air, and if the heavens grew silent, and the very soul grew silent to herself, and, by not thinking of self, mounted beyond self; if all dreams and images grew silent, and every tongue and every symbol – everything that passes away… and in their silence He alone spoke to us, not by them but by Himself: so that we should hear His Word, not by any tongue of the flesh, not in the voice of an angel, not in the sound of thunder, not in the darkness of a parable – but that we should hear Himself . . .should hear Himself and not them.[1]

I see Augustine explaining their rapture using the via negative.

Rereading your question, let me say one more thing: if Aristotles’ reason relies on the univocal, then the mathematization of language through logic results. But mathematics is a sub-class of logic. Without the equivocal, language loses its ability to communicate, or so I interpret Wittgenstein. Maybe the uncertainty principle is constitutive here to make room for faith. That would be Kant taken way out of bounds. But Maimonides absolute equivocation may reach farther than univocal reasoning.

Just for language, which I am very interested in: children are asked, “Who wants ice cream?”

One answers, “I do.”

Then the other children cry, “So don’t I. So don’t I.” meaning that they want some, too.

Other Books referred to and used here:

Michael Peterson, William Hasker, Bruce Reichenbach, and

David Basinger, editors, Philosophy of Religion, Third Edition, (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Donald Palmer, Looking at Philosophy, Fourth Edition,

(New York: McGraw Hill, 2006).

Cited by Palmer:

Marvin Fox, Interpreting Maimonides: Studies in

Methodology, Metaphysics, and Moral Philosophy, (University of Chicago Press, 1990), page 21.