THIRTEEN
In God: A Biography, Jack Miles, a former Jesuit, cautiously situates his subject in literature: “I write here about the life of the Lord God as—and only as—the protagonist of a classic of world literature; namely, the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. I do not write about (though I certainly do not write against) the Lord God as the object of religious belief.” (1995, 10) Miles does not want to offend or to be perceived as a blasphemer. He resolves to discuss the character God rather than God.
Whereas Augustine worried that he would fail to refer to God, Miles worries that he will refer to God. Augustine tries to secure reference with theology. Miles tries to avoid reference with literary theory.
IMMUTABILITY
The Old Testament seems to provide Miles with ample material for an action-packed biography. But if God is immutable, as maintained by Augustine and the medieval tradition which culminated with Thomas Aquinas, then God’s life is not composed of a succession of events. Everything is in the present for God—an instantaneous whole. As Boethius (480–524) wrote in his prison cell:
Eternity, then, is the total and perfect possession of life without end, a state which becomes clearer if compared with the world of time, for whatever lives in time lives in the here and now, and advances from past to future. Nothing situated in time can at the one moment grasp the entire duration of its life. It does not as yet apprehend the morrow, and it has already relinquished its yesterday; and even in your life of today, you humans live for no more than that fleeting and transient moment. So anything subject to a status within time, even if it has no beginning and never ceases to exist, and even if its life extends without limit in time, as Aristotle argued is the case with the world, is not yet right accounted eternal; for it does not grasp and embrace at the one moment the whole extent of its life, even if that life is without end. It does not yet possess the future, and it no longer owns time past.
(2000, 110–11)
An immutable subject makes for a boring life story. Miles points out that the bulk of the Bible presents God as acting in time: creating, destroying, cursing, and rejoicing. He dismisses the doctrine of immutability as an artificial import from Aristotle.
However, Aristotle’s metaphysics only became available to the medieval schoolmen in the second half of the twelfth century. Augustine’s doctrine of an eternal God had already been entrenched for eight hundred years. Although Augustine was influenced by Plato through Plotinus, Augustine’s account of God’s relationship with time is a Christian innovation.
Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274) was responsible for integrating Aristotle’s philosophy into Christianity. He mainly used Aristotle’s distinctions and principles to consolidate extant Catholic dogmas. Aquinas was a moderate. He looked for the truth that lies between extreme opinions. He was not interested in importing Greek novelties. Aquinas’s aim was to achieve an overall synthesis that would stand up to learned challenges from the Moslems, Jews, and heretics. He faces paradoxes with equanimity: “Since faith rests on infallible truth, and since the contrary of a truth can never be demonstrated, it is clear that the arguments brought against faith cannot be demonstrations, but are difficulties which can be answered.” (1929, Ia.I.8) Aquinas’s conservativeness outraged Bertrand Russell:
There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading. I cannot, therefore, feel that he deserves to be put on a level with the best philosophers either of Greece or of modern times.
(1945, 463)
Regardless of how Aquinas should be ranked, he had astounding success with his theoretical unification. After a period of resistance, Aquinas’s teachings became orthodoxy. He is the only individual mentioned in the 1917 Code of Canon Law. Echoing the Second Vatican Council, the 1983 Code says priests in training should take Aquinas “in particular as their teacher.”
Aquinas acknowledges that the doctrine of immutability requires that one treat biblical descriptions of God as metaphorical. Augustine had already discussed passages in which God appears to change his mind: “Then the word of the Lord came to Samuel: ‘I repent of having made Saul king.’” (1 Sam. 15.10–11) Augustine handled such passages by making a distinction between God changing his will and God willing a change. A father who schedules different children to sit at his right during the week’s dinners is not changing his mind each day. Similarly, God’s will that Saul take a turn as king does not mean he has changed his mind when Saul’s time was up.
According to Aquinas, the will of an immutable being changes from now to then only in the way that an obelisk changes from being thick at the base to being thin at the tip. God is impassible; nothing can cause God to do anything. This is guaranteed by God being fully realized; whichever property he can possibly have, he actually has.
Although God cannot have most emotions, he does have knowledge. God’s omniscience reinforces the point that God makes no decisions; he already knows what will happen.
IS GOD ALIVE?
If life requires change and God is immutable, then God cannot be alive. He could be a force, like gravity. But gravity is not a fit subject for a biography.
Thomas Aquinas boldly argues that God is supremely alive. Organisms are alive by virtue of a principle of movement lying in themselves. They are “automobiles.” Since God is the cause of everything, he has life in the highest degree.
One may suspect that Aquinas is committing the genetic fallacy of inferring that the origin has the same properties as the outcome. Astronomers and biologists agree that the sun is the origin and sustainer of all life on the earth. The sun controls the movements of the earth and all the other planets of the solar system. But none of this confers any degree of life upon the sun.
Aquinas pictures God as a knowing maker of the whole universe. Aquinas’s proofs of God’s existence treat the universe as a big object. He asks simple questions: Where did it come from? What keeps the universe going? According to Aquinas, God wittingly organizes his creation and attracts everything toward himself.
Aquinas’s thesis that God is supremely alive also grates against his sympathy with negative theology. This principle only permits negative descriptions of God. “God is wise” only means that God is not stupid, not foolish, not ignorant. We can only apply positive properties to the material things of which we have experience. “Alive” designates a positive property.
The difficulty of saying God is alive is not restricted to theologians. When Jack Miles says God is alive, he wishes to be construed as saying “According to the Old Testament, God is alive.” That is why Miles feels free to ignore history when writing God: A Biography. Miles’s book is a fictionalized biography. If the Old Testament turns out to be accurate, then this make-believe chronicle of the life of God would be a helpful guide to God’s actual life. Would it be about God? A pretend biography that coincidentally matches the life of Aquinas would not be about Aquinas. Similarity is not enough. But if the Old Testament’s accuracy was due to the source it claims for itself, then there would be an appropriate causal connection between Jack Miles’s use of “God” and God. Miles would have inadvertently written a real biography of God.
Aquinas thinks that we can know “God is alive” as a literal truth. The hitch is that we cannot comprehend the state of affairs that makes the statement true. Consider a girl who is informed by her father that she has two brothers who are not brothers of each other. Although she is not in doubt about the revelation, she is puzzled as to what “it means.” She futilely tries to draw a family tree that could generate this outcome. She accurately interprets the problem as a weakness of her imagination, not a reason to doubt the revelation that she has two brothers who are unrelated to each other.
TIMELESSNESS AND ETERNITY
In A History of π, Peter Beckman chronicles how π was first assumed by mathematicians to be a rational number and then came to be known as an irrational number. But π did not undergo any real change. Each intrinsic property of π is essential to π. Since π cannot have a property at one time and not at another, π is immutable.
Believers in a timeless God think he is much like a number. God possesses all his properties essentially. God cannot change his mind or stop doing anything. As a perfect being, he cannot change for the better or change for the worse. He is absolutely simple and so cannot gain or lose parts. Facts about God can change—but only in virtue of changes in things other than God. For instance, God is no longer honored by animal sacrifices made by the Jews. But this is a change in the Jews rather than a change in God. God can only acquire new properties in the attenuated sense that numbers acquire new properties.
The timelessness of God has grammatical reverberations. The “is” in “π is a transcendental number” is tenseless. To criticize a mathematical thesis as “out of date” is a grammatical joke. The “is” of mathematics is never given a tense. Similarly, the debate about the nature of God gets played out at the level of syntax. When Friedrich Nietzsche puts “God is dead” in the present tense, he is taking a swipe at ahistorical theology.
Perhaps Beckman will next write The Geography of π. After all, the wheels and buildings that are designed with π occupy space. Once again, remarks about the location of π must be interpreted as indirect comments about the material things that have been affected by π. If God is like a number, then “Where is God?” is a defective question. Augustine’s City of God could not be about God’s residence.
But Aquinas thinks “Where is God?” has an answer; namely, “Everywhere.” Since God is in all locations, God cannot travel. Instead of thinking of God as timeless, Aquinas pictures God as in a big Now unflanked by a past or future. God cannot move through time as we can. In some circumstances, Aquinas uses this static quality of divine time to solve problems in much the same way as believers in a timeless God. For instance, when trying to show that foreknowledge is compatible with freewill, Aquinas will talk as if dynamic time does not apply to God.
Yet when Aquinas approaches other issues, such as potentiality, he assumes God’s knowledge and power gets altered by the passage of time. Time narrows the field of possibilities. God can help a woman retain her virginity but cannot restore her virginity. Thus, God’s power is conditioned by time.
Thomists work hard to find consistent interpretations of Aquinas’s remarks. But I suspect that he is caught by an underlying schizophrenia in the language of time. This double nature has been exposed bit by bit since the middle ages. It was first fully exhibited by a British philosopher writing seven hundred years after Aquinas.
FLOWING TIME VERSUS STATIC TIME
Generally, children abandon philosophical questions after failing to make any progress in answering them. There are a few exceptions. Like Aquinas, John McTaggart (1866-1925) was a precociously abstruse boy, shambling about in a cloud of ruminations about the Almighty. Unlike Aquinas, McTaggart became a boy atheist. This caused consternation until McTaggart’s schoolmates decided he was deranged.
Surprisingly, McTaggart combined his atheism with a belief in immortality. This conviction was based on mystical experiences. McTaggart devoted his philosophical career to devising arguments that would yield the conclusions he took to have been independently revealed to him.
In 1908, he published “The Unreality of Time.” McTaggart points out that our words for time divide into two series. What he calls the A series is comprised of past, present, and future. McTaggart’s B series is comprised of earlier, simultaneous, later. He notes that the A series suggests a flow of time whereas the B series is static. What is in the future becomes present and then becomes past. The A series guides our emotions. After giving birth, a new mother exclaims “Thank goodness that is over!” She is pleased that her labor is in the past, not that her labor precedes a particular date. The A series also guides our actions. Knowing that the baby is scheduled to be fed at noon leads to action only when coupled with the belief that it is now noon.
McTaggart believes that the A series (past, present, future) is more fundamental than the B series (earlier, simultaneous, later). He defines “x is earlier than y” as “Either x is past when y is present, or x is present when y is future.” He then argues that the A series (and therefore the B series) is subjective. McTaggart agrees with Augustine that the paradox of measurement refutes the objectivity of time. But he thinks Augustine’s equation of past-present-future with the psychological series memory-perception-anticipation makes time viciously subjective. Time cannot vary from mind to mind. If your perceptual span increases from childhood, there is no corresponding change in the duration of the present. If there is time, there must be a single perspective from which all temporal statements can be harmonized. Since there is no such perspective, time is an illusion.
McTaggart offers a battery of intriguing arguments for the unreality of time. What binds them together is their exploitation of tensions between the A series and B series. Metaphysicians credit McTaggart for specifying the conceptual origin of a whole family of temporal paradoxes. In retrospect many earlier metaphysicians can be seen as responding to the disharmonies between the A and B series.
Aquinas generally writes in a way that makes the B series more fundamental than the A series. Most twentieth-century thinkers share Aquinas’s preference for the B series. They define the A series in terms of the B series—with the help of the demonstrative term “this.” Under one scheme “now” means simultaneous with this utterance, “past” means earlier than this utterance, and “future” means later than this utterance. Given facts about the speed of light and sound, it is natural for human beings to organize time in a past-present-future series. Think of how navigational concerns led us to develop the longitude-latitude system. This imaginary grid organizes complicated geographical facts. The relationships between the equator and the prime meridian can be studied in a precise mathematical way, just like the “logic of time” implicit in the A series. But the system is a useful fiction rather than an x-ray of reality.
The Pythagoreans took amenability to mathematical analysis to be the mark of truth. McTaggart takes the precision of calendars and stop watches to be a sign of a fabricated order. The order we “discover” is the order of a notational scheme that we project onto the world.
This conventionalism already had deep roots in Aquinas’s era. The medieval nominalists rejected Plato’s realm of universals and analyzed words as having no more behind them than custom. They believed we frequently misconstrue the hand of man as the hand of God. As we shall see in the next chapter, accusations of this kind of mistake easily escalate into charges of blasphemy and heresy.