God

GOD. - In the common acceptation, God is the supreme, infinite, eternal, absolute Being, the intelligent and free cause of all reality.

I. GOD IN DOGMATIC AND MORAL THEOLOGY.

The problem of God is at the center of all the problems of the world and of human life. Its solution is a demand of the spirit not only from the ethical-religious point of view, but also from the purely philosophical point of view. Leaving to others what concerns the idea of God in the history of religions and in the history of philosophy, we limit ourselves here to a synthetic "theological" exposition of that problem in the light of Catholic doctrine, which is divine Revelation rationally illustrated and developed. For reasons of order and clarity, the material may be divided into three points: knowability, existence and essence of God. But it must be noted at once that the three questions are distinct, not separate, and therefore it is difficult to treat one without implying the others.

I. KNOWABILITY

The Catholic doctrine on the knowability of God is clearly formulated and defined by the Vatican Council (sess. III, can. 2): "The same holy mother Church holds and teaches that God, the beginning and end of all things, can be known with certainty, through created things, by the force of the natural light of human reason." This definition is first of all a vindication of the dignity of human reason against every form of agnosticism and skepticism, from which modern philosophy, not excluding rationalism, has come. Furthermore, it moderates and corrects the pretensions of apriorism of every stripe, marking out the path by which reason can and must arrive at the knowledge of God, that is, the consideration of the world, which evidently presents the characters of a finite, conditioned, contingent being, and therefore of an effect wholly subordinate to a transcendent cause.

This is the nerve center of Christian theodicy, in which the flower of Hellenic philosophy, purified and reworked by the Fathers of the Church, meets with divine Revelation. Plato and Aristotle, although they had not reached the concept of creation, grasped the character of contingency in the cosmos and brought it to light through movement, multiplicity and the gradual limitation of things. By this path they sought to connect the world and its life to a transcendent Principle conceived as the supreme Good, the unmoved Mover, pure Act. But the link, more intuited than demonstrated, remained obscure and uncertain between an eternal God and a world that was also eternal. The best Greek philosophy lacked the clear concept of efficient causality, and therefore it either remained within the narrow barriers of dualism or later degenerated into pantheism, as is seen in Plotinus. Classical speculation thus has the appearance of an unfinished web: the completion is in divine Revelation, which in the first verse of Genesis illuminates the relationship between the world and God with the light of creation and of the realizing omnipotence of the first, eternal Cause, which draws the universe out of nothing together with time, which marks its rhythm through the ages. The creative act, which is the only reasonable solution to the problem of the relationship between the infinite and the finite against the absurdity of an irreducible dualism or of a pantheistic monism, offers the link of causality, which opens to the intellect the sure itinerary from the created to the Creator as from an effect to its own cause. This itinerary is traced in two places of Sacred Scripture: in ch. 13 of the book of Wisdom and in ch. 1 of St. Paul's Letter to the Romans. In both, the foolishness or the guilt is affirmed of those men who do not know how to raise themselves from the contemplation of the universe to the concept of God, the source of all created perfections. The text of Wisdom, more ample than the Pauline one, develops two motifs: one of a rather Hebrew character, which concerns power, the other of Hellenic taste, which refers to beauty. In all things there quivers a dynamism, which is a transforming and realizing force, a feverish tendency toward the enrichment of perfection and hence of being. Men foolishly stopped at these natural forces and divinized them, whereas they could and should have seen in them a reflection of the omnipotence of Him who is in an absolute manner and to whom all cosmic activity is subordinate as to a supreme artificer. Likewise, men enraptured by the beauty of creatures made idols of them, losing sight of Him who as supreme Beauty is the source of all imperfect created beauties. The foolish "through the visible goods of this world did not know how to intuit Him who is, nor, considering well the works (= the activity of creatures), did they recognize who was the artificer." Then the sacred text concludes categorically: "From the greatness and the beauty of created things one can by reasoning clearly intuit their Creator." Reflecting therefore on cosmic reality, the human intellect easily discovers in it a necessary relationship to God in these terms: from the movement of the interdependent forces of nature to their technical mover (τεχνίτης); from beauty manifold, fragmentary, variously participated, to the generating principle of all beauty, which is absolute beauty (καλλονῆς γενεατάρχης); from imperfect, contingent being, to being by essence (ὁ ὄν) and therefore from the effect to the first Cause.

St. Paul in ch. 1 of the Letter to the Romans compendiously sums up all these concepts in drastic form: "What can be known of God is manifest among men, because God himself has manifested it to them. Indeed, his invisible attributes, from the beginning of the world, appear clearly, through created things, by way of reasoning (νοούμενα)."

These texts, illustrated and commented on by the Fathers of the Church, justify the definition of the Vatican Council and contain in germ the whole doctrinal development of Christian theodicy, such as is found in the Scholastics and above all in St. Thomas Aquinas, who on the basis of those texts and with the help of solid rational principles, drawn from the best philosophy, constructs five arguments, by now classical, to prove the existence of God and his essential attributes.

II. EXISTENCE

Both in the texts of Sacred Scripture and in the definition of the Vatican Council examined above, we have not only the affirmation of the natural capacity of human reason to know God, but also the determination of the manner in which one can arrive with certainty at that knowledge. There is no talk there of immediate intuition, nor of interior experience, nor even of a priori dialecticism, but of a cognition acquired through the attentive consideration of created things, in which a relationship with God the Creator is implicit. In other words, it is a process ascending from effects to their proper cause, which philosophers call demonstration a posteriori and which can be expressed schematically in this syllogism: every effect postulates its adequate cause, but the universe is an effect, therefore it postulates its own adequate cause, which is God. The force of this demonstrative process lies entirely in the principle of causality. Once its ontological value as a law of being is granted, the various aspects of cosmic reality are studied, which reveal the characters of an effect, and one ascends by way of analogy (v. ANALOGIA) to the first universal Cause. St. Thomas in Sum. Theol., I, q. 2, a. 3, in the light of written and oral revelation, adopts these rational criteria for the elaboration of the famous "five ways," each of which grasps an aspect of created things. The diagram of the argumentation consists of an empirical observation of fact, which is connected with a general principle of a metaphysical character, in order to conclude with the affirmation of the existence of God.

The 1st way starts from the movement that animates all creation and strikes our attention before any other property. Movement is understood by St. Thomas not only in the physical sense (locomotion), as Aristotle does in this argument (Physics, VIII), but in the metaphysical sense, that is, as the passage from potency to act, a becoming (different from the becoming of modern philosophy). The world, then, is entirely a becoming, πάντα δέ (Heraclitus); now becoming is a passage from non-being to being: the germ, which is not a tree, becomes a tree by developing. Such a passage or development requires the causal influence of a superior being, because no thing can give itself what it does not have, by force of the principle of contradiction. If the world had the fullness of perfection, its becoming would be absurd. Therefore, through the interplay of causal influences among beings in movement, since an infinite process among things moved and movers is not possible, one must necessarily arrive at an immobile Mover, that is, at a supreme Being, who is not subject to becoming because he has the fullness of being and is the efficient principle of all the becoming of the world. Aristotle, remaining on the line of physical motion, does not succeed in establishing a first Mover who transcends movable things; but the consideration of metaphysical motion (passage from potency to act), according to the mind of St. Thomas, leads to a transcendental Act.

This fundamental argument reduces to absurdity the claim of all evolutionistic philosophy (from Hegel to Bergson), which resolves all reality (not excluding God!) into a perpetual becoming, that is, into the inconceivable identification of being with non-being. The definitive conclusion of the 1st way of St. Thomas is this: the dynamism of the world reveals its poverty (= potency) and its tendency toward the richness of being (= act); and since every movement requires the causal influence of a being in act upon a being in potency (omne quod movetur ab alio movetur), all that dynamism finds its reason for being only in a Being who moves without moving, that is, who is pure Act without any potentiality.

The 2nd way starts from the observation of the world's actualizing forces, that is, of the various efficient causes subordinated among themselves, which, precisely because of their mutual interdependence, do not have in themselves the reason for their being, but each is explained by the influence of another. Since an infinite process in a series of causes all subordinated is absurd, one must admit a first Cause, which, free from any influence, acts upon the entire series of secondary causes.

The 3rd way moves from the observation of the contingency of the world, whereby every created thing is not such as to require absolutely to be, that is, it does not have in itself the reason for its existence, but is conditioned by other things. Therefore there must exist an unconditioned, absolute Being, who has in himself the reason for his own being and for the being of all contingent creatures.

The 4th way rests on the qualitative consideration of the world and therefore of the different degrees of perfection of things, in which goodness, truth, beauty, life, etc. are evidently distributed according to more and less. If one thinks that every perfection is metaphysically reduced to a mode or reason of being, one can say that a thing is more or less perfect (good, true, beautiful, etc.) insofar as it is more or less being. But more and less, whether in the logical order or in ontological reality, imply a genetic, causal relationship to a maximum: therefore the things of the world, more or less good, more or less true, more or less beautiful, in a word more or less being, demand a Being who is most good, most true, most beautiful, and in short an infinite richness of being. This argument, with a Platonic flavor (cf. the dialogue Phaedo and the Symposium), has also recently been the object of lively discussions. Some have wished to see in it a demonstration with an idealistic tinge similar to that of St. Anselm, Descartes and Leibniz; others find in it a function of exemplary causality, but not efficient causality, in harmony with Platonism, which explains the relationship between subsistent ideas and the things of the sensible world by way of imitation and formal participation (μίμησις-μέθεξις). But St. Thomas, while admitting this Platonic exemplarism, with due cautions, emends it and integrates it here too, as elsewhere, in the light of Aristotelianism. In fact, in this 4th way he recalls the principle of Aristotle: "what is maximum in a given genus is the cause of all the things that are found in that genus." The reference to the function of efficient causality is evident, as appears moreover from parallel passages (cf. Summa contra gentiles, II, ch. 15). The basic principle of the 4th way is this: the limitation of the perfection of created things does not depend on their nature, because if a thing were good or beautiful by its own nature, it would be goodness and beauty without limits. Therefore the limitation depends on an extrinsic cause, which freely and efficaciously communicates some degree of its perfection to things. That cause is God, the supreme good, the supreme true, the supreme beautiful, that is, the supreme Being, principle and source of all being.

Finally the 5th way, which is within everyone's reach: it starts from the observation of the order and finalism of the world, which reduces the indefinite multiplicity of created things to a static and dynamic unity. Now order and end, especially in the irrational world, reveal a transcendent intelligence and Will, that is, a wise and free Cause, principle and end of the universe. The order and finality of the world cannot be reduced to a subjective idea of the human spirit, as Kant would wish, because the spirit itself feels its own subordination to an end, nor can they be attributed to chance or to a blind will (Schopenhauer) or to an unconscious immanent principle (Hartmann) unless one wishes to explain the enigma of the universe with an enigmatic play on words.

In conclusion, the five ways of St. Thomas, after seven centuries of criticism, retain all their firmness and their organic coherence for anyone who is convinced of the objective value of human cognition and who, distinguishing between thought and reality, knows how to grasp the harmony between the laws of the one and of the other. In summary, the 5 ways philosophically develop the itinerary traced in the Book of Wisdom and in the Letter to the Romans. The world has a dynamic aspect and a static aspect. The first, more evident, is movement, which must be considered in its genesis (from potency to act) and in relation to its end (1st and 5th way). The second, more hidden but more real, is the being and essence of things. Being must be considered in its origin as efficient realization (2nd way) and in its intimate reason as contingent or necessary (3rd way). Essence expresses the qualitative element of things according to a varying gradation (4th way). Both the dynamic aspect and the static aspect are revealed empirically through motion, multiplicity and variety, in which the intellect grasps the metaphysical reason of subordination, limitation, and participation, which in turn leads to a creative Cause, principle and end of all things, according to the thought of St. Thomas (Sum. Theol., 1st, q. 44, a. 1): "From the fact that a thing is being by participation, it follows that it is caused by another."

Within the ambit of Catholic doctrine there are also other proofs of the existence of God, which either reduce to one of the ways of St. Thomas or do not have their argumentative force.

a) The ideological argument (dear to St. Augustine): in the human intellect there are found truths with a character of eternity, necessity and absoluteness. Such a character can derive neither from the intellect nor from the things apprehended by the intellect, because the one and the others are contingent. Therefore there exists a supreme, absolute, eternal, necessary Truth, source and reason of the truths that are in us. St. Augustine, as Boyer has proved, with this reasoning of his, connected with the theory of illumination (v. AGOSTINO), wishes to demonstrate neither an immediate vision of God nor an intuition in the manner of the ontologists; he intends only to demonstrate that the immutable truths, which are in our mind and dominate it as an indispensable rule, require a transcendent Truth as subsistent intelligible Reality. But this argument, if it is not to fall into ontologism, must pass from the psychological sphere to the ontological order and resolve itself into a relation of causality between the human intellect, created things and God, which brings us back to the 4th way of St. Thomas. The human intellect, abstracting from the limit proper to the truth that is in things, forms for itself the idea of absolute truth (logical order) and from this rises to the concept of God as subsistent Truth (ontological order), from which derives, as from its own cause, the truth that is in things and that formulated in the intellect.

b) The eudaemonological argument: man has a natural and irrepressible tendency toward a supreme good, source of perfect happiness. Such a natural tendency cannot be vain, and therefore its term must exist, that is, a most perfect good (God). This argument too proves only insofar as a relation of causality is established between the limited good of creatures (from which the concept and desire of a supreme good arise) and God, infinite goodness.

c) The deontological argument, more cogent than the first two: the human conscience feels the force of a categorical imperative, of a moral law, which transcends man and all evidently contingent cosmic reality. Therefore there exists a supreme Legislator, who has impressed that law upon the human spirit.

d) The moral argument: the universal consent of the human race in admitting a supreme Principle, an object of worship among all peoples. It is impossible to reduce this constant and universal fact to a deception. Atheism (v.), sporadic and debatable in its meaning and its value, does not undermine the force of this argument.

Finally, the existence of God is proved by divine Revelation and by other supernatural facts that form part of the historical patrimony of humanity. A particular value is assumed, even before modern philosophers (Bergson), by the lived experiences of the great Christian mystics, which attest by way of psychological experiment to the divine presence of the Absolute, not as a vague and indeterminate reality, but as a personal reality, which makes dialogue possible.

III. ESSENCE

Reason, according to the already cited Council of the Vatican, can know with certainty the existence of God, but can hardly touch His essence. In any case it is absurd, within the sphere of the natural faculties, to speak of an intuitive or adequate cognition: the itinerary of the mind toward God is always marked by creatures, which claim His existence and reflect, however faintly, the perfections of His transcendent nature. The itinerary is possible by virtue of the principle of causality, which justifies and strengthens analogical cognition (v. ANALOGY), whereby the attributes of God are identified through the consideration of the perfections of the created order. According to our way of understanding, these attributes are, as it were, the essential properties of God, which nevertheless are really identical among themselves and with the essence, because of the absolute simplicity proper to Pure Act.

Consequently the radical question arises concerning the divine essence itself, which must be taken in a physical sense and in a metaphysical sense. The physical essence is equivalent to the complex of elements that specifically constitute a being, as, for example, the soul and the body in man. The metaphysical essence, on the other hand, is the first element, abstracted from all the others, without which a thing cannot even be conceived, e.g., animality and reasonableness in man. The metaphysical essence, which answers to the quidditative and distinctive definition of the thing, is like the root of all its properties. Christian philosophy unanimously sees the physical essence of God in the accumulation of all perfections, whereby He is the Infinite. Every pantheistic monism stands in antithesis to this doctrine, whether materialistic (Haeckel) or idealistic (Hegel), because it identifies or hybridly confuses the Infinite with the finite, the Absolute with the contingent. Likewise every limitation of the Infinite is repugnant, even if one attempts to justify it on account of personality, as Renouvier and a few others do.

But more delicate is the question of the metaphysical essence of God, on which there are disagreements even within the sphere of Christian thought. Remaining within the sphere of natural reason, the following conclusions are reached: a) there is no difference between physical essence and metaphysical essence, and therefore in both senses the essence of God is the accumulation of all perfections, that is, actual infinity. This is the thesis of Ockham and of the nominalists in general, to which the Scotist thesis is close, which is the following: b) the metaphysical essence of God is radical infinity, which implies the exigency of all perfections (Scotus); c) metaphysically the divine essence is intellectuality or, more dynamically, actual thought (John of St. Thomas, the Salmanticenses, Suárez, Gonet, Billuart, Gardeil and other Scholastics). This opinion, excluding immanentism, recalls the thinking thought of modern idealism; d) the divine essence is metaphysically the same subsistent being (St. Thomas, Capreolus, Molina, Vásquez, Billot and many modern theologians); e) the metaphysical essence of God is aseity, that is, the reason of ens a se (= underived being). Thus Buonpensiere with a few others; f) finally, some place the metaphysical essence of God either in goodness or in freedom.

Now an exhaustive evaluation of these theories would lead to an integral examination of the various systems with which they are connected. Here it suffices to make a few critical remarks, keeping in view the formal concept of metaphysical essence as defined above. Infinity, preferred by the nominalists and the Scotists, does not seem to answer to that concept, because it does not have the characteristic of a primordial element, but rather of a reflected notion, if it is true that infinity is equivalent to a mode of being. In God, therefore, being is conceived first and then its infinite mode, which is inferred from pure being (proper to Pure Act).

Nor is the position of those who place the divine essence in thought in act shown to be sound, because thinking is action and action, at least logically, follows being, as its presupposition and its source.

Aseity, moreover, answers not so much to the question of the essential constitution of God as to the question of His origin, affirming His non-derivation from another. An affirmation that holds only by recourse to the concept of fullness of being, of subsistent being. In short, the esse a se is proved by virtue of the esse per se; and then aseity is not first, but perseity.

Finally, the good is being insofar as it is desirable and therefore, even while being identified with it, is conceived after it. Freedom is a function of the will, which presupposes intellection and being. On the other hand, neither the good nor thought nor much less freedom can be conceived as the source of all the other perfections.

There remains therefore as more probable the thesis that upholds, in this too, the primacy of being: the metaphysical essence of God consists in the reason of subsistent being, of pure being. In fact the principal demonstrative arguments for the existence of God lead to the conclusive concept of God as pure Actuality, Pure Act, free from every shadow of potentiality. Now actuality is in relation to being: « eo magis aliquid est actus quo magis est ens ». God therefore is Pure Act insofar as He is pure being and as such is distinguished from all the created order, which is a composite of act and potency, that is, of being and essence: « Ipsa autem natura vel essentia divina est eius esse: natura autem vel essentia cuiuslibet rei creatae non est suum esse, sed esse participans ab alio. Et sic in Deo est esse purum, quia ipse Deus est suum esse subsistens » (St. Thomas, De veritate, q. 21, a. 5). Moreover the reason of subsistent being answers to the other exigency of the metaphysical essence, namely that it be the source of all perfections, because every perfection is radically reduced to a mode or degree of being: « secundum hoc enim aliqua perfecta sunt quod aliquo modo esse habent » (Sum. Theol., 1a, q. 4, a. 2). Accordingly the infinite perfections of God are, as it were, the expression of the unlimited fullness of His pure being: « Deus est ipsum esse per se subsistens, ex quo oportet quod totam perfectionem essendi in se contineat »: ibid.).

Thus human reason touches the apex of philosophical speculation concerning the nature of God; the light of Revelation confirms this conquest. In Ex. 3:14-15 God manifests to Moses His proper name expressed in four fragile letters: Jhwh (= Jahweh), 3rd person singular of the imperfect of the verb hwh (= hajah); so that Jahweh = He Who Is. Modern exegetes (Lagrange, Vaccari, Bea, Ceuppens) justify this interpretation (v. TETRAGRAMMATON) and demonstrate the originality of the Mosaic revelation. The Fathers understood the text in the same sense (v. St. Jerome, In Epist. ad Ephes., II, 3, 14, and St. Augustine, De Genesi ad litt., V, 16). With reason St. Thomas writes (Sum. Theol., 1a, q. 13, a. 11): « Hoc nomen qui est (Jahweh)... est maxime proprium nomen Dei... Non enim significat formam aliquam, sed ipsum esse. Unde cum esse Dei sit ipsa eius essentia et hoc nulli alii conveniat... inter alia nomina hoc maxime nominat Deum ».

The Church leaves the matter open to discussion, but has not failed to manifest its preferences for the thesis of St. Thomas, as appears from the 23rd of the Thomistic Propositions approved by the Sacred Congregation of Studies (1914): « Divina Essentia, per hoc quod exercitae actualitati ipsius esse identificatur, seu per hoc quod est ipsum esse subsistens, in sua veluti metaphysica ratione bene nobis constituta proponitur et per hoc idem rationem nobis exhibet suae infinitatis in perfectione » (AAS, 6 [1914], pp. 383-86).

Pietro Parente

IV. IN MORAL THEOLOGY

A supernatural morality evidently cannot do without the idea of God, and of a personal God who has in some manner manifested himself. Philosophy already demonstrates that a truly genuine ethics is not possible without God and that the only path to follow is from God to duty, not from duty to God, inasmuch as duty cannot derive its binding value except from the divine will or reason. The absolute dominion of the law over all consciences (absoluteness and universality of the law) is in fact inconceivable without a transcendent foundation. Man is a rational being; can such a being, without contradicting his nature, obey a law that does not appear evident to him, and of which he is forbidden even to ask the origin? Duties would then appear as unintelligible and brutal commands.

But the Christian moral system, before being Christian, is reasonable and therefore places in God the principle and the end (v. LAST END) of our morality, in God who pours out his complacencies upon those who love and serve him.

This God, just as he gave an order to the irrational world, animate and inanimate, has also given a law to the world of rational beings, which is the manifestation of his will (v. LAW). Although individual persons are left free to actualize their own energies to the extent and in the direction that each one pleases, each one will have to answer for himself in proportion to the degree of knowledge of God's will to which he has attained.

The vision of God and its privation will then be the supreme reward or the supreme punishment: vision of God which, though impossible in the natural order, has been made possible by the supernatural order (v. GRACE; PARADISE; REDEMPTION; REVELATION; SACRAMENTS).

The law of God, echo of his will, was in a first degree communicated to all through the impression of the natural law in hearts: then further through the promulgation of the Decalogue on Sinai; lastly through Jesus Christ, bringer to earth of a perfect code of morality.

This complex of norms regulates human activity with all that surrounds us and has relation to us; and before all else with God himself.

Once the knowledge of a personal God is in fact posited, endowed with moral attributes, and particularly with power and goodness, a disposition is born as it were spontaneously in the soul, made in turn of reverence, of filial fear and of love. All this is nothing other than the virtue of religion which embraces all those actions in which is expressed the recognition of God as supreme master and the submission of the creature to his dominion (v. ADORATION; WORSHIP; DEVOTION; OATH; ORATION; PRAYER; SACRIFICE; VOW, etc.).

This harmonious bond of the creature with its God, capable of notes so diverse and which can attain an indefinite intensity, has in Christian morality a further development in the theological virtues, whose object is no longer the acts that have a bearing on God, but God himself. In faith the Christian sees God as his creator, in hope he considers him as his last end; through love (v. CHARITY), he gives himself in order to unite himself to him in a more perfect manner.

All this can be read summarized in the 1st precept of the Decalogue: "I am the Lord thy God... Thou shalt not have strange gods before me" (Ex. 20:2-6; Deut. 5:6-10), reconfirmed in the Gospel: "The first of all is: Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; therefore love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind and with all thy strength. This is the first commandment" (Mk. 12:28-31).

Pietro Palazzini

II. GOD IN THE BIBLE.

In Scripture God is not presented in philosophical terms. God is the center and the soul of the Bible, not as an object of inquiry, but as the Creator and the master of the world and as the loving Father of his beloved.

The Old Testament has a very lofty concept of God. This already appears in the various names, among which the principal ones are: 'El, 'Elōhim, Jahweh; also fairly frequent is the form 'Elōah (cf. Is. 44:8; Ps. 17:32; Dan. 11:17 etc.), which designates divinity in general or is the proper name of the true God (cf. Deut. 32:15; Heb. 3:3 and often in Job). In composition with 'El ('Elōhim) or with Jahweh there appear especially the terms 'elōh = 'Most High' (Gen. 14:18-20, 22; Ps. 46:3; 77:56) and Saadaj (Gen. 17:1; 28:3; 35:11; etc.), usually translated 'Omnipotent', but whose etymological meaning is much disputed. Other designations are Qēdhā Jīšrā'ēl 'Holy One of Israel', an expression frequent in Isaiah, and 'Elōhē haš-šāmajim 'God of heaven', which is read in less ancient texts (Jon. 1:9; Ps. 135:26; Esd. 1:2; Neh. 1:4, 5 etc.). Finally, note should be taken of the use of calling God with the generic term Be'al "master", "Lord", which is ordinarily reserved for false divinities, and mēlekh "king". The first of these names is rarely applied to the true God (cf. Judg. 6:25), but appears in many theophoric proper names, such as 'Elba'al, Be'eljādhā' Be'aljāh etc.; the second is read in Deut. 35:5; Is. 6:5; 33:22; 43:15; Jer. 48:15; Ps. 5:3, etc.; sometimes it is specified with reference to the chosen people ("king of Jacob", "king of Israel"), or with adjectives that determine the majesty ("great king", "eternal", "of glory", etc.). In the Septuagint the term Κόριος "Lord" is much used, which in the New Testament will usually be reserved for the Son of God.

In the Bible, besides the various divine attributes, the purest monotheism is attested. In the New Testament it is maintained in absolute form, notwithstanding the perspicuous testimony concerning the Trinity of persons. And it stands out even more in the Old Testament, where the trinitarian mystery is only vaguely shadowed forth, while there is often polemic against pagan idolatry, especially in the more recent books (Wis. 14:13 ff.), but also in more ancient texts, particularly in the Letter of Jeremiah and in frequent very energetic affirmations of the great prophets (Is. 40:19, 20; 44:13-19; Jer. 10:3 ff.; Ez. 6:4, 5; 14:6 ff.; Dan. 3:12 ff.). In the minor prophets, even in the most ancient (Am. 2:4; 4:13; 5:8 ff.; 9:2, 5 ff.; Hos. 4:12; 9:10; 13:4), the same faith is found.

Moreover, even those who point to other religious forms for the origins of the Hebrew people (animism, totemism, demonism etc.) admit prophetic monotheism. Against them it can be observed that certain idolatrous deviations or cultic deformations are to be judged as such, even in the most ancient texts, and not as indices of a presumed religious evolution. Furthermore, monotheism is already found in the patriarchal times in a very clear manner (Gen. 18:25; 24:3; Deut. 4:35; 39; 6:4). Today less insistence is placed on the various local designations (such as "God of Bethel" in Gen. 31:13 etc.), exploited as signs of a supposed polytheism; they are only the memory of ancient sanctuaries or of particular portentous events. And even non-Catholic authors (W. Eichrodt) recognize that the various theophanies or angelophanies in no way contradict the monotheistic idea. The expressions "angel of Jahweh", "face of God", "name" or "glory of Jahweh", etc., indicate nothing other than the direct manifestation of God or, very rarely, the indirect one by means of an angelic envoy of his.

Sometimes the Bible deals in a practical manner with the problem of God's existence and resolves it with the principle of causality (Heb. 11:3; Rom. 1:20; Wis. 13:1-15:19; Ps. 18:2; Job 12:7 ff.; Jer. 10:11; Is. 37:16; 40:7). Usually the demonstration is based on the cosmological argument. The theological concept most developed or most inculcated in the Old Testament is that of God the Creator (v. CREATION) and of Providence, particularly with regard to the chosen people. Despite the many anthropomorphisms (v.), there is no lack of texts that describe in a surprising manner the spirituality and the divine essence. The most famous is that of Ex. 3:14, where the profound interpretation of the word Jahweh is given, by which God is described as "He who is by essence" (v. ASEITY).

Angelo Penna

III. GOD AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES.

Under the name of Supreme Being (Höchstes Wesen, Supreme Being, Etre Suprème, etc.) religious ethnology commonly understands the supernatural being who, in the beliefs of the individual present-day primitive peoples, has traditionally, or has acquired, ontological pre-eminence with respect to the other entities or figures (mythological, animistic, manistic, etc.) of the respective religions, summing up in himself various distinctive characteristics such as great antiquity, omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, creativity. These faculties and attributes are as a rule lacking, individually or in their totality, in the remaining figures of primitive religions, and, converging in the Supreme Being, they often distinguish him clearly from those, conferring on him a pre-eminent place in animological conceptions and thus the dignity of a supreme deity.

The reality of such a belief as an original and autonomous element of primitive cultures — that is, apart from any ancient or recent derivation from the monotheistic religions of peoples of high civilization, and in particular from the influence of Christian missionaries — was long unrecognized. This happened partly because of the persistent poverty of accurate and reliable information about the so-called "peoples of nature," and partly because of the a priori skepticism, within cultivated circles, regarding the intellectual capacity of such peoples to arrive spontaneously at such elevated animological concepts as were presupposed necessary for the recognition of a supreme god. Such an attitude on the part of historians and psychologists of religion, which prevailed throughout the entire second half of the last century and beyond, was based among other things on the uncontested axiom that crude and rough forms of material and social culture of ancient humanity must necessarily be associated with equally rough forms of spiritual life. An axiom that erred not in logic, but in the arbitrary definition of the "primitiveness" of beliefs, conceptions not properly such being presented from time to time, and illustrated, as "primitive," in the progressive search for a primum spirituale subjectively, and therefore fallaciously, understood ("psychologism"). The reporting, already in the 19th century, of the beliefs of primitives in a personal Being with typical traits of a true and proper supreme deity, first among some tribes of the Andaman Islands and of southern Australia (Man 1878-85, Howitt 1884), and then gradually among uncultivated peoples of various parts of the globe, was received with diffidence or passed unnoticed, despite the courageous, isolated stance of Andrew Lang (The Making of Religion, 1898). It was above all thanks to the work of the Vienna ethnological school, and in particular of its head Fr. W. Schmidt, that these observations were systematically collected, and later extended by means of a broad organic plan of direct research. Availing himself of ample documentation, in a work that is also the first vast attempt to determine historically a prius and a posterius in the succession of the religious beliefs of primitive humanity, Schmidt opposes to the preceding theories — which placed the origin of religion in various types of animological conceptions (fetishism, manism, animism, etc.) — a new theory, which maintains the chronological priority of the belief in a Supreme Being. Schmidt's work of synthesis concerns for now the cultures classified by him (and generally, albeit with individual reservations, recognized) as the most ancient accessible to us (original cultures, Urkulturen), as well as part of the later pastoral cultures, classified by Schmidt as "primary" (v. ETHNOLOGY); and it arrives at the affirmation of a universal primordial monotheism, preceding the dispersion of the today sparse "original" populations into marginal, or in any case impervious, regions of all the continents of the globe. The fundamental characteristics of such monotheism would be the following:

I. UNITY

The Supreme Being is "one." The supernatural figures that are sometimes found beside him, even in the beliefs of the most archaic peoples, can be interpreted as contributions from more recent religions. As such must be explained the figures of mothers, wives and children of the Supreme Being, deriving especially from the lunar mythology of patriarchal peoples. To an internal evolution of the Urkulturen Schmidt instead assigns other deviations, such as the elevation to divinity of the tribal progenitor, who rivals the Supreme Being and can obscure his figure (Andamanese, certain north-central Californians, Yuin of southern Australia, etc.); the personifications of certain particular aspects and functions of the Supreme Being that rose to independent beings (Arctic cultures, certain Algonquians); the emergence finally of an antagonist, the Being of evil (Arctic peoples, many among the Algonquians, eastern tribes of the Paleo-Californians), which is an ancient phenomenon deeply rooted among the pastoralists of central Asia.

II. NOMI

The most frequent and widespread are "father," "lord," "the elder," also "our father," "father in heaven," "father of all," "our great father," "father of life"; next come the names that refer to his activity as "creator" or "maker," "owner" (Lenape), "lord of life," "lord of death" (Western Cree), "giver of food" (Montagnais), "lord of the boars" (Negritos), "ruler of the world" (Maidu), "lord of heaven and earth" (Negritos), "ruler of the world" (Maidu), "lord of heaven and earth" (Cheyenne). Rarer are the names relating to his celestial seat and activity, such as "sky," "thunderer."

III. FIGURE

Schmidt holds that a form of spirituality is attributed to the Supreme Being, which for the most part the primitives would not be capable of defining explicitly: formulas such as "he is like the wind" would be attempts to express concepts of this kind; but much more often the primitives form an anthropomorphic image of him, as of a being with a bright, shining, or even fiery face, of tall or gigantic stature, etc.

IV. SEAT

It is generally believed that he now lives in heaven, but in some of the most archaic cultures there frequently recurs the motif according to which the Supreme Being, after the creation, would have dwelt for a certain period on earth, in confident and benevolent community of life with men, instructing them in their needs, instituting their sacred ceremonies, and, among certain tribes, celebrating them himself together with the creatures.

V. DURATION OF EXISTENCE

The eternity of the Supreme Being is affirmed explicitly among one of the primitive peoples of Australia: the Baiame of the Wiradjuri bears, among others, the name Burrambian, from burrambian "eternal"; but for the most part his great antiquity emerges implicitly, since it is said that he was "alone" at the beginning, before the other beings. In some primitive cultures (Arctic, Paleo-Californian, Algonquian) the representative of evil is held to be coeval with the Supreme Being. A motif that often recurs in the religions of gathering peoples is the unsuccessful attempt on the part of the Supreme Being, himself immortal, to make men share in that same immortality. Although almost always in the most primitive languages there is lacking a term as abstract as the one designating eternity, the latter is expressed by the affirmation that the Supreme Being is uncreated: an attribute that even the tribal ancestor (or cultural hero) tries to appropriate when he vies with the divinity. In other cases, the Supreme Being enters the scene when there still exist in the cosmos only the original chaos, ocean and mists.

VI. OMNIPRESENCE AND OMNISCIENCE

Omnipresence is not explicitly affirmed, and seems to have interested the primitive mentality little; it is rather a collateral attribute, integral to that of omniscience; in general there is a lack of speculative interest in the abstract properties of the divinity, so that the statements of primitives on the matter have a predominantly practical, that is, ethical, value. Only in the primordial cultures judged to be younger does the Supreme Being no longer have immediate and direct knowledge of what happens in the world, but obtains it through his messengers or subordinate entities; his omniscience is thus only mediated, for example, in the sense that the sun and the moon are the eyes with which the Supreme Being sees the earth and what happens on it (Samoyeds, Semang); the stars are the ears that allow him to hear by night, compensating for the faint moonlight (Samoyeds), or else the innumerable eyes with which he watches the dark earth, not necessary by day because of the shining light of the sun (Alakaluf); while the Andamanese believe the Supreme Being to be omniscient only by day. Among other primitives, by contrast (African and Asian Pygmies and Pygmoids, Fuegians, etc.), he is conceived as capable of rising even into the most secret recesses of the human soul.

VII. OMNIPOTENCE

Almost universal in primordial cultures is the affirmation, explicit or implicit, of this attribute: no force can successfully oppose the Supreme Being, not even that of the most powerful sorcerers. This conviction is expressed in mythical form in the oral literature of certain American and Asiatic tribes (some Algonquians, Samoyeds, western Paleo-Californians), in which there recurs the motif of contests that the Supreme Being sustains with the culture hero or the tribal ancestor, and in which (or in the last and most difficult of them) the former carries off the victory. And his power over the health and the life of men is unlimited.

VIII. OTHER ATTRIBUTES AND FUNCTIONS

The Supreme Being is almost always the creator of the cosmos and of man (v. CREATION) and the guardian and sanctioner of the ethical order that proceeds from him. All the good, and only the good, that humanity enjoys comes from him: not only objectively, but also subjectively, inasmuch as many primitive peoples recognize his "affective goodness" toward man, his care and concern for man's well-being and destiny. The various manifestations of immorality that characterize the gods of later cultures are not found in him; and the accusations of "killer" and "evil one" that are sometimes leveled at him are to be interpreted as references to his aspect as a severe punisher, through diseases and death, of infractions of the moral precepts he has imposed on humanity.

Father Schmidt's theory has been criticized from various quarters (in Italy particularly by R. Pettazzoni); nevertheless, and despite the fact that such beliefs are not to be found among all "primordial" peoples (they are absent, for example, among the Vedda of Ceylon and among the northern Andamanese, they were doubtful among the now extinct Tasmanians, and they are in part now being called into question again with regard to the original culture of the African Pygmies), the ethnological antiquity of the belief in a Supreme Being is by now positively established, and it must be recognized as a heritage proper to many of the most primitive peoples of the various continents. No less important is the observation that this belief is found again, albeit combined with other religious elements, among many peoples of later and more evolved cultures ("primary" and "secondary") in every part of the globe.

The Aranda, totemists of central Australia, have the notion of an uncreated and eternal being (Altgira), whose dwelling is in the sky, and whose campfires are the stars; he is conceived as an immense man, red-skinned, with light hair falling on his shoulders, feet like those of the emu, while his wives have dogs' feet. He is good, but indifferent to the things of the world; lord of the sky, he did not create man and does not care for him; no cult is addressed to him. Here and there in Indonesia (for example, among the Batak of Sumatra), in Melanesia (on some southern island of the Solomon group), and even more so in Africa (Nilotic peoples, certain Sudanese and Bantu peoples) the belief in an ancient Supreme Being coexists alongside forms of totemism; but it seems to be mostly a matter of independent beliefs, assignable to different cultural strata superimposed over time, and it must be recognized that the totemist mentality favors the development of magic more than that of theistic conceptions. This is clearly observed, for example, among the natives of California, where the totemist tribes are entirely ignorant of the figure of a Supreme Being (Kroeber). More complex is the situation in South America, where the totemic culture, hardly distinguishable from the neo-matriarchal one, has also influenced the most primitive peoples and groups. In any case, even apart from the three small Fuegian groups, the concept of a high deity is found on this continent already among the peoples who best represent the stage of collectors and hunters. The Ciamacoco are, in the Chaco region, those who possess the mythological figure closest to a supreme god, Escetevuarha (of the female sex), mother of infinite spirits, who dominates everything, and who prevents the sun from burning the earth and procures water for humanity; she demands that every night men sing in her honor, and she punishes them if they neglect this duty. The "Botocudo" (Ge) of eastern Brazil believe in a "White-headed Father" who lives in the sky, set apart from the other celestial spirits: gigantic chief of the spirits, he sends rain and storms, kills enemies with invisible arrows, and causes the phases of the moon. The Uitoto too, totemist collectors and hunters of the upper Yapurá, have a great creator and beneficent god, whom they call "father," although doubts remain about the original character of this belief. Even when one passes to the relatively superior agricultural cultures of the upper and middle Amazon, similar conceptions are found here and there. The Cascinahua of the upper Juruá speak of an "old Father" living in the sky with his wife, the "great mother"; his main function is to lead the souls of the dead to heaven and provide them there with every good; he has been identified with Poka "the Good" who sought to make men immortal, and he is the father of the cultural hero; during thunderstorms he is believed to weep and sob as he remembers his lost children. The Tupinambà of the Atlantic coast knew a thunder god endowed with sufficiently elevated characteristics that the missionaries could judge it appropriate to adopt his name (Tupan, Topana) for the purposes of Christian preaching. The Apapocuva (also of the great Tupi-Guarani group) recognize a creator, "our great father," who generated the cultural heroes. But it is precisely the importance of these cultural heroes, together with the development taken on by astral mythology — especially by the personifications of the sun and the moon — that among the majority of Amazonian peoples causes the figure of the Supreme Beings to recede into the background, practically annulling their cult.

That the solar character of the Supreme Being may be secondary is demonstrated by the conceptions of numerous primitive tribes of northeastern India. The supreme deity of these bears the name Sing Bonga, "spirit of the sun," among the Santal, Munda, Ho, Birhor, and other Kolarian peoples; the same deity is found among the Munda of Chota Nagpur. He is a benevolent being, creator and preserver of life, eminent among all the gods; but his solar nature seems to be acquired, probably borrowed from the younger Dravidian populations among whom traces of similar conceptions are still found (linked to totemism?), and only subsequently Hinduized. Thus among the Oraon and the Maler (Dravidian) the Supreme Being formerly bore, and in some cases still retains, the name "solar king"; the Oraon have then adopted for him the Hinduistic names of Dharmi or Dharmesh, "the Holy One," who manifests himself in the sun, or of Bhagwan (Bhagavat), common among the Bhil of central India. But not infrequently there has been a splitting of the two concepts, distinguishing the Supreme Being (Dharmesh, Bhagwan) from a particular solar god, who has preserved ancient names. The same occurs among the Gond scattered throughout central India: their "great god" or "old god" appears to be only a primus inter pares among the minor deities, distinct from the invisible creator and preserver of the world, of whom they have another conception. Characters dating back, at least in part, to an even greater antiquity seem to be offered by the conceptions of the Chenchu of southern India: alongside their Supreme Being Bhagavantaru, living in heaven, creator of human souls, manifesting himself in thunder and rain, there is a female figure, Garelamaisana, lady of the jungle and its products. In general, one can observe that figures of celestial deities were already present and alive in pre-Aryan India, down to the most archaic ethnic strata: the pervasive Hinduistic pantheism has certainly influenced them, lending them new names, but has not erased their ancient traces. A not very different process occurred in Indonesia, where the religious conceptions of the most primitive peoples often show through the veneer of more advanced and recent civilizations, Hinduism first and Islam afterward. Thus it is with the ancient Supreme Being of the Batak of Sumatra, Mula Giadi, overshadowed by the arrival and affirmation of another (Hinduistic) deity, Batara Guru (Shiva). The Ngadha of Flores keep alive the belief in a Supreme Being, existing from the beginning of time, dwelling in the firmament, unique and double at the same time: Deva above (conceived as a man) and Nitu below (conceived as a woman). He is said to be invisible except in dreams, but he is conceived as white in appearance, with a flowing beard, and his garments are described as marvelous, his fine cloak, his splendid belt, his bag of horse or goat leather, his bracelets as large as plates. Deva is the creator and master of all things, including men, he who sees and knows all, the powerful one, he who takes away life; he is believed to be benevolent, but he is feared for his justice, which manifests itself in illnesses and harm to wrongdoers.

The figures of high female deities such as those mentioned above almost always betray the corresponding presence, in the sociological sphere, of agricultural matriarchy, which as a rule favors the development of animism and lunar mythology. Feminine characteristics are found in the figure of Hintubuhet, deity of New Ireland, uncreated, existing from the beginning of time, creatress of heaven, earth, and men, but today indifferent and idle, and as such receiving no cult except in exceptional cases; and a female creator deity is reported, for example, from Viva Island (Fiji). But even in matriarchal heavens the femininity of the Supreme Being is a sporadic aspect which, for example, among the matriarchal Bantu of west-central Africa reveals itself only in traces: here (as among the OvAmbo and OviMbundo of Angola) the Supreme Being Kalunga is a manistic deity, connected with the earth and with the dead who dwell in it, or is even identified with the chthonic, subterranean conception of the afterlife; but he is a male being, as male is the other divine figure, itself also of high antiquity among the Bantu, Nzambi, a celestial creator being, who reigns in heaven.

In the manistic religions, which predominate in black Africa, among patriarchal as well as matriarchal peoples, the cult of the ancestors overshadows or replaces that of the Supreme Being, but does not obliterate his figure, which remains eminent though distant. The AmaZulu believe in a celestial god, Inkosi Pezulu, "the Chief in heaven," who manifests himself in meteorological phenomena and strikes down transgressors of tribal laws with lightning; the AmaXosa see in the figure of uDali the creator of all things, who controls and governs everything, rewards good and punishes evil: to these and other Supreme Beings, however, no cult is offered directly, but rather through the ancestors, who in the invisible world are closer to the deity, have greater wisdom than men on earth, and are therefore the mediators par excellence "at the court of the unapproachable Chief."

Even greater prominence has the figure (and the cult) of a Supreme Being among pastoral peoples, whose most typical and pure representatives in Africa are the Galla. In their celestial god, Waq or Waqa, are summed up almost all the attributes and faculties that Schmidt recognized in the Supreme Beings of primordial peoples, and the intimate and direct cultic and ethical relationship between man and God is felt more deeply than it generally is among Africans. It is Schmidt's recent merit to have brought to light the hitherto neglected monotheistic substratum in certain religions of the pastoral peoples of Asia: among the Tatars of the Abakan, for example, above a plurality of minor gods, celestial and infernal, there emerges an originally unique figure of a celestial Being, Kudai, whose unity has, however, come to be confused in identification with multiple gods, the Seven (or Nine) Kudai: here too it is a question of a creator and benevolent god dwelling in heaven, also called "the White," "the Golden," exceptionally "Father," dispenser of life and fertility, source of authority and order, moral legislator.

It should be noted finally that even in the religions considered most typically polytheistic, such as the Polynesian, the conception of a true and proper Supreme Being is not always unknown, even if it presents itself with particular aspects. Thus, for example, on Rennell Island (at the southern extremity of the Solomon group, but colonized by Polynesians and remaining immune to subsequent cultural contacts) the highest place in the beliefs is occupied by Angiki e Ha, "the Chief on high," gigantic head of the divine family, who manifests his wrath with thunder and lightning: if wife and children are assigned to him, this is in a supernatural, symbolic form, since he is "too sacred" to beget children by a woman. His sacred character also reveals itself in the prohibition against pronouncing, otherwise than in a whisper, his personal name, Te Tonusanga (as is the case, for example, with the name of Daramulun among the Yuin of Australia); and to his elevated and feared figure is opposed that of Tangangoa — the well-known supreme god of the Polynesian pantheon — for whom there is no respect and at whom people laugh, considering him unworthy of the name of God.

For the cult of the Supreme Being, v. PREGHIERA; SACRIFICIO.

Vinigi L. Grottanelli

IV. GOD AMONG PEOPLES OF HIGHER CULTURE.

As among primitive peoples, so too among peoples that have reached a higher degree of culture and whose aggregation has passed from the tribal state to the civic and national one, the idea of God stands at the center of their religious ideation.

I. NATIONAL RELIGIONS

Mexico and Peru. — Pre-Columbian Mexico and Peru must be examined first because from the cultural point of view they form the connecting link between primitive peoples and those that have reached a higher degree of culture. The Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún, who was the first to come into contact with the Aztecs of Mexico after the Spanish conquest, who learned their language and came to know their customs and traditions thoroughly, affirms that they believe "in one single God, pure spirit, omnipotent and creator of all things, to whom they attribute all wisdom, beauty and beatitude." His name is Tezcatlipoca, considered as the god of justice, and therefore represented with a golden mirror with which he scrutinizes the actions of men. In Peru the Supreme Being is called Pachacamac, indefinable, nameable only in a low voice, creator and legislator.

China. — Apart from Christianity, three religions exist in that immense country: the ancient natural religion systematized by Confucius, leaving intact its age-old heritage of beliefs and rites; Taoism, from tao (way), a philosophical vision of the universe with a pantheistic orientation; Buddhism, which penetrated into China from the south in the form of the "great vehicle."

The indigenous religion of China is the religion of Heaven (T'ien), to which the title of "Supreme Lord" (Shang-ti) is given. The concept of Heaven as the sole Lord is developed there more from the ethical point of view than from the doctrinal one, in keeping with the more practical than metaphysical mentality of the Chinese. The emperor has the mandate to carry out the will of Heaven, for the benefit of his people; his negligence provokes, on the part of the Supreme Lord, the calamities of nature and the discontent of the people.

Japan. — The national religion of Japan is a transparent naturalistic paganism, notwithstanding the systematization of its mythology carried out in the 18th century by Mabuchi (d. 1769), Motoori (d. 1801) and Hirata (d. 1841). It is called Kami-no-michi, the "way of the Kami," that is, of the gods, or shin-to, of the same meaning. Kami are the "superior" beings; that is, the great divinities of nature, above all the sun, conceived as feminine and called Amaterasu (v.), ancestress of the imperial dynasty, regulator of the heavens, who ended up absorbing the uranic element that acknowledged the existence of a "lord of the middle of heaven" from whom the generations of the gods would have descended.

Egypt. — From the most ancient elements of the Egyptian religion it emerges that it was a deification of the sky and of the sun that traverses its spaces. The concept of divinity is expressed by the word muter, also adopted by the Coptic Christians to signify God. The various divinities of Egypt were arranged by priestly speculation into enneads or groups of nine tending to place in the foreground the god of the politically dominant city: Atum at Heliopolis, Thoth at Hermopolis, Ptah at Memphis, Amun at Thebes. The theology of Amun rose to speculative value: he produced the gods by his word, he ordered the world by separating heaven from earth, he created things, animals and men.

The political power of the priesthood of Amun aroused the reaction of the pharaoh Amenhotep IV (d. 1358 B.C.), who moved the capital from Thebes to the vicinity of present-day al-Amarna, establishing there the monotheistic-solar cult of the disk of the sun, Aten, exalted, in a most beautiful hymn, as creator of all things, from the Nile to the little bird that chirps in its nest.

Semites. — Among the Eastern Semites (Babylonians and Assyrians), the Western (Canaanites, Arameans, Hebrews), and the Southern (Arabs, Ethiopians), the concept of God is expressed by the name el (ilu, ilāh), from a root meaning dominion, lordship, and is always linked to a person and not to a locality.

Among the Babylonians the Supreme Being is called Anu (= Heaven) and his ideogram is a star. He presides over the celestial regions and regulates the course of the stars. Facing him stands Adad, who represents the meteorological sky, and is the lord of the hurricane and of lightning.

Indo-Europeans. — This great family of peoples held together by the linguistic criterion includes in Asia the Indians, the Iranians and the Armenians, and in Europe the Slavs, the Germans, the Celts, the Illyrians, the Thracians, the Greeks and the Italic peoples. These peoples, before separating from their original homeland, already had in common a heritage of words relating to domestic life, agriculture and the patriarchal organization of the family; and from the religious point of view they had already fixed the concept of the Supreme Being with a word whose root is die, with the meaning of "to shine," referable to the astronomical sky understood as father. This Supreme Being is called Dyaus in India, Zeus (Dieus) in Greece, Deus for the Latins, Ziu for the Germans, Dievas for the Lithuanians.

India. — The meteorological manifestations of the sky gained the upper hand in Vedic India over the astronomical ones, under the figure and name of Indra, while those of the sky, as seer and guardian of the moral law, go under the name of Varuṇa, who is properly the night sky. Brahmanism, which succeeds Vedism and is its religious-philosophical development, culminates in a pantheistic vision of the universe insofar as it tends to resolve, that is, to annul, the individual soul (ātman) in the soul of the world (brahman), treading the path of knowledge and no longer that of the works of ritual sacrifice: a pantheistic and substantially atheistic conclusion, because without the recognition of a transcendent Being there is no religion. This point of view is still that of the present religion of India (neo-Brahmanism or Hinduism), tainted by elements drawn from popular religion and complacently tolerated by the Brahmins, who returned, after the Buddhist parenthesis, to being the masters of the religion of the country. In the cultic religious sphere, while maintaining the monistic vision of the identity of the individual self (ātman) with the universal one (brahman), the action of brahman is specified through the three aspects of creator, preserver, destroyer, identified with the three Vedic and Brahmanic divinities Brahma, Viṣṇu, Śiva, the so-called Indian trinity (trimūrti). Of these, Viṣṇu in particular is the object of invocation and prayers that consider him as personal and transcendent.

Greece. — Leaving aside the religion of the Mycenaean age, whose archaeological finds are mute for us, one must reach Homer to find both an echo of pre-Homeric religiosity and a sufficiently rich profile of the divine world of the Greeks. In the Homeric poems Zeus, the personification of the sky, is the father of gods and men, lord of atmospheric phenomena, ruler of the other gods whom he gathers around himself on Olympus. The fact that he, master of all, cannot dominate fate, while it appears as a limitation of his power, ends up being a homage to the idea of God, inasmuch as fate is opposed to the caprice of the gods and is the expression of the physical and moral laws that maintain the equilibrium of the cosmos. Mythology has in part spoiled this grandiose profile of Zeus, so clearly oriented toward a monotheistic conception. Hesiod's Theogony coordinates the data of mythical tradition and shows how from the formless and dark chaos, dominated by rebellious forces, the cosmos derived, that is, the ordered world that proceeds toward light and beauty, represented by Zeus. After Homer and Hesiod, during the 8th-6th centuries, an age of great religious and social upheaval, the yearning of the Greek conscience toward a God giver of good and punisher of evil came to maturity. The Persian Wars brought to maturity the elements that would be proper to classical Greece, on whose threshold stand the great figures of Pindar and of the two tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles: Euripides, a contemporary of Sophocles, already belongs to the critical and enlightened currents of the new times. Pindar (d. 448) exalts Zeus as personifying the moral order of the world, creator of right and law; he exalts the moral abstractions: Truth, Infallibility, Law as manifestations of his unifying action in which the features of the individual divinities merge. Aeschylus (d. 456) magnifies the omnipotence of Zeus who in himself sums up the universe and what is beyond the universe, and whose figure represents the unity of the "divine" (τὸ θεῖον); he is the avenger of the crimes of the fathers, whose expiation the children must accept until the divinity absolves them, as happened to the matricide Orestes, who killed in obedience to the family vengeance of blood and was in the end absolved by the Areopagus. Sophocles (d. 406) venerates the gods, respects the oracles, feels the power of fate as the manifestation of a superior will, sanctioned only by Zeus, which, however, does not act as a constraint from outside, but works and is fulfilled within the psyche. An evident example is Oedipus, who submits to his most sorrowful fate but does not lose his nobility of conscience and merits to end his days, blessed once more, in the sacred grove of the Eumenides.

The religiosity of the mysteries, which arose in the 6th century, an age of political and social upheaval, by placing in the foreground the concern of spirits for their individual lot in the life beyond the grave, contributed in Greece first and in the Hellenistic milieu afterward to ennoble the moral vision of life, inviting men to look to heaven as their native homeland, to which they must return after freeing themselves from the evil in which the soul is caught like a ray of light within the dark prison of matter.

To the process of religious unification that begins during the Hellenistic age, the development of Platonism contributed, which, by identifying the idea of the good with God and making the world of ideas the archetype after whose model God creates the universe, offered the foundations for the theodicy of the Hellenistic age.

Rome. — Roman religiosity is characterized by respect for the divine world, not curiously scrutinized from the intellectual point of view, but deeply felt from the point of view of practical action. Jupiter has the characteristics of the supreme divinity from pre-Capitoline times. He is, like the other Indo-European supreme beings, a divinity of the sky both astronomical and meteorological: his cult takes place on the heights: the Capitoline hill, the Alban mount; with the lightning bolt he manifests and sanctions his orders. Toward the end of the Republic a monotheistic conception of the divinity begins to take shape in philosophical circles, one that recognizes in Jupiter the "numen praestantissimum."

Celts, Germans, Slavs. — More difficult, because of the scarcity and fragmentariness of the sources and the superficiality of the "Roman interpretation" of the divinities of the peoples with whom the Romans came into contact, is the task of fixing the physiognomy of the Supreme Being of these populations. For the Celts, Caesar indicates Mercury as the major divinity, who is the most frequently mentioned in inscriptions and depicted on roadside pillars; of the triad named by Lucan (I, 446), Taranis is the god who most closely recalls the figure of Jupiter the thunderer. Tacitus interprets the supreme God of the Germans as Mercury, under which name is to be seen the indigenous God Watan (Odin), conceived as universal father and "regnator omnium Deus," worshiped according to Germanic custom in the depths of a sacred forest.

The religion of the Slavs is known through the reports of Latin missionaries for the West and of Byzantine writers for the East. Under different names: Peru for the Russians, Svarog (Zuarniš), Triglav, Svantevit for the Baltic Slavs, their supreme Beings are considered the chiefs of the tribe, have divinatory powers, are represented with many heads (3, 4 and even more heads), a naive manner of affirming their all-seeingness, characteristic of the divinities of the sky.

II. SUPRANATIONAL RELIGIONS

For Judaism and Christianity see the relevant entries.

Buddhism. — From the intellectual point of view Buddhism is the final term of Brahmanic speculation, flowing into a pancosmism that identifies the universal self with the individual self. From the religious point of view the Buddhism preached by the Buddha is atheistic because it excludes from the government of the world an ordering mind; it does not abolish the gods, but subjects them to the mechanical law that regulates the whole universe, and it denies the existence of the soul. From this primitive agnostic orientation, called that of the "small vehicle" (hināyāna), that is, of the small raft that carries one to the shore of salvation (nirvana) through the current of transmigration, there developed a broader vehicle (mahāyāna = great vehicle) made for the masses and not for the few, more capable of satisfying spirits desirous of a more intimate and personal religious piety. Mahāyānic Buddhism introduces the concept of a transcendent and permanent God, in the figure of the cosmic Buddha (Adi Buddha) who revealed himself one day in the historical Buddha. Every individual can, by following the path of piety (bhakti), become a bodhisattva, that is, place himself in a condition to attain the rank of Buddha, and can facilitate this ascent by renouncing the attainment of final liberation in order to make his sacrifice redound to the benefit of others. Trust in the Buddha, which is enacted through manifestations of worship, helps one to attain this state: hence temples, statues, ceremonies, formulas of prayer unknown to primitive Buddhism.

Mazdeism. — In the face of the naturalistic polytheism of the Persians, a reformer, Zarathustra (Zoroaster), perhaps born in Media in the 7th-6th centuries B.C., preached a religion of monotheistic content, which, at first opposed by the priestly class of the ruling magi, ended by being accepted in the Iranian country, with adaptations to the ancient naturism, establishing itself as the national religion of Persia in the era of the Sassanids (226-651 A.D.). Ahuramazdā, the "Wise Lord," is the one god preached by Zarathustra, whose teaching is preserved in the sacred book called the Avesta (from the Pahlavi Apatāth, "fundamental text"), which is possessed not entire but in fragments. Ahuramazdā (v.) is the avenger of truth against error, he is the creator of the universe through his omnipotent word, and he is its provident preserver. His throne is surrounded by six "holy immortals" (Amefa Spenta, v.): Good Thought, Justice, Sovereignty, Piety, Integrity, Immortality, which are the expression of God's providence in the government of the world.

Islam. — Already during pre-Islamic paganism the figure of Allāh was dominant over the other gods of Arab polytheism. Muhammad, whose religious formation was influenced by Christians and Jews settled on the northern borders of the Arabian peninsula, raised against that polytheism the banner of the one God, omnipotent, omniscient, just retributor of men's actions, who manifests himself not through the chatter of soothsayers or in the objects of nature, but through prophets, among whom the principal ones are Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and, last, Muhammad himself, the messenger par excellence (vastā Allāh). His monotheism is of Jewish origin insofar as it excludes the two mysteries of the Christian faith: the Trinity and the Incarnation of the Word: "God is one, God the eternal; (he) has not begotten nor been begotten. And there is none equal to him" (Qur'an, 1:2). For the development of Muslim theology and mysticism see ISLĀM. See also: ANIMISM; HENOTHEISM; MONOTHEISM; POLYTHEISM.

Nicola Turchi

V. GOD IN THE HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY.

Philosophy, as rational inquiry into the absolute, that is, as the search for a knowledge that with its extreme consequences validates its premises, is always directed to the treatment of the problem of God, that is, to the determination of a resolving concept in which the ideal and real order of being finds its foundation and justification. Even the particular treatments into which philosophical knowledge is articulated (e.g., cosmology, ontology, logic, ethics, aesthetics, etc.) presuppose a reference to the supreme concepts in which the meaning of reality is concluded, and therefore carry within themselves, at least implicitly, the lines of a natural theology; which, moreover, is not lacking even in atheistic systems that, even in the negation of traditional concepts, involve the application of a new sense of the whole, of the absolute, in short of what, in a very broad acceptation, may still be called the divine. Therefore the point of view to be attained for the consideration of the problem of God in the history of Western philosophy should be so elevated as to allow a synthesis of what is essential in the contribution of human thought to the resolution of the problem of being.

In the problem of God one can distinguish three problems: a) that of his nature, b) that of his relations with the world, c) of his knowability. In ancient philosophy the first two problems are in the forefront and subordinate the one relating to knowability; in the philosophy of Christianity the latter acquires an autonomous consistency of its own alongside the other two; in modern philosophy the problem of the knowability of God prevails over the other two, almost to the point of resolving them into itself.

a) As for the nature of God, solutions oscillate between the ontological conceptions (God as being), logical (God as idea or thought or regulative principle of mentality, etc.), axiological (God as value), spiritualistic and personal (God as the presence of immaterial being to itself, in the fullness of the act that is thought, will, love). For a very general historical perspective, without any indication of particulars, one may say that in the most elevated theological investigations of classical antiquity the ontological and the logical conceptions prevail; in modern philosophy the logical and axiological conceptions prevail; while the philosophy of Christianity synthesizes the ontological, logical and axiological determinations in the spiritualistic and personal conception of God.

b) The problem of the relations between God and the world gives rise to two extreme solutions: monistic (unity of God and world) and dualistic (duality of God and of the material principle that is the support of the world of becoming). The monistic solution is specified in two forms, proper respectively to classical thought and to modern thought, according to whether the divine remains immanent in the empirical order of phenomena (naturalistic pantheism) or in the ideal order of human mentality (idealistic pantheism). The creationist principle, proper to Christian philosophy, can, in a certain sense, be called at once monistic and dualistic: monistic, insofar as the world (the universe of things and the universe of souls) belongs entirely to the power of the creator; dualistic, insofar as the created, contained in the free act that gives it existence and consistency, remains constituted in its own nature and is clearly distinguished, by its ontological positivity, from the substance and the being of the creator.

c) The problem of the knowability of God, finally, historically admits two extreme theses: ontological-intellectualistic (God as the object of an immediate apprehension of the intellect) and agnostic (unknowability of God), between which moves the intermediate solution, supported by the ecclesiastical magisterium, of the demonstrability of God (God not intuitable, but knowable through a rational process of inference from created things: a process that culminates in the qualification of the divine being with positive attributes, valid for knowing, but inadequate to resolve the divine being into human comprehension). From the agnostic thesis derive the fideistic, pragmatistic and sentimental currents, intended to make up for the lack of speculative means, in the penetration of the divine, respectively with the aids of Grace and Revelation, or with the postulates of praxis, or with the indefinite revelations of the heart. The relations of man with God, for the intellectualistic and rationalistic currents, are resolved without residue in the sphere of natural knowability, with the consequent reduction of religion to philosophy; for the fideistic currents, they are established only on the basis of a supernatural intervention, with the consequent reduction of philosophy to religion; for an intermediate current, which moves in the furrow of Catholic orthodoxy, the metaphysical idea of God, emerging from the natural and rational order, constitutes indeed a necessary preamble of faith, but does not exhaust the meaning of human relations with God, so that philosophy and religion are distinguished in conditions of continuity and complementarity.

I. IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

To supplement the preceding outline with some reference to the historical development of the problems, it is noted first of all that, as regards the nature of God, classical philosophy was unable to disengage itself except with difficulty, through the work of Plato and Aristotle, and even with these not stably, from the naturalistic ground in which the mythology of the poets had arisen.

The poetic image is the undifferentiated space of the sensible and the ideal, of the corporeal and the spiritual, of the finite and the infinite: and in this lived space the gods of Olympus, the fruit of a fantasy that objectifies in physical semblances every human sense of force and ideality, animating nature with conscious and available powers. As intuitive instants succeed one another, each with its own absoluteness, so the divine mythical apparitions were juxtaposed one to another, populating Olympus with a multiplicity of numina, among which the theological instinct of the Greeks sought to compose a certain order, arranging them hierarchically under the empire of Zeus, the supreme God. The divine monarchy was an insufficient corrective to classical polytheism; so that when alongside the "theologians" there arose the "physiologists," that is, the first naturalistic philosophers of Greece, they sought to unify in a physical element the "principle" of reality, and divine was the "water" of Thales, divine the "ἄπειρον" of Anaximander, divine the "fire" of Heraclitus. A vigorous impulse toward unity was imparted by Xenophanes, with his protest against the polymorphous and basely anthropomorphic representation of the gods; but his God, as "One-all," does not exceed the limits of the naturalistic pantheism of the Greeks: and within these limits remains the one "being," immutable, immobile, which Parmenides likens to a sphere, well defined and concluded in its perfect roundness. Whether with Empedocles the cosmic dynamism is seen as the result of the action of an active principle of love and hate upon the passive elements that constitute the "roots" of the world, or whether with Democritus every motion proceeds from the nature of the material elements, called atoms, from which also the soul and the intellect result; whether with Epicurus some element of freedom is introduced into cosmic determinism, and the gods, themselves composed of the most tenuous atoms, live blessed in the spaces between world and world, indifferent to human vicissitudes; whether, finally, with the Stoics God is conceived as the universal reason (λόγος) which, intrinsic to matter and itself material, constitutes its propelling and hegemonic element: in every case speculation offers no more than a refined image of that naturalistic pantheism in which the theogonic fantasy of the first poets of Greece had sculpted the powerful semblances of the numina of Olympus. Nor does the astral divinity that the Demiurge of Plato's Timaeus composes with a pondered mixture of ideal substances emerge from this framework, in the last analysis; nor do the various unmoved movers, divine intelligences, that preside over the harmonic movements of the spheres in the single heaven of Aristotelian astronomy (Met., 1073 a 14 ff.).

A luminous opening onto a different conception of God is offered by the "essences" of Plato: the immutable, eternal, immaterial forms of every earthly appearance, perceptible not with the eyes of the body, but with the gaze of the soul. The same aesthetic exigency that moved the Greeks toward the finite, the completed, the clearly defined, drove Plato beyond the chiaroscuro vision of the senses, in which being is always mingled with non-being, toward the pure intelligible that "has of being the most that can be had" (Phaed., 92 d). The ideas are, in fact, "what precisely each thing is," its "being without qualification" (αὐτὸ δ' ἔστι: op. cit., 75 d). And since the being that welds every idea to its specific nature is also that which circulates over all the ideas, and "embraces" and "binds" them all, so there emerges above all the ideas that which might be called the idea of ideas, that is, the being that "fully is," toward which things and ideas tend as toward their Good. The Good is therefore constitutive of the being and essence of all things, as it is the cause of their intelligibility (Rep., VI, 508 e and 509 a). The true cause, whether of each individual thing or of things in their entirety, is their best way of being, that is, their being such as they are (Phaed., 98 a). No Atlas has the strength to embrace and sustain the world, except the Good (op. cit., 99 c).

It has often happened that critics discern in the Good of the Phaedo and the Republic the features of the Christian God, who is precisely Being and Good. But the approximations and anticipations must not cause one to lose the exact measure of the profound differences. The Being-Good of the Phaedo and the Republic is object, not subject; it is intelligible and principle of intelligibility, it is not intelligence; it is efficient cause insofar as it is final cause, not final cause insofar as it is efficient cause. The world strains toward the fullness of being, which is its Good, and in this sense the Good is the cause of intelligibility and of existence; but this ascensional motion is not, as for the Christian God, the response to the act of love of the Creator toward the creature. Here one recognizes the features of the Aristotelian God. Aristotle, who was at the school of Plato, repudiated the Demiurge and the imagistic conception of the master's last dialogues, but made his own the theology of the Phaedo and the Republic, and diffused it throughout the ample development of the Physics and the Metaphysics. The true Platonism of Aristotle, more than in what the critics are gathering from the few fragments of the Stagirite's youthful dialogues, lies in the unmoved mover which, like the Good of the Phaedo and the Republic, moves, not as subject, but as "object of love" (Met., 1072b3): efficient cause, it too, insofar as it is final cause, not vice versa. Here too all of nature moves toward it, as toward the pure actuality and ideality in which it would wish to realize itself: but the pure act, free of every potential and material element, does not turn with a power of its own, ideative and effective, toward the cosmos, but rather is consumed in a solitary thought that is ideality circulating upon itself, intelligence as intelligence of intelligence (νόησις νοήσεως). We would perhaps not be very far from Aristotle's thought in saying that his God is the limit-concept of the ideality immanent in the world: a celebration of the naturalistic pantheism of the Greeks at the summit of their speculative effort. And, in fact, Aristotle himself poses the problem whether the good and the best, in which the nature of the universe participates, is something separate from nature and existing in itself and for itself, or whether it is nothing other than the order of the whole, or whether it is in both ways, as in an army, where it is true both that its good consists in its order and that its leader is its good, because the order depends on the leader (Met., 1075 a 11-15). The question remains without answer, because the answer would have been beyond the limits of the Aristotelian conception.

In passing from the nature of God to his knowability, it is clear that for classical philosophy, since God is the intelligible, the object of pure thought as such, wherever there is pure thought there cannot but be, even more than an intelligence of God, God himself in his actuality. The dogma of classical intellectualism, already sanctioned by Parmenides with the affirmation that thought is not different from being, because it is only thought of what is (frg. 34), and developed by Plato with the aphorism of the Republic "what fully is, is fully knowable" (παντελῶς ὃν παντελῶς γνωστόν; V, 477 a), finds application in the mentality of the ancient sage who, when he reaches the summit of the contemplative life, identifies himself with the activity of pure thought that thinks itself, that is, with God. Christian contemplation will always maintain substance before substance, the soul before God (facie ad faciem); Aristotelian contemplation ravishes the sage into the vortex of pure intelligence, which does not belong to his humanity and his individuality, because it is the proper condition of the divine.

One must return with the briefest mention to Plato, so that it not be believed that the line of his theology unfolds solely in the direction, marked by the Phaedo and the Republic, that leads to Aristotle. There is another line which, starting from the last dialogues and without touching Aristotle, is historically prolonged in Neoplatonism. The direction of this line is marked by the exigency of reintegrating into the principle of being the elements of subjectivity, vitality, productivity, providence, which escaped the pure ideality of the essence.

The Sophist is an attempt to introduce life and movement into the world of ideas: but the movement achieved there remains still within the limits of pure logicality. A more valid result seems to be achieved by splitting the order of principles. Plato's God cannot be at one and the same time ideality and subjectivity, and must be divided, just as the gods of the Phaedrus, principle of life and movement, are divided from the purest essences that they succeed in contemplating at the summit of their celestial ride. The Demiurge of the Timaeus, finally, realizes the concept that only in the soul is there intellect and only the intellect can bring to completion upon things the idea of the best (46 c-d): he therefore is god, invisible, intelligent, good and unenvious craftsman, father, orderer, provident. But the intelligible remains outside this busy and provident intellect, which in its acting is doubly limited: above by the ideas that he mirrors as the model of his plastic action, below by the spurious "matrix" of becoming, upon which he impresses the stamp of his ordering activity. The universe, which comes forth from the industrious hands of the Demiurge, reproduces with a degrading level of perfection the eternal exemplar to which it conforms: and it happens, therefore, that man too, recognizing himself as an image very far from the fullness of ideal being, cannot claim to express in his thought more than an imitation very disproportionate to its inaccessible object (λόγοις εὖ μιμεῖσθαι; Tim. 10 e). Pure intelligence, which identified the sage with God, gives way to an anxious search, nourished by humility and at times by discouragement.

This is the voice of Plato that reaches as far as Plotinus, echoing there in the hypostases that overflow from the absolute Unity, which is Good and God, giving origin to the intelligible world, to the universal Soul and to nature. Here too the relation that is established among the various degrees of being emanating from God is one of imitation, so that the inverse process is mimetic, by which man, through sensibility and intellect, returns to his origin. But to remain in the field of thought is still to remain in the atrium of the temple, where there are the statues of the gods, that is, their images, not what the images represent. One must go beyond the atrium, annulling in ourselves sensibility, thought, being, in order to obtain a "conjunction of the soul with God, and a perception of like with like" in the supreme state of ecstasy. In Neoplatonic ecstasy, which surpasses the intellect, classical intellectualism is also surpassed: so that this last voice of ancient philosophy, not immune from Jewish and Christian influences, is destined in its turn to arouse immediate echoes in the philosophy of Christianity.

II. IN PATRISTICS AND SCHOLASTICISM

When Christianity enters the world, the philosophical discourse continues with a certain coherence. In St. Augustine the ideas of Plato remain; the One of Plotinus remains in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite; in St. Thomas the unmoved mover of Aristotle remains. But to this literal fidelity there corresponds, anything but a substantial fidelity, an innovative spirit, which to some has seemed outright revolutionary. In relation to the tripartition of the scheme adopted, the threefold essential contribution brought by the philosophy of Christianity is: a) the concept of the spirituality and personality of God, with regard to his nature, b) the concept of creation, with regard to the relations between God and the world, c) the concept of analogy, with regard to the problem of the knowability of God.

Christianity is a religion before it is a philosophy: it is a new relationship between God and man, established on the basis of Revelation and of the divine Incarnation. The first rational inquiries into the God of Christianity could not but be conditioned by what God had said of himself, and therefore the first speculative contribution of the Fathers merges and blends with the most laborious process of dogmatic definition. But that contribution itself is easily summarized when one considers that, in the face of a God who lives, speaks, understands, is moved, provident, not only toward man but also toward the grasses and flowers of the field, the conception of a God who was consumed in a pure intelligence having itself as its object can no longer hold. The new God of the philosophers, besides being object, must be subject; besides being thought and thought, must be a thinker, and only subordinately thought and thought insofar as he is primarily a thinker. As « no one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from it », so the motion of love of things must be the response to the inverse initial movement: so that God appears as object of love insofar as he primarily manifests himself as subject of love, object of the will and end appointed to creatures insofar as he is Will that wills itself and absolute Goodness. It suffices to read the De Trinitate of St. Augustine to understand how from a dogmatic theology, set upon the mysteries of Revelation, there is born a new natural theology that shadows forth the depths of the personal and spiritual God through the penetration of the human spirit, one in the multiplicity of its functions, present to itself in its inner word and in the intrinsic virtue of willing and loving. Now the Platonic duality of the ideal principle and the spiritual principle, of the intelligible and the intellect, can no longer subsist, and the Platonic ideas live and are unified in the fullness of the divine life as the internal generation of the Father in the Son, who is his Wisdom and his eternal Word.

The ontological conception of God is not, as is commonly repeated, the original product of the philosophy of Christianity. Ontology is a legacy of pagan antiquity: it suffices to recall the Phaedo and the Republic. The ontology of the classical philosophers meets well with biblical ontology, when the Fathers and Doctors place before every one of their disquisitions on God the divine self-definition of Ex. 3:14: Ego sum qui sum. Ait: sic dicet filiis Israel: qui est misit me ad vos. But it is original to the philosophy of Christianity that for which the esse becomes a sum. Whoever repeats the biblical verse places the accent on the Ego, as if to bring out the process by which the esse becomes, in its fullness, a living and personal reality. St. Bonaventure speaks with the voice of all when he exclaims: « Ecce personalis distinctio: Exodi tertio, ego sum qui sum » (Com. in Io., VIII, 38). The ontology of the classics was the resolution of the existence of things into their ideality, so much so that at the summit of being they found nothing more than the Aristotelian « thought of thought », so much so that Plato needed to juxtapose to the principle of pure ideality the counterpart of the animate and intelligent principle; the ontology of the Christians is the integration of ideality with the fullness of existing. Classical ontology is existence volatilized into essence; Christian ontology is essence consolidated into existence. The highest concept of God, reached by Christian philosophy, revolves entirely around the identification of essence with existence (in Deo idem est esse et essentia: C. Gent., I, 22). One understands therefore that St. Thomas can continue to define God as pure act: but the word now sounds with a wholly special timbre, which it did not have in Aristotle, because in the Greek philosopher pure act was simple intelligibility, purged of every potential element, whereas in St. Thomas it is the absolute positivity of the act by which being belongs to itself, with the exclusion of non-being and of every defective form of existence: ens dicitur ab actu essendi. From this aseity, or perfect independence of the circle by which God possesses himself in his own act, all the other attributes of the divine being are deduced: infinity, perfection, eternity, omniscience, supreme goodness, holiness, etc.

Also an attribute of Being, in such a redundant richness of positivity, is the note of diffusiveness and communicability: Bonum est diffusivum sui. From this

This note depends on the passage from God's aseity to creation. It is a fact that the contingent exists, that is, that deficient being in which existence fails to coincide with essence and, not sustaining itself by its own power, changes, becomes, and therefore betrays the lack of being that from moment to moment threatens to sweep it away into nothingness. If the contingent nevertheless exists, and we experience it in the contingency of our own existence, it cannot persist and subsist except by virtue of the Being that draws it from nothingness and keeps it in existence. The "five ways" of St. Thomas for demonstrating the existence of God ultimately follow the path of this fundamental argument. It is a matter of an integral application of the principle of causality. The very productive capacity that homo faber controls in his action upon the external world, when understood without those limits against which human activity constantly runs up, suggests the concept of creation. Although it belongs to Revelation, therefore, creation is so far from being repugnant to reason that creativity is, on the contrary, the perfect fulfillment of the concept of causality. It is a participation of being from Being, which does not empty itself of itself in order to give itself to another, nor does it rest upon something pre-existing in order to impress upon it a form or a seal, but posits and penetrates finite existing things and contains them down to the dark depths of matter: productio rei ex nihilo sui et subiecti. The unmoved mover of St. Thomas does not modify on the surface the mode of being of reality, but produces the passage from non-being to being, even before it determines the passage from potency to act and from rest to motion. St. Bonaventure is aware of the profound difference between the Demiurge of Plato and the Christian God, when he writes: "Plato commendavit animam suam factori, sed Petrus commendavit animam suam creatori" (In Hexaem., IX, 24). The creator, necessarily complete in himself as in the integrity of being, is not then bound by necessity to finite beings, which are called forth by his power, without diminution or increase of the divine substance, by a free act of his diffusive love. This radical application of the concept of creation decisively places Christian thought, in the most authoritative currents of the Middle Ages, outside every kind of pantheistic naturalism, Neoplatonic emanatism, and Peripatetic or Manichaean dualism. The concept of creation also serves to maintain the finite nature of created beings in their own substantiality, outside every Nirvanic vision that implies the illusoriness of the cosmos and its resolution into the absorbing principle of being. Instead, the inference holds that from a creative act, as a positive constitution of being, created beings derive a positive consistency in their individuality, efficacy, and responsibility. Although the Augustinian concept of "rationes seminales" had to undergo some correction through the Thomist concept of "second causes," the creationist principle of the relative autonomy of creatures is already clearly stated by St. Augustine: "Quamvis enim nihil esse possint sine ipso, non sunt quod ipse" (De civ. Dei, VII, 30). On the basis of the Aristotelian-Thomist canon omne agens agit sibi simile, the perfect efficacy of the creative act cannot exhaust itself in vain and unproductive products, but must in a certain way repeat and prolong itself in effects, as far as possible similar to the cause, and therefore endowed with a causality rooted in their being. "Si igitur communicavit aliis similitudinem suam quantum ad esse, in quantum res in esse produxit, consequens est ut communicaverit eis similitudinem suam quantum ad agere, ut etiam res creatae habeant proprias actiones... Detrahere ergo perfectioni creaturarum est detrahere perfectioni divinae virtutis" (C. Gent., III, 69). And therefore the more each being deepens the nature proper to it and attains its perfection, the more it reaffirms in itself the image that brings it closer to its divine exemplar. "Unumquodque tendens in suam perfectionem, tendit in divinam similitudinem" (op. cit., III, 21).

To the gaze of the Christian thinker, as to the heart of the believer, the universe manifests itself as one in its origin divine, even while multiplying in the indefinite variety of beings, among which there runs neither a univocity that would sacrifice one to another, nor an equivocity that would make them separate and hostile, but an analogy (v.) that is cohesive of their individuality and conductive of their affinity. To the analogia entis (v. ESSERE) there then follows the analogia mentis. The law of unity and difference that animates Christian cosmology, justifying itself rationally through the creative principle, is also fruitful in the gnoseological order in determining, in the greatest representatives of medieval thought, the solution of the problem of the knowability of God. Here the prevailing doctrine finds itself under the continual solicitation of two opposite and extreme tendencies, one of which would lead to the God known per se, the other to the unknown and unknowable God: a) the first tendency, in which the impulse of classical intellectualism is only slightly dulled, seeks an evident intellection of God that is prior to every investigation and the starting point of every investigation. It seems that, in declaring his name Esse, God has enclosed in it his essence, and that man can capture in the notion of Esse, or in another name that God has attributed to himself, the very essence of God. The doctrine of illumination of St. Augustine, by deriving the human apprehension of truth from the source of Truth, which is God himself, can insinuate the suspicion of an exhaustive penetration of the divine Being on the part of human knowing. On the convertibility of existence and essence in God is founded the famous ontological argument of St. Anselm, which sees the notion of the most perfect Being converted into the certain affirmation of its existence, because the most perfect Being cannot lack the perfection of existence. b) The opposite tendency, heavy with all the echoes of the superessential and superintelligible One of Neoplatonism, is an inference, up to a certain point legitimate, from the Augustinian-Scholastic adage: Quidquid scientia comprehenditur, scientia comprehensione finitur (De civ. Dei, XII, 18). If the notion of God is contained in the finite mind of the creature, which thinks only by referring to the sensible phantasm, it seems that the notion itself cannot but contaminate the divine essence, mentally inaccessible, with improper attributions. From this consideration, which is the germ of the critical doubt of modern philosophy, there originates negative theology (Deus qui scitur melius nesciendo: St. Augustine, De ordine, II), which admits that it is possible to refer to God rather by denying than by affirming any determination intrinsic to the human mentality. From this negation the mystic sets out in order to attain an affective and supernatural contact with the divine, beyond the darkness in which every rational investigation is lost. c) The prevailing doctrine (which may be called median, not because it is a compromise between the two opposite tendencies, but because it expresses in its synthesis the partial truth that they solicit) appeals to the biblical text: Invisibilia enim ipsius, a creatura mundi, per ea quae facta sunt, intellecta, conspicuntur (Rom. 1:20). God is not seen, is not intuited, but is demonstrated by causal inference from the existence of creatures, especially of rational creatures, in which he manifests himself. Already St. Basil, in polemic against Eunomius, declared that no divine name suffices for man to exhaust the depth of the divine essence, but that the divine names, though rooted in the concepts of the human mind (και' ἐπίνωσαν), have a positive validity of metaphysical signification, and are not arbitrary fantastic constructions. In order to remove from the Augustinian doctrine of illumination every intuitionistic and immanentistic meaning, St. Thomas interprets it in the sense that the eternal truth of God is the source of human knowing non obiective, sed causaliter, that is, not as the object of an immediate apprehension, but as the cause of the intellective capacity, incorporated with the human intellect (Sum. Theol., 1a, q. 84, a. 6). The same St. Thomas opposes the God known per se of St. Anselm, but the argument of St. Anselm preserves its value in a great part of the Scholastic tradition, not insofar as by it one presumes a direct intuition of the divine essence, but insofar as, in the demonstrative and causal order, from the existence in us of the idea of the ipsum Esse, which governs the whole order of our mentality and of our experience, one infers the real and objective existence of the Being itself. To negative theology there is joined a positive theology, which predicates of God the qualifications that the mind derives via eminentiae from the perfections of the real; and the same negative procedure is declared fruitful in positive senses, according to the consideration of L. Thomassin, founded on the texts of Pseudo-Dionysius, quod omnes negationes positio aliqua implicat. It is specified that God can be known, although he cannot be comprehended, understanding by comprehension a compenetration with the divine essence that would identify us with God himself. It is also specified that of God one can know quia est, although the quid sit cannot be exhausted in our concept; but since, according to a consideration that will be made explicit in Suárez, the affirmation of existence always implies a certain qualification of the essence (Nos non possumus demonstrare Deum esse, nisi demonstrando aliquo modo quid sit: Disput. metaph., XXIV, sect. II, 41), even of the essence it is possible for us to predicate valid attributes, however inadequate.

Significative validity of human concepts, rationally expressed, and their inadequacy for an exhaustive expression; positivity of verbal terms and their disproportion with respect to the object to which they allude; vision not in the sun, but through the sun, that is, through that intellectual light that belongs to us, though being a participata similitudo of the uncreated light; cosmic elevation, whereby all created things, and first of all the human soul, possunt considerari ut res vel ut signa, as St. Bonaventure says (In I Sent. 3, 3, ad 2), that is, the more they are in their perfection the more they refer back to the perfection of the creator; bond and structural incommensurability; this is the sense of the analogism that reverberates from the ontological order to the cognitive and moral order and, outside of philosophy, diffuses itself into every manifestation of art, of poetry, of rite, enveloping all the manifestations of the medieval soul in the atmosphere of a universal liturgism.

III. IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

A gradual elimination of the concept and sense of analogy is, perhaps, the most comprehensive note characterizing modern and contemporary philosophy in relation to the theological problem: one might even say, modern and contemporary philosophy without qualification. The elimination of that concept gives rise to a twofold consequence: a) either human conception closes itself within its own internal rhythms and resolves the absolute into them, with a monistic and immanentistic result that reproduces, on subjectivistic ground, the same result obtained, on objectivistic ground, by classical intellectualism (this is the current that, from Cartesian mathematism, through the ontologism of Malebranche, the panlogism of Spinoza and Leibniz, the natural religion of the Enlightenment, reaches as far as the absolute Subject of post-Kantian idealism, and continues in the more recent forms of humanism, humanitarianism, aestheticism and atheism); b) or human conception recognizes itself as incapable of signifying the absolute, so that the relation with it is established on irrational or sentimental or fideistic grounds, or by way of shock and collision (this is the current that, starting from the terminism of Occam, through German theology, Lutheranism and the various empiricist doctrines of "belief," reaches as far as the theological postulate of Kant's practical reason, and then continues in the sentimentalism of Schleiermacher, in the doctrine of values, in the irrationalism of E. Hartmann, and so on until it reaches us in those forms of theistic existentialism which, rooted in Kierkegaard's Lutheran soil, establish the human relation with God on the basis of contradiction and absurdity). In either case what is at issue is the excluded transparency of the mental term onto transcendent values which are either resolved into pure mentality or persist in their transcendence and announce themselves by other means, outside mentality or in contradiction with it. Here below it is not possible to give an account, in two distinct sections, of the two currents, so frequent are their connections and interferences: but the initial schema, which would need far greater development, must be kept in mind in order to find a guiding thread through the enormous complexity of contributions and systems.

The Renaissance is the deepening and exaltation of the perfections of Man-as-image and Cosmos-as-vestige: that to which the image and the vestige allude gradually dies out, though at the outset it survives in some mystical transparency, which is still noticeable, for example, in M. Ficino and in Pico della Mirandola. The passage from Nicholas of Cusa to G. Bruno and to J. Böhme gives the exact sense of the progressive shutting of the cosmic monad and of the mental image within its internal rhythms, to the point of making the very frictions and contradictions that tear the real apart intrinsic to the divine. In Cusanus, albeit with some perplexity, the coincidence of opposites is the limit reached, in its extreme effort, by the human mentality, adumbrating the inaccessible divine, in which opposition ceases; in Bruno, at times the universe is divinized in its infinity, at times it is dilated in its unitary totality to signify infinity — a Deity of which it is "the great simulacrum and the great image"; in Böhme the contradiction of yes and no, of good and evil, becomes intrinsic to God, the totality of being, from which there spring forth, along with the positive forces of construction, the destructive forces of hatred and wrath. German mysticism, the very mysticism that had paved the way for Lutheranism, had not been without influence on Böhme. Already in the medieval world the consumption of universals in Occam's nominalism had limited the demonstrative capacity of reason in relation to divine truths. In the currents descending from Occam, the ideas of the human mind, mere names or flatus vocis, become insignificant with regard to the divine, just as in Luther the works of man become ineffective with respect to Grace. In those currents every revelation concerning the supreme truths is awaited from faith alone, just as in Luther salvation is awaited only from Grace and predestination. The medieval openness of reason onto the transcendent is succeeded by the fracture between the two domains: and the whole of modern thought will either maintain the fracture or repair it in such a way that reason occupies the entire domain of faith. Meanwhile Descartes prepares the advent of panlogism, which in turn prepares the advent of the absolute mentality of the post-Kantians. Descartes' clear and distinct ideas do indeed come from God, but they are too clear and too distinct, and serve the philosopher and the physicist too well to ensnare the whole world in a mathematical web or imprison it in a mechanical contraption, for the mind that possesses those ideas not to lose in them, sooner or later, the sense of mystery, deeming superfluous the God who grants them to man. Pascal is the drama of the believer's heart that seeks to rediscover the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob beyond the iron enclosure of mathematical reason. But before bearing the fruits of the absolute Subject of idealistic philosophy, Cartesianism bears fruit, in the ontologism and occasionalism of A. Geulincx and F. Malebranche, in an absorbing transcendentism, with a strong mystical accentuation, where everything that thinks in the world thinks in God, everything that acts in the world acts through the work of God. Ontologism is the lost initiative of the human mind, just as occasionalism is the lost spontaneity of physical causes: both are a negation of secondary causes. In Scholasticism substance was defined as "res cuius naturae debetur esse non in alio" (St. Thomas, Quodl., IX, q. 3, a. 5, ad 2), that is, a being that is not constituted as a mode or accident of another being, and therefore it was granted to attribute substantiality both to the creator and to creatures, reaffirming the latter's consistency in their own being. By contrast, Descartes' substance ("res quae ita exsistit, ut nulla alia re indigeat ad exsistendum") does not allow substantiality to be attributed to anyone but God, extending it to creatures in a manner that the philosopher himself declares "equivocal." Beyond what one might truly call the Cartesian equivocation, one places B. Spinoza in constituting the most rigorous form of modern pantheism, which reduces every sensible appearance, every finite individuality, the thinking and the extended, the spiritual and the corporeal, back into the bosom of the one divine substance ("id quod in se est et in se concipitur"): a naturing nature that has its "modes" in the particular manifestations of natured nature, and its "attributes," known to us, in thought and extension. The illusory freedom and contingency of beings is entirely resolved into the physical and logical necessity that binds God to himself, as causa sui, and leads man, beyond the particularism of affections and passions, back to the intellectual love of God. It is a pantheism that has no need of processions or emanations reaching from God down to the lowest strata of matter, as happened in Neoplatonic and Gnostic pantheism, but actually sums everything up in the substantial unity of the divine. The universe of G. Leibniz, on the other hand, varies in multiplicity, obeys the law of difference. He feels within himself the spirit of medieval philosophy, multiplying substances or monads, all centered and concentrated in themselves and enveloped in the creative act of God, the absolute monad. But for Leibniz the individual monads are closed in on themselves, "without doors and without windows," and they perceive the world because they are a world, but they do not perceive the world of monads and do not directly influence it either through thought or through action. The ontological and logical openness of medieval analogism is occluded by the impenetrability and incommunicability of the monads which, not communicating among themselves, cannot be seen to communicate with the absolute. Here the deus ex machina intervenes: what is not intrinsic to the nature of the monads is due artificially to a divine intervention, by which a harmony is preordained that owes nothing to the spontaneous collaboration of the incommunicating monads. Pre-established harmony is the philosophical equivalent of Lutheran predestination.

Kant's critical doubt comes, even more than from Hume's phenomenalism, from the closure of Leibniz's monads. Kant's subjects do indeed communicate among themselves through the forms of understanding which, common to all men, guarantee the universality and objectivity of scientific knowledge; but they do not communicate intellectually with God, because the forms themselves, being unable to apply to empirical experience in the intuition of God, are not valid in their transcendent employment. God is conceived, but he is not known within the limits of pure reason, because the idea we have of him cannot be converted into an intuition of reality. The idea of God, subject to the antinomies in which reason struggles in the attempt to demonstrate his existence, remains as "regulative" of a process of unification of experience that our mentality cannot bring to completion. Post-Kantian idealist philosophy, on the other hand, brings the process to completion, arriving at Fichte's transcendental I which produces and resolves within itself the empirical individualities of men; at Schelling's Absolute which, with a strong Brunian and Spinozian emphasis, constitutes the moment of identity and indistinction of subject and object, of spirit and nature; and especially at Hegel's absolute Spirit which, with the broadest dialectical development, in which are included the moments of the eternal ideal history in its conscious determinations and in its natural externalizations, brings all the real back to the rational in the luminous self-possession of intellectual life.

Included in this very process are the imaginative representations of the divine with which religion prepares the advent of the pure philosophical conception: the dogmas and mysteries of Christianity are taken up, outside their historical and positive meaning, as symbols of the creative process of the infinite that determines itself in the finite and becomes incarnate in the sensible, in order finally to redeem itself in pure rational spirituality. This idealistic symbolism (which reproduces the relation by which the ancient Stoics took the mythical representations of the gods as allegories, proportioned to popular understanding, of the God of the philosophers) is the inversion of medieval analogism: in the latter, rational truths are open onto the mysteries of faith, adumbrating them in an effective and inadequate way, whereas in idealistic symbolism it is the mysteries of faith that are open onto rational truths, as their imaginative presentiment.

While the immanentist design of the post-Kantians is prolonged in various idealistic or positivistic forms of humanism, humanitarianism or explicit atheism that reach down to our own day (Feuerbach: God as the self-alienation of man who substantivized in him his needs and aspirations; Nietzsche: God as a product of human weakness that arrests in him its vital impulse toward an indefinite overcoming; Comte: God as the Great Being of humanity, in its historical continuity and its solidarity; Durkheim: God as the self-adoration of social consciousness; Hamelin: God as the consciousness of the totality of human facts and relations; G. Gentile: God as the objective moment that circulates dialectically, together with the subjective moment of art, in the absolute philosophical actuality of self-consciousness) and while the residual metaphysical element of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is reborn, on positivist ground, with Spencer's "unknowable" (the Absolute as that impenetrable but positive ground on which are applied the forms and relations within which alone our clear consciousness can move); another strand of fundamental importance for the lay theology of modernity breaks away from Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. What is forbidden to pure reason (namely, to rise from the immanent legality of facts to the demonstration of the transcendent intellect that establishes that legality) is granted to practical reason which, noting that the moral will is indeed autonomous, that is, obedient to a categorical imperative that has no justification outside itself, but that the perfectly moral intention remains a pure form that takes no hold on empirical reality, which sometimes dramatically belies the good intentions of the virtuous man, is induced to postulate a supreme Will that governs at once the order of facts and the order of laws and, establishing the accord between nature and spirit, also establishes the equation between virtue and happiness. From this point of view the moral laws appear as divine commands and God presents himself again as a postulate of the moral consciousness.

Later philosophy pays in a thousand ways for the dualism of Kant's two Critiques, whether it exacerbates it or seeks to heal it, re-establishing the unity among the spiritual functions under the primacy of practical reason. Schleiermacher moves toward unity, making feeling the principle of religious life, and attaining through feeling that penetration of the divine which places us above the dualism of subject-object, spirit-nature, sensibility-intellect. The dualism, on the other hand, is exacerbated in Ritschl's theory of values, which sharply distinguishes religious knowledge from theoretical knowledge, judgments of value from scientific judgments, so that the personal relation with God is established outside any philosophical question about his existence and about the truth content of Christian beliefs, in order to seek in God and in these truths only what gives satisfaction to our sentimental and moral needs.

The "belief" that intervened to fill the metaphysical void left by pre-Kantian English empiricism also intervenes after Kant, in the philosophy of Hamilton and Mansel, to arm with good reasons the psychological experience and the moral will that seek to rise to God, while God remains not only unknowable but unthinkable, insofar as God must by definition be the unconditioned (the unconditionally unlimited, that is, the infinite, and the unconditionally limited, that is, the absolute), whereas thought is by its nature a relation between terms and their mutual conditioning, so that to think God would be to determine and limit him within the conditions of our intellect (without any theistic intention, Stuart Mill rightly objected to Hamilton that "determination" is not synonymous with "limitation," and that qualifying God with certain attributes does not mean imprisoning him within the limited quantity of those attributes themselves). The inconceivability of God was also suggested to Mansel by the impossibility of combining infinity with personality, and this motive reverberates in nineteenth-century French philosophy, e.g. in Vacherot and in Renouvier (in Italy, by contrast, Gioberti considered infinity so little incompatible with personality that infinity, on the contrary, constitutes the perfection of the person, as the perfect self-possession of the being that returns to itself from its own act, without any extraneous intervention). As for how much the Kantian legacy still bears fruit in French philosophy, it suffices to recall the neo-criticism of Renouvier, who settles the discord between the two Critiques with a "will to believe" that takes as its supreme object a God as legality in the moral relationship that exists between beings, while the intelligence, instead of preceding the will and illuminating it, works reflectively on the materials that the will itself has pre-established. The "will to believe," which builds its object outside any possibility of rational demonstration and ontological affirmation, is transmitted to the pragmatism of James, determining in it an attentive empirical observation of mystical states and a respectful consideration of the beneficial influence that religion exercises on human life. The primacy of practice marks in modernity the first movement of revolt of the human person against the universal and impersonal reason which, just as it had failed to satisfy man's religious needs, had likewise dissolved the singularity of the individual into a secondary and empirical manifestation. A more violent movement of revolt of the "single individual" against logicism occurs in the most recent philosophy, through the work of existentialism, which, reviving the spirit of the Lutheran S. Kierkegaard, sees in the egalitarian, concluded, necessary Logos the negation of the freedom, spontaneity and originality of individual existence. The consequence of this new irrationalistic movement is, on the one hand, the negation of God, considered as the guardian of logic, of order and of the rationality of the world, and as the limit imposed on the free choice of personal commitment (Sartre): on the other hand, the extension of the irrational character to God himself, the realm of the impossible and the absurd, to be reached through a desperate faith that breaks the necessity of knowledge and of duty, and conquers the true freedom of the spirit, in which God lives (Chestov).

The philosophy of Christianity continues its course also in modernity, either by preserving its traditional values in a prudent reserve, devoid of communication and influence; or by initiating a dialogue so intimate and confiding with modern thought as to transform confidence into acquiescence; or, finally, as more often happens today, by reliving in its own anxious search the deepest demands of modern thought in order to lead them to satisfaction within the orbit of traditional theism. Already Gioberti, in nineteenth-century Italy, had yielded to the suggestions of ontologism, but, not without some perplexity, had known how to avoid an immanentist outcome through an elaborate use of the concept of creation; and A. Rosmini had in a Kantian manner applied the idea of being as a category of human understanding, while nonetheless drawing from it values of objectivity, both as regards the empirical being of physical reality and as regards "being thought in a completed act," which is God. Modernism, a sum of immanentist, pragmatist, intuitionist tendencies, which, between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, would have wished to bring about a revival of traditional faith from within, is the typical case of the aforementioned confidence that brings acquiescence and surrender. Ever more decisively outside the modernist movement, especially after the recent publication of the trilogy: L'action, L'être, La pensée, there stands

M. Blondel, with his synthesis of the entire phenomenology of finite being, of defective thought and of transient action, which open onto the transcendence of the "One necessary and impracticable," that is, to the God of revealed and positive religion. In France the religious and Christian inflection of existentialism gathers under the banner of the Philosophie de l'esprit the thinkers who avail themselves of the unanimous protest against abstract logicism in order to rediscover the meaning of existence through a more direct and vital participation in Being (Lavelle) or through a more intense and conscious feeling of absolute Value (Le Senne) or through a more assiduous penetration, flashing with vivid presentiments, of the sense of mystery (Marcel). In Italy, the "Gallarate movement," which annually gathers Catholic university professors, devotes itself to metaphysical reconstruction on the basis of a rigorous critical approach and of an integral humanism that preserves rationality as a factor of personal cohesion, of social communion and of elevation to the transcendent.

Luigi Stefanini

VI. ICONOGRAPHY.

God, One in nature and Triune in person, being a most pure spirit, does not admit the possibility of being adequately depicted. Since a representation of him must nonetheless be given, it can only be that of the Most Holy Trinity, that is, of the Father, the Eternal, of the Son, the Word, and of the Holy Spirit, variously expressed also by symbols (v. TRINITÀ, SANTISSIMA).

Nevertheless, the image of God in certain compositions, from as early as the 3rd century at Dura Europos (v.) and in the West from the 4th century onward, was rendered by the representation of a hand offering crowns or blessing; thus very often in sarcophagi (Wilpert, Sarcofagi, II, pp. 226-27, 233-37), in frescoes, in the mosaic decorations of apses, in ivories. In paleochristian art the image of God the Father is found in sarcophagi where the creation of man is represented, as, for example, in the so-called dogmatic sarcophagus, in which the Eternal Father is bearded, seated on a draped chair, while the Son and the Holy Spirit stand (Wilpert, op. cit., p. 226, pl. 65); or else in the scene of the offering of Cain and Abel, in which God the Father, bearded, is seated on a basket or on a faldstool (Wilpert, op. cit., pl. 186, 1 and 190, 8), while in some instances of this scene the three persons of the Most Holy Trinity are beardless (Wilpert, op. cit., pl. 182 and 191, 5). In a sarcophagus of Saragossa, God the Father drives Adam from Paradise (Wilpert, op. cit., p. 228).

In the 13th century a new type is created for representing his Person, namely the image of an old man of most noble appearance with long white hair and a beard that is likewise flowing and white. This image, which frequently assumes the attributes of royalty, often appears in compositions depicting scenes of the Old Testament, in the visions of the Prophets, etc. This type acquires extraordinary majestic impressiveness through the work of the artists of the Renaissance. Such is the Eternal painted by Perugino who blesses from a mandorla surrounded by angels, a group of sibyls and Prophets in one of the frescoes of the Cambio in Perugia, such are the images painted by Michelangelo on the vault of the Sistine Chapel, such is the one painted by Raphael in the small picture of the Pitti Gallery with the vision of Ezekiel. - See pl. XCVII.

Emilio Lavagnino