Japan. - The national religion of Japan is a transparent naturalistic paganism despite the systematization of mythology carried out in the 18th century by Mabuci (d. 1769), Motoori (d. 1801), and Hirato (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, namely the great divinities of nature, above all the sun, Amaterasu (v.), ancestor of the imperial dynasty, ruler of the heavens, who ended up absorbing the uranic element that acknowledged the existence of a "lord of the middle of the sky" from whom the generations of the gods were descended.
Egypt. — From the most ancient elements of Egyptian religion it is evident that it was a deification of the sky and the sun that traverses its spaces. The concept of divinity is expressed by the word niter, adopted also by Coptic Christians to signify God. The various deities of Egypt were arranged by sacerdotal speculation into enneads or groups of nine, tending to place in the foreground the god of the politically dominant city: Atum at Heliopolis, Thot at Hermopolis, Ptah at Memphis, Amon at Thebes. The theology of Amon attained a speculative value: he produced the gods with his word, ordered the world by separating heaven from earth, and created things, animals, and men.
The poetic work of the priesthood of Amon provoked the reaction of Pharaoh Amenophis IV (d. 1358 B.C.), who transferred the capital from Thebes to the site of present-day el-Amarna, establishing there the monotheistic-solar cult of the sun’s disk, Aten, exalted in a beautiful hymn as the creator of all things, from the Nile to the fledgling bird chirping in its nest.
Semites. — Among the Eastern Semites (Babylonians and Assyrians), Western Semites (Canaanites, Arameans, Hebrews), and Southern Semites (Arabs, Ethiopians), the concept of God is expressed by the name el (ilu, ilah) 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 Amu (= Heaven), and his ideogram is a star. He presides over the celestial regions and regulates the course of the stars. Opposite him stands Adad, who represents the meteorological sky and is the lord of the storm and lightning.
Indo-Europeans. — This great family of peoples, united by linguistic criteria, includes in Asia the Indians, Iranians, and Armenians, and in Europe the Slavs, Germans, Celts, Illyrians, Thracians, Greeks, and Italics. Before these peoples separated from their original homeland, they already shared a common vocabulary relating to domestic life, agriculture, and the patriarchal organization of the family; and from a religious point of view, they had already fixed the concept of the Supreme Being with a word whose root is *div- with the meaning of “to shine,” referable to the astronomical sky understood as father. This Supreme Being is called Dyaus in India, Zeus (Diēus) in Greece, Deus by the Latins, Ziu by the Germans, Dievas by the Lithuanians.
India. — In Vedic India, meteorological manifestations of the sky prevailed over astronomical ones, under the figure and name of Indra, while those of the sky as seer and guardian of moral law are embodied in Váruna, who is properly the nocturnal sky. Brahmanism, which succeeded Vedism and is its religious-philosophical development, culminates in a pantheistic vision of the universe inasmuch as it tends to resolve, that is, to annul, the individual soul (ātman) in the world soul (brahma), following the path of knowledge rather than that of ritual sacrificial works: a pantheistic conclusion essentially atheistic, for without the recognition of a transcendent Being there is no religion. This viewpoint is still that of present-day Indian religion (Neobrahmanism or Hinduism), which is tinged with elements deriving from popular religion and complacently tolerated by the Brahmans, who, after the Buddhist parenthesis, returned to being the dominant force in the country’s religion. In the cultic religious sphere, while maintaining the monistic vision of the identity of the individual self (ātman) with the universal (brahman), the action of brahman is specified through the three aspects of creator, preserver, and destroyer, identified with the three Vedic and Brahmanic deities Brahma, Viṣṇu, Śiva, the so-called Indian "trinity" (trimūrti). Of these, Viṣṇu in particular is the object of invocations and prayers that consider him as personal and transcendent.
Greece. — Setting aside the religion of the Mycenaean age, whose archaeological findings are mute for us, we must come to Homer to find both an echo of pre-Homeric religiosity and a fairly rich profile of the Greek divine world. 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 him on Olympus. The fact that he, master of all, cannot dominate fate, while appearing as a limitation of his power, ends up being a tribute to the idea of God, since fate opposes 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 grand profile of Zeus, so clearly oriented toward a monotheistic conception. The Theogony of Hesiod coordinates the data of mythical tradition and shows how from the formless and dark chaos, dominated by rebellious forces, there derived the cosmos, 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 consciousness matures toward a God who gives good and punishes evil. The Persian Wars bring to fruition the elements that will be characteristic of classical Greece, on whose threshold stand the great figures of Pindar and the two tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles; Euripides, a contemporary of Sophocles, already belongs to the critical and enlightened currents of the new age. Pindar (d. 448) extols Zeus as personifying the moral order of the world, creator of right and law; he exalts moral abstractions: Truth, Infallibility, Law as manifestations of his unifying action in which the features of individual deities are fused. Aeschylus (d. 456) magnifies the omnipotence of Zeus, who in himself sums up the universe and what lies beyond the universe, and whose figure represents the unity of “the divine” (τὸ θεῖον); he is the avenger of the sins of fathers, for which the sons must accept expiation until the deity absolves them, as happened to the matricide Orestes, who killed to obey the family vendetta of blood and was finally absolved by the Areopagus. Sophocles (d. 406) venerates the gods, respects the oracles, feels the power of fate as the manifestation of a higher will, sanctioned only by Zeus, which, however, does not act as an external constraint but works and is fulfilled within the psyche. A clear example is Oedipus, who submits to his most tragic fate but does not lose his nobility of conscience and deserves to end his days, blessed, 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 fate in the afterlife, contributed in Greece first and then in the Hellenistic world to ennoble the moral vision of life, inviting men to look to the sky as their homeland of origin, to which they must return after freeing themselves from the evil in which the soul is trapped like a ray of light within the dark prison of matter.
The process of religious unification that began during the Hellenistic era was aided by the development of Platonism, which, by identifying the idea of the Good with God and making the world of ideas the archetype according to which God creates the universe, provided the foundations for the theology of the Hellenistic period.
Rome. — Roman religiosity is characterized by reverence for the divine world, not curiously scrutinized from an intellectual standpoint, but deeply felt from the perspective of practical action. Jupiter possesses the characteristics of the supreme deity from pre-Capitoline times. Like the other supreme Indo-European deities, he is a sky deity both astronomical and meteorological: his cult takes place on high places—Capitoline Hill, Mount Albanus—and he manifests and sanctions his decrees with lightning. Toward the end of the Republic, a monotheistic conception of the deity began to take shape among philosophical circles, recognizing in Jupiter the *numen praestantissimum*.
Celts, Germans, Slavs. — More difficult, due to the scarcity and fragmentary nature of sources and the superficiality of Roman interpretation of the deities of the peoples with whom the Romans came into contact, is the task of defining the features of the Supreme Being among these populations. For the Celts, Caesar indicates Mercury as the chief deity, the one most frequently mentioned in inscriptions and depicted on roadside milestones; of the triad named by Lucan (I, 446), Taranis is the god who most closely resembles the figure of Jupiter the Thunderer. Tacitus interprets the supreme god of the Germans as Mercury, under which name is to be understood the indigenous god Wotan (Odin), conceived as a universal father and *regnator omnium Deus*, worshipped according to Germanic custom in the depths of a sacred grove.
The religion of the Slavs is known through accounts by Latin missionaries in the West and Byzantine writers in the East. Under various names—Perun for the Russians, Svarog (Zuarasië), Triglav, Svantevit for the Baltic Slavs—their Supreme Beings are regarded as tribal leaders, possess oracular powers, and are represented with multiple heads (three, four, or more) in a naive manner to affirm their universality, a characteristic of sky deities.
II. SUPERNATIONAL RELIGIONS
For Judaism and Christianity, see the respective entries.Buddhism. — From an intellectual standpoint, Buddhism is the final term of Brahmanic speculation, culminating in a pan-cosmism that identifies the universal with the individual self. From a religious standpoint, the Buddhism preached by the Buddha is ascetic, for it excludes from the governance of the world an ordinary mind, does not abolish the gods but subjects them to the mechanical law that governs the universe, and denies the existence of the soul. From this primitive agnostic direction, known as the "Little Vehicle" (*hināyāna*), that is, the small raft that carries to the shore of salvation (*nirvana*) through the current of transmigration, there developed a broader vehicle (*mahāyāna* = Great Vehicle) designed for the masses rather than the few, more capable of satisfying minds desirous of a more intimate and personal religious devotion. Mahāyāna Buddhism introduces the concept of a transcendent and permanent God in the figure of the primordial Buddha (Adi Buddha), revealed one day in the historical Buddha. Every individual, by following the path of devotion (*bhakti*), can become a *bodhisattva*, that is, place themselves in a condition to attain the status of Buddha, and can facilitate this ascent by renouncing the achievement of final liberation in order to make their sacrifice redound to the benefit of others. Trust in the Buddha, realized through acts of worship—hence temples, statues, ceremonies, and prayer formulas unknown to primitive Buddhism—is beneficial in attaining this state.
Mazdaism. — In contrast to the naturalistic polytheism of the Persians, a reformer, Zarathustra (Zoroaster), born perhaps in Media in the 7th–6th centuries B.C., preached a religion with a monotheistic content, which, though initially misunderstood by the dominant priestly class of the Magi, eventually came to be accepted in the Iranian lands with adaptations to ancient naturalism, establishing itself as the national religion of Persia during the Sassanian era (226–651 A.D.). Ahura Mazda, the "Wise Lord," is the unique god preached by Zarathustra, whose teachings are preserved in the sacred book called the Avesta (from the Pahlavi *Apastak* = fundamental text), which survives only in fragments. Ahura Mazda (v.) is the vindicator of truth against error, the creator of the universe through his omnipotent word, and its provident preserver. His throne is surrounded by six "Holy Immortals" (*Ameša Spenta*, v.): Good Thought, Justice, Sovereignty, Piety, Integrity, and Immortality, which are the expression of God’s providence in the governance of the world.
Islam. — Even during pre-Islamic paganism, the figure of Allah dominated over the other gods of the Arab pantheon. Muḥammad, whose religious formation was influenced by Christians and Jews settled on the northern fringes of the Arabian Peninsula, raised the banner of the one, omnipotent, omniscient, and just God who rewards human actions, a God who does not manifest Himself through the utterances of soothsayers or in the objects of nature, but through prophets, among whom the principal are Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and, lastly, Muḥammad himself, the messenger par excellence (*rasūl Allāh*). His monotheism is of Jewish origin in that it excludes the two mysteries of the Christian faith: the Trinity and the Incarnation of the Word: “God is One, God the Eternal; (He) begets not, nor is He begotten. And there is none like unto Him” (Qur’an, 112). For the development of Muslim theology and mysticism, see ISLĀM. See also: ANIMISM; HENOTHEISM; MONOTHEISM; POLYTHEISM.
V. GOD IN THE HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY.
Philosophy, as rational inquiry into the absolute—that is, the search for knowledge whose ultimate consequences validate its premises—is always directed toward the treatment of the problem of God, namely, the determination of a resolutive concept in which the ideal and real order of being finds its foundation and justification. Even the particular treatises 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 contain within themselves, at least implicitly, the lines of a natural theology; which, moreover, is not lacking even in atheistic systems that, despite 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 sense, may still be termed the divine. Therefore, the point of view to be adopted for the consideration of the problem of God in the history of Western philosophy should be one that allows a synthesis of whatever is essential in the contribution of human thought to the resolution of the problem of being.
Three problems may be distinguished in the problem of God: a) that of His nature, b) that of His relationship to the world, c) that of His knowability. In ancient philosophy the first two problems are to the fore and subordinate the one concerning knowability; in Christian philosophy the latter acquires an autonomous consistency alongside the other two; in modern philosophy the problem of the knowability of God prevails over the other two, almost resolving them into itself.
a) As regards the nature of God, solutions oscillate between 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). From a very general historical perspective, without any indication of particulars, it may be said that in the highest theological inquiries of classical antiquity the ontological and logical conceptions prevail; in modern philosophy the logical and axiological conceptions prevail; while Christian philosophy synthesizes the ontological, logical, and axiological determinations in the spiritualistic and personal conception of God.
b) The problem of the relationship between God and the world gives rise to two extreme solutions: monistic (unity of God and world) and dualistic (duality of God and the material principle that is the support of the world of becoming). The monistic solution takes two forms, proper respectively to classical and modern thought, depending on whether the divine remains immanent in the empirical order of phenomena (naturalistic pantheism) or in the ideal order of human mentality (idealistic pantheism). The creational principle, proper to Christian philosophy, may, in a certain sense, be said to be at once monistic and dualistic: monistic, inasmuch as the world (the universe of things and the universe of souls) belongs entirely to the power of the creator; dualistic, inasmuch as the creator, contained in the free act that gives it existence and consistency, remains constituted in His proper nature and is distinctly separated, by His ontological positivity, from the substance and being of the creature.
c) Finally, the problem of the knowability of God admits historically of two extreme theses: the ontological-intellectualist (God as the object of immediate apprehension by the intellect) and the agnostic (the unknowability of God), between which moves the intermediate solution, upheld by ecclesiastical teaching, of the demonstrability of God (God not intuited but knowable through a rational process proceeding from created things: a process that culminates in the qualification of the divine being with positive attributes, valid for knowledge but inadequate to resolve the divine being into human comprehension). From the agnostic thesis there derive the fideistic, pragmatistic, and sentimental currents, which seek to compensate for the lack of speculative means in penetrating the divine, respectively with the aids of grace and revelation, or with the postulates of praxis, or with the indefinite revelations of the heart. For intellectualistic and rationalistic currents, human relations with God are resolved without remainder within the sphere of natural knowability, with the consequent reduction of religion to philosophy; for fideistic currents, they are established only on the basis of supernatural intervention, with the consequent reduction of philosophy to religion; for an intermediate current, which moves within the sphere of Catholic orthodoxy, the metaphysical idea of God, emerging from the natural and rational order, constitutes indeed a necessary preamble to faith, but does not exhaust the meaning of human relations with God, in which philosophy and religion stand in conditions of continuity and complementarity.
SUMMARY:
I. In classical antiquity
II. In patristics and scholasticism
III. In modern and contemporary philosophy.I. IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY
To supplement the preceding outline with some reference to the historical development of these problems, it is first noted that, as regards the nature of God, classical philosophy could extricate itself only with difficulty, through the work of Plato and Aristotle, and even then not definitively, from the naturalistic ground in which the mythology of the poets had originated.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 space dwelt the gods of Olympus, the product of a fantasy that objectifies in physical semblances every human sense of strength and idealism, animating nature with conscious and rival powers. Just as intuitive moments succeed one another, each with its own absolute character, so too the mythical divine apparitions were juxtaposed, populating Olympus with a multiplicity of deities, among which the theological instinct of the Greeks sought to impose a certain order by 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 naturalist 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 impressed by Xenophanes, with his protest against the polymorphous and crudely 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 “being” one, immutable, immobile, which Parmenides likens to a sphere, well-defined and enclosed in its perfect roundness.
Whether, with Empedocles, 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, all motion proceeds from the nature of material elements, called atoms, from which even the soul and 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 blissfully in the spaces between worlds, indifferent to human affairs; or whether, finally, with the Stoics, God is conceived as the universal reason (ἀγόης) that, intrinsic to matter and itself material, constitutes its propulsive 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 earliest Greek poets had carved the powerful semblances of the gods of Olympus. Ultimately, the astral deity of the Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus, composed of a pondered mixture of ideal substances, does not escape this framework, nor do the various unmoved movers, divine intelligences, that preside over the harmonious 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 Plato’s “ideas”: 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 sense that drives the Greeks toward the finite, the complete, the clearly defined, impelled Plato beyond the chiaroscuro vision of the senses, in which being is always commingled with non-being, toward the pure intelligible that “has as much being as it is possible to have” (Phaed., 92 d). The ideas are, in fact, “what precisely each thing is,” its “being pure and simple” (αὐτὸ καθ’ αὑτὸ: op. cit., 75 d). And since the being that binds each idea to its specific nature is also that which circulates over all ideas, “embraces” them, and “binds” them, there emerges above all 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, just as it is the cause of their intelligibility (Rep., VI, 508 e-509 a). The true cause, both of each single thing and of things in their totality, is their best mode of being, that is, their being as they are (Phaed., 98 a). No Atlas has the strength to embrace and sustain the world, except the Good (op. cit., 99 c).
Critics have often discerned in the Good of the Phaedo and the Republic the traits of the Christian God, who is precisely Being and Good. But such comparisons and anticipations must not obscure the exact measure of the profound differences. The Being-Good of the Phaedo and the Republic is an object, not a subject; it is intelligible and a principle of intelligibility, not intelligence; it is an efficient cause insofar as it is a final cause, not a final cause insofar as it is an efficient cause. The world stretches toward the fullness of being, which is its Good, and in this sense the Good is the cause of intelligence and existence; but this upward movement is not, as it is for the Christian God, the response to the act of love of the Creator toward the creature. Here we recognize the traits of the Aristotelian God. Aristotle, who was a pupil of Plato, repudiated the Demiurge and the imaginative conception of the master’s later dialogues, but he adopted the theology of the Phaedo and the Republic and spread it throughout the broad development of his Physics and Metaphysics. The true Platonism of Aristotle, more than in what critics have gleaned from the few fragments of the early dialogues of the Statesman, lies in the unmoved mover, which, like the Good of the Phaedo and the Republic, moves not as a subject but as an “object of love” (Met., 1072 b 3): an efficient cause as well, insofar as it is a final cause, not vice versa. Here too all of nature moves toward it, as toward pure actuality and ideality in which it would realize itself; but the pure act, devoid of every potential and material element, does not turn toward the cosmos with an effective and suitable power, but rather is consumed in a solitary thought that is ideality circulating upon itself, intelligence as intelligence of intelligence (νόησις νοήσεως νόησις). Perhaps we shall not be far from Aristotle’s thought if we say that his God is the limiting concept of the immanent ideality of the world: a celebration of the naturalistic pantheism of the Greeks at the summit of their speculative effort. Indeed, Aristotle himself poses the problem whether the good and the best, of which the nature of the universe partakes, is something separate from nature and existing in itself and by 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 general is its good, because the order depends on the general (Met., 1075 a 11-15). The question remains unanswered, 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, God himself must be present in his actuality, more than merely as an object of thought about God. The dogma of classical intellectualism, already sanctioned by Parmenide with the assertion that thought is not different from being, because it is only thought of what is (frg. 34), and developed by Plato with the affirmation in the Republic that “what fully is, is fully knowable” (παντελῶς ὄν παντελῶς γνωστόν V, 477 a), finds application in the mentality of the ancient sage, who, when he reaches the summit of his earthly 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 carries off the sage in the vortex of pure intelligence, which does not belong to his humanity or his individuality, because it is the proper condition of the divine.
It is necessary to return with the briefest glance to Plato, so that one does not believe that the line of his theology unfolds solely in the direction marked by the Phaedo and the Republic, which leads to Aristotle. There is another line that, beginning from the later dialogues and without touching Aristotle, continues historically into Neoplatonism. The direction of this line is marked by the exigence of reintegrating into the principle of being the elements of subjectivity, vitality, productivity, and providence, which escaped the pure ideality of essence.
The Sophist is an attempt to introduce life and movement into the world of ideas: but the movement thus achieved still remains within the limits of pure logic. A more valid result seems to be achieved by splitting the order of principles. Plato’s God cannot be at once ideality and subjectivity, and must descend, as the gods of the Phaedo, principles of life and movement, are separated from the purest essences that they contemplate at the summit of their celestial journey. The Demiurge of the Timaeus, finally, realizes the concept that only in the soul is there intellect, and only intellect can bring to completion in things the idea of the best (46 c-d): he is therefore, as an invisible, intelligent, good, and unenvious craftsman, father, ordainer, and provident. But the intelligible remains outside this operative and provident intellect, which in its action is doubly limited: above by the ideas that it reflects as models of its plastic activity, below by the spurious “matrix” of the divine, upon which it impresses the mark of its ordering activity. The universe that issues from the industrious hands of the Demiurge reproduces, with a degrading level of perfection, the eternal exemplar upon which it is conformed: and it happens, therefore, that even man, recognizing himself as an image very distant from the fullness of ideal being, cannot claim to express in his thought more than a very disproportionate imitation of his inaccessible object (ἀγώσις ἐν μυεσίδαι: Tim. 19 e). Pure intelligence, which identified the sage with God, gives way to an anxious search, nourished by humility and sometimes by discouragement.
This is the voice of Plato that reaches as far as the Platonists, echoing in the hypostases that overflow from the absolute Unity, which is Good and God, giving rise to the intelligible world, the universal Soul, and nature. Here too the relationship established between the various degrees of being emanating from God is one of imitation, so that the mimetic process is inverted 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 vestibule of the temple, where there are statues of the gods, that is, their images, not what the images represent. One must pass beyond the vestibule, annihilating in oneself sensibility, thought, and being, in order to obtain a “conjunction of the soul with God, and a perception of the like by the like” in the supreme state of ecstasy. In Neoplatonic ecstasy, which surpasses intellect, classical intellectualism is also surpassed: so that this final voice of ancient philosophy, not immune from Hebraic and Christian influences, is in turn destined to arouse immediate echoes in the philosophy of Christianity.
II. IN PATRISTIC AND SCHOLASTIC THOUGHT
When Christianity enters the world, it continues the philosophical discourse with a certain coherence. The ideas of Plato remain in St. Augustine; the One of Plotinus remains in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite; the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle remains in St. Thomas. But literal fidelity corresponds to anything but substantial fidelity; rather, there is an innovative spirit, which to some has seemed downright revolutionary. In relation to the threefold division of the schema adopted, the three essential contributions made by Christian philosophy are: a) the concept of the spirituality and personality of God, concerning his nature; b) the concept of creation, concerning the relationship between God and the world; c) the concept of analogy, concerning 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 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 thus the first speculative contribution of the Fathers merges and blends with the laborious process of dogmatic definition. But the contribution itself is easily discerned when one considers that, in the face of a God who lives, speaks, intends, is provident not only toward man but also toward the grass and flowers of the meadow, the conception of a God who was consumed in pure intellect that had itself as its object can no longer hold. The new God of the philosophers, in addition to being an object, must be a subject; in addition to being thought and thought itself, he must be a thinking subject, and only subordinately thought and thought insofar as he is primarily a thinking subject. As “no one has ascended to heaven except the one who descended from it” (John 3:13), so the motion of love of things must be the response to the inverse initial movement: thus God appears as an object of love insofar as he primarily manifests himself as a subject of love, an object of the will and finality marked for creatures insofar as he is Will that wills itself and absolute Goodness. It is enough to read St. Augustine’s De Trinitate to understand how from a dogmatic theology, founded on the mysteries of Revelation, there arises a new natural theology that adumbrates 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 interior word and in the intrinsic power of will and love. 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 divine life as the internal generation of the Father in the Son, who is his Wisdom and eternal Word.
The ontological conception of God is not, as is often repeated, an original contribution of Christian philosophy. Ontology is an inheritance from pagan antiquity: it suffices to recall the *Phaedo* and the *Republic*. The ontology of classical philosophers is well in accord with biblical ontology when the Fathers and Doctors of the Church propose, at the beginning of every discussion on God, the divine self-definition from Exod. 3:14: *Ego sum qui sum. Ait: sic dices filiis Israel: qui est misit me ad vos*. Yet it is original to Christian philosophy all that pertains to the transformation of *esse* into *sum*. Whoever repeats the biblical verse places the emphasis on the *Ego*, almost to highlight the process by which *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» (*Comm. in Io.*, VIII, 38).
The ontology of the classical philosophers resolved the existence of things into their ideality, so that at the summit of being they found nothing more than Aristotle’s “thought of thought,” and Plato needed to juxtapose to the principle of pure ideality the opposite principle of an animated and intelligent being. The ontology of Christians, by contrast, is the integration of ideality with the fullness of existence. Classical ontology is existence volatilized into essence; Christian ontology is essence solidified into existence. The highest concept of God attained by Christian philosophy revolves entirely around the identification of essence with existence (*in Deo idem est esse et essentia*: *C. Gent.*, I, 22). It is thus understandable that St. Thomas can continue to define God as pure act; yet the word now carries a special resonance it did not have in Aristotle, for in the Greek philosopher pure act was simply intelligibility, stripped of every potential element, whereas in St. Thomas it is the absolute positivity of act by which being belongs to itself, excluding non-being and every defective form of existence: *ens dicitur ab actu essendi*.
From this *aseitas*, 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, and so forth.
An attribute of Being, in such abundant richness of positivity, is the note of diffusiveness and communicability: *Bonum est diffusivum sui*. From this note follows the transition from the *aseitas* of God to creation. It is a fact that the contingent exists—that is, a being deficient in which existence does not coincide with essence and, unable to sustain itself, changes, becomes, and thus betrays the lack of being that at every moment threatens to plunge it into nothingness. Yet if the contingent 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 sustains it in existence. The “five ways” of St. Thomas for the demonstration of God’s existence ultimately follow the path of this fundamental argument. It is an integral application of the principle of causality. The same productive capacity that man, as a maker, exercises in his action upon the external world, when understood without the limits that constantly frustrate human endeavor, suggests the concept of creation. Although creation belongs to Revelation, it is so far from contradicting reason that creativity is in fact the perfect fulfillment of the concept of causality. It is a participation in being from the Being who does not empty Himself in giving to another, nor relies upon anything preexistent to impress upon it a form or seal, but rather posits and penetrates the finite existent and contains it even to the depths of matter: *productio rei ex nihilo sui et subiecti*.
The Unmoved Mover of St. Thomas does not merely modify the surface mode of being in reality; He produces the passage from non-being to being before determining the transition from potency to act and from stillness 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 factori» (*In Hexaem.*, IX, 24). The Creator, necessarily complete in Himself as in the integrity of being, is not bound by necessity to finite beings, which are called into existence by His power without diminution or increase of the divine substance, through a free act of His diffusive love. This radical application of the concept of creation decisively sets Christian thought, in its most authoritative medieval currents, outside every kind of pantheistic naturalism, Neoplatonic emanationism, Aristotelian or Manichaean dualism. The concept of creation also serves to maintain the finite nature of created beings in their own substantiality, beyond any vision that would reduce the cosmos to illusion and dissolve it into the all-absorbing principle of being. Instead, it is the illusion 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 the *rationes seminales* required some adjustment in light of the Thomistic concept of second causes, the creational principle of the relative autonomy of creatures is already clearly enunciated 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-Thomistic canon *omne agens agit sibi simile*, the perfect efficacy of the creative act cannot be exhausted in vain and unproductive effects but must in some way iterate and prolong itself in effects as similar to the cause as possible, and thus 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 habent proprias actiones... Detrahere ergo perfectioni creaturarum est detrahere perfectioni divinae virtutis» (*C. Gent.*, III, 69). Thus, the more each being deepens its own nature and attains its perfection, the more it reinforces within itself the image that draws 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 reveals itself as one in its origin.
divine, even as it multiplies in the indefinite variety of beings, among which there obtains not an univocity that sacrifices one to another, nor an equivocity that renders them solitary and hostile, but an analogy (v.) that preserves their individuality and conduces to their affinity. To the analogy of being (v. ESSERE) then follows the analogy of mind. The law of unity and difference that guides Christian cosmology, justifying itself rationally through the creative principle, is also fruitful in the gnoseological order in determining, among the foremost representatives of medieval thought, the solution to the problem of the knowability of God. Here the prevailing doctrine is continually stimulated by two opposing and extreme tendencies, one of which would lead to God as known in Himself, the other to God as unknown and unknowable: a) The first tendency, in which the thrust of classical intellectualism is only slightly realized, seeks an evident intellect of God that is prior to all investigation and the starting point of all investigation. It seems that, by declaring His name "He Who Is," God has enclosed in it His essence, and that man may grasp in the notion of "He Who Is" or in any other name that God has attributed to Himself, the very essence of God. The doctrine of the illumination of St. Augustine, by deriving human apprehension of truth from the source of Truth, which is God Himself, may insinuate the suspicion of an exhaustive penetration of the divine Being by human knowledge. The convertibility of existence and essence in God underpins the famous ontological argument of St. Anselm, who sees the notion of the most perfect Being converted into the certain affirmation of His existence, because to the most perfect Being existence cannot be lacking. b) The opposing tendency, laden with all the echoes of the superessential and superintelligible One of Neoplatonism, is an illusion, to a certain extent legitimate, of the Augustinian-Scholastic adage: "Quidquid scientia comprehenditur, scientis 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 sensible phantasm, it seems that this very notion cannot but contaminate the divine essence, mentally inaccessible, with improper attributes. From this consideration, which is the germ of the critical doubt of modern philosophy, there arises negative theology ("Deus qui sciitur melius nescio": 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 mind. From this negation the mystic proceeds to achieve 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 opposing tendencies, but because it expresses in its synthesis the partial truth that stimulates them) refers to the biblical text: "For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made" (Rom. 1:20). God is not seen, nor intuitively grasped, but is demonstrated by causal inference from the existence of creatures, especially rational creatures, in which He manifests Himself. Already St. Basil, in his polemic against Eunomius, declared that no divine name suffices for man to exhaust the depths of the divine essence, but that divine names, though rooted in the concepts of the human mind (κατ' ἐπίνοιαν), have a positive validity of metaphysical signification and are not arbitrary fantastic constructions. To remove from the Augustinian doctrine of illumination any intuitionistic and immanentistic meaning, St. Thomas interprets it in the sense that the eternal truth of God is the source of human knowledge not objectively, sed causaliter, that is, not as the object of immediate apprehension, but as the cause of the intellectual capacity, incorporated with the human intellect (Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 84, a. 6). The same St. Thomas opposes the God known in Himself of St. Anselm, but Anselm's argument retains its value in much of the Scholastic tradition, not insofar as it 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 ipsum Esse, which governs the entire order of our mentality and our experience, the real and objective existence of Being Itself is inferred. To negative theology is joined a positive theology, which predicates of God the qualifications that the mind derives by way of eminence from the perfections of the real; and the same negative procedure declares itself fruitful of positive meanings, according to the consideration of L. Thomassin, based on the texts of the Pseudo-Dionysius, "quod omnes negationes positionem aliquam implicent." It is specified that God can be known, although He cannot be comprehended, understanding comprehension as a compenetration with the divine essence that would immerse us in God Himself. It is also specified that of God one can know *quia est*, although one cannot exhaust in our concept the *quid sit*; but since, according to a consideration that will become explicit in Suárez, the affirmation of existence always implies a certain qualification of 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 to predicate attributes that are valid, though inadequate. The meaningful validity of human concepts, rationally expressed, and their inadequacy to an exhaustive expression; the positivity of verbal terms and their disproportion with respect to the object to which they allude; a vision not *in sole* but *per solum*, that is, through that intellectual light which belongs to us, though it is a participated participation in the inherent light; the cosmic elevation, whereby all created things, and first of all the human soul, "possunt considerari vari ut res vel ut signa," as St. Bonaventure says (*In I Sent.* 3, 3, ad 2), that is, the more perfect they are, the more they point to the perfection of the Creator; the bond and incommensurability of creatures—this is the sense of analogism that reverberates from the ontological order to the gnoseological and moral orders and, beyond philosophy, spreads into every manifestation of art, poetry, and ritual, enveloping all the manifestations of the medieval soul in the atmosphere of a universal liturism.
III. IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY
A gradual elimination of the concept and sense of analogy is, perhaps, the most comprehensive feature that characterizes modern and contemporary philosophy in relation to the theological problem: one might even say, modern and contemporary philosophy tout court. The elimination of that hinge gives rise to a twofold consequence: a) either human conception closes in upon its internal rhythms and resolves the absolute within them, with a monistic and immanentistic result that reproduces, in a subjectivistic setting, the same result achieved, in an objectivistic setting, by classical intellectualism (this is the current that, from Cartesian mathematicism, through Malebranche’s ontologism, Spinoza’s and Leibniz’s panlogism, the natural religion of the Enlightenment, reaches as far as the absolute Subject of post-Kantian idealism, and extends into the most recent forms of humanism, humanitarianism, aestheticism, and atheism); or b) human conception recognizes itself as incapable of signifying the absolute, so that the relationship with it is established on irrational, sentimental, fideistic grounds, or in terms of shock and collision (this is the current that, starting from Ockham’s terminism, through German theology, Lutheranism, and the various empiricist doctrines of “belief,” reaches as far as Kant’s theological postulate of practical reason, and then extends into Schleiermacher’s sentimentalism, the doctrine of values, E. Hartmann’s irrationalism, and so on, down to our own day in those forms of theistic existentialism that, rooted in the Lutheran soil of Kierkegaard, establish the human relationship with God on the basis of contradiction and absurdity). In both cases, the excluded transparency of the term is at issue.mental on transcendent values that either find resolution in pure mentality or persist in their transcendence and are announced by other means, outside of mentality or in contradiction to II. It is not possible here to account for, in two distinct sections, the two currents, so frequent are the connections and interferences; but the initial schema, which would require much further development, must be kept in mind 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-the-image and of
the Cosmos-the-trace: what
the image and
the trace allude to
gradually fades away, though it survives at the beginning in
some mystical transparency,
still noted, 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 closing-in of the
cosmic monad and
of the mental image within its internal rhythms, until it makes
intrinsic to the divine the very frictions and contradictions that tear apart the real. In Cusanus, despite some perplexity, the coincidence of opposites is the limit to which human mentality arrives in its extreme effort, adumbrating the inaccessible divine, in which opposition ceases; in Bruno the universe is at times divinized in its infinity, at times closed in its unitary totality to signify the divine intimacy 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, with the positive forces of construction, the destructive forces of hatred and wrath emanate. On Böhme, German mysticism had not been without influence, the same mysticism that had paved the way for Lutheranism. Already in the medieval world, the consumption of universals in Ockham’s nominalism had limited the demonstrative capacity of reason in relation to divine truths. In the currents descending from Ockham, the ideas of the human mind, mere names or _fata socii_, become insignificant in relation to the divine, just as in Luther human works become ineffective with respect to Grace. In those currents, only faith is awaited for any revelation of supreme truths, just as in Luther salvation is awaited only from Grace and predestination. After the medieval openness of reason to the transcendent comes the fracture between the two domains: and all 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 panagism, which in turn prepares the advent of the absolute mentality of the post-Kantians. Descartes’ clear and distinct ideas indeed come from God, but they are too clear and distinct, and serve the philosopher and physicist too well in weaving the world into a mathematical fabric or imprisoning it in a mechanical device, for the mind that possesses these ideas not to lose, sooner or later, the sense of mystery, deeming superfluous the God who gives them to man. Pascal is the drama of the believer’s heart who seeks to find the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob beyond the iron fence of mathematical reason. But before the fruits of the absolute Subject of idealist philosophy ripen, Cartesianism bears fruit in the ontologism and occasionalism of A. Geulincx and F. Malebranche, a transcendent, absorbing symbol with a strong mystical accent, where everything that thinks in the world thinks in God, and everything that acts in the world acts by the operation of God. Ontologism is the lost initiative of the human mind, 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 whose nature it is to exist not in another, and thus substantiality could be attributed both to the Creator and to creatures, reaffirming for these latter their consistency in their own being. Instead, Descartes’ substance («res quae ita exsistit, ut nulla alia re indigeat ad exsistendum») does not allow substantiality to be attributed except to God, extending it to creatures in such a way that the philosopher himself declares it «equivocal». Beyond what might truly be called the Cartesian equivocation, B. Spinoza establishes 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 single divine substance («id quod in se est et in se concipitur»): a natural nature whose «modes» are the particular manifestations of natural nature, and whose «attributes» we know 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 brings man, beyond the particularism of affections and passions, to the intellectual love of God. It is a pantheism that needs no processions or emanations from God down to the lowest strata of matter, as occurred in Neoplatonic and Gnostic pantheism, but rather sums everything currently into the substantial unity of the divine. The universe of G. Leibniz, on the other hand, varies in multiplicity, obeying the law of difference. He retains within himself the spirit of medieval philosophy, multiplying substances or monads, all centered and concentrated in themselves and enveloped in God’s creative act, the absolute monad. But for Leibniz the individual monads are closed in upon themselves, «without doors or windows», and perceive the world because they are a world, but do not perceive the world of monads and do not directly influence it either through thought or action. The ontological and logical openness of medieval analogism is occluded by the impenetrability and incommunicability of the monads, which, not communicating with one another, 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 artificially attributed to a divine intervention, by which a harmony is pre-established that owes nothing to the spontaneous collaboration of the incommunicable monads. Pre-established harmony is the philosophical equivalent of Lutheran predestination.
Kant’s critical doubt arises, more than from Hume’s phenomenalism, from the closure of Leibniz’s monads. Kant’s subjects do communicate with one another through the forms of understanding that, common to all men, guarantee the universality and objectivity of
Scientific knowledge does not communicate intellectually with God, because the very forms, being incapable of application to empirical experience in the intuition of God, are not valid in their transcendental employment. God is conceived, but 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 attempting to demonstrate His existence, remains as a “regulative” principle of a process of unification of experience that our mentality cannot bring to completion.
Post-Kantian idealistic philosophy, however, brings the process to completion, arriving at Fichte’s transcendental Ego, which produces and resolves within itself the empirical individualities of men; at Schelling’s Absolute, which, with a strong Brunian and Spinozist accentuation, 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 most ample dialectical development—encompassing the moments of ideal and eternal history in its conscious determinations and its natural externalizations—reduces all reality to the rational in the luminous self-possession of intellectual life.
Within this very process are included the imaginative representations of the divine with which religion prepares the advent of pure philosophical conception: the dogmas and mysteries of Christianity are assumed, apart from their historical and positive meaning, as symbols of the creative process of the infinite that determines itself in the finite and incarnates itself in the sensible, to be redeemed finally in pure rational spirituality. This idealistic symbolism (which reproduces the relationship by which the ancient Stoics took mythical representations of the gods as allegories, proportioned to popular understanding, of the God of the philosophers) is the reversal of medieval analogism: in the latter, rational truths are open to the mysteries of faith, veiling them effectively and inadequately, whereas in idealistic symbolism it is the mysteries of faith that are open to rational truths, as their imaginative foreshadowing.
Within this very process are included the imaginative representations of the divine with which religion prepares the advent of pure philosophical conception: the dogmas and mysteries of Christianity are assumed, apart from their historical and positive meaning, as symbols of the creative process of the infinite that determines itself in the finite and incarnates itself in the sensible, to be redeemed finally in pure rational spirituality. This idealistic symbolism (which reproduces the relationship by which the ancient Stoics took mythical representations of the gods as allegories, proportioned to popular understanding, of the God of the philosophers) is the reversal of medieval analogism: in the latter, rational truths are open to the mysteries of faith, veiling them effectively and inadequately, whereas in idealistic symbolism it is the mysteries of faith that are open to rational truths, as their imaginative foreshadowing.
While the immanentist design of the post-Kantians extends into various idealistic or positivistic forms of humanism, humanitarianism, or explicit atheism that reach down to our own time (Feuerbach: God as the self-alienation of man, who substantiates 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 solidarity; Durkheim: God as the self-worship of man that substitutes for Him; Hamelin: God as the consciousness of the totality of facts and human relations; G. Gentile: God as the objective moment that circulates dialectically, together with the subjective moment of art, in the absolute actuality of philosophical self-consciousness), and while the metaphysical residue of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is reborn, in positivist guise, in Spencer’s “unknowable” (the Absolute as that impenetrable yet positive ground upon which the forms and relations are applied, among which alone our clear consciousness can move); another current of fundamental importance for lay theology in modernity detaches itself 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 conceded to practical reason, which, noting that moral will is indeed autonomous—obedient to a categorical imperative that has no justification outside itself—but that perfectly moral intention remains a pure form that does not take hold of empirical reality, which at times dramatically belies the good intentions of the virtuous man, is led to postulate a Supreme Will that governs at once the order of facts and the order of laws and, by constituting the agreement between nature and spirit, also establishes the equation between virtue and happiness. From this standpoint, moral laws appear as divine commands, and God reappears as a postulate of moral consciousness. Subsequent philosophy encounters in a thousand ways the dualism of Kant’s two Critiques, whether exacerbating it or seeking to heal it by restoring unity among spiritual functions under the primacy of practical reason. Toward unity moves Schleiermacher, making feeling the principle of religious life and achieving, through feeling, that penetration of the divine which places us above the dualism of subject and object, spirit and nature, sensibility and intellect. Instead, the dualism 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 relationship with God is established outside any philosophical question about His existence and the truth-content of Christian beliefs, seeking in God and in these truths only what satisfies our emotional and moral needs.
The “belief” that intervened to fill the metaphysical void left by pre-Kantian empiricism also intervenes after Kant, in the philosophy of Hamilton and Mansel, to arm with good reasons the psychological experience and moral will that seek to rise to God, while God remains not only unknowable but unthinkable, inasmuch as God must by definition be the unconditioned (the unconditionally unlimited, i.e., the infinite, and the unconditionally limited, i.e., the absolute), whereas thought is by its nature a relation between terms and their reciprocal 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 quite rightly objected to Hamilton that “determination” is not the same as limitation).
The notion of “limitation” and the idea that qualifying God with certain attributes does not mean confining Him within the finite limits of those attributes. Mansel’s inconceivability of God also sprang from the impossibility of reconciling infinity with personality, a motif that resounds in 19th-century French philosophy, e.g. in Vacherot and Renouvier (whereas in Italy Gioberti deemed infinity and personality so little incompatible that he saw infinity as the perfection of the person, namely the perfect self-possession of being that returns to itself through its own act, without any external intervention). How deeply Kant’s legacy still bears fruit in French philosophy is shown by Renouvier’s neo-criticism, which resolves the conflict between the two Critiques by positing a “will to believe” that makes its supreme object a God as the moral law governing the relations among beings, while intelligence, instead of guiding the will by illuminating it, works reflectively on the materials that the will itself has constituted. This “will to believe,” which constructs its object beyond all possibility of rational demonstration or ontological affirmation, passes into James’s pragmatism, where it fosters careful empirical observation of mystical states and respectful consideration of the beneficial influence religion exerts on human life. The primacy of practice marks, in modernity, the first revolt of the human person against universal and impersonal reason, which, having failed to satisfy man’s religious needs, had dissolved the individual’s uniqueness into a secondary and empirical phenomenon. A more violent uprising of the “single self” against logicism is now occurring in contemporary philosophy through existentialism, which, reviving the spirit of the Lutheran S. Kierkegaard, sees in the closed, necessary, egalitarian Logos the negation of freedom, spontaneity and originality in individual existence. The upshot of this new irrationalism is, on the one hand, the denial of God as the guarantor of logic, order and the world’s rationality and as the limit imposed on the free choice of personal commitment (Sartre); on the other, the extension of irrationality even to God Himself, the realm of the impossible and the absurd, to be attained through a desperate faith that shatters the necessity of knowledge and duty and wins the true freedom of the spirit in which God lives (Chestov).
Christian philosophy continues its course in modernity either by preserving its traditional values in a cautious reserve devoid of communication and influence; or by entering into so intimate and confident a dialogue with modern thought that confidence turns into complaisance; or, as most often happens today, by reliving modern thought’s deepest exigencies in its own anxious research so as to lead them to satisfaction within the orbit of traditional theism. Already in 19th-century Italy, Gioberti had yielded to the suggestions of ontologism, yet without falling into immanentism thanks to an elaborate use of the concept of creation; and A. Rosmini had applied Kant’s idea of being as a category of human understanding, while still drawing from it objective values both for the empirical being of physical reality and for “being thought in fully accomplished act,” which is God. Modernism, a complex of immanentist, pragmatist and intuitionist tendencies that at the turn of the century sought to revive traditional faith from within, is the classic instance of the confident dialogue that ends in complaisance. Increasingly apart from the modernist movement, especially after the recent publication of the trilogy L’action, L’être, La pensée, M. Blondel stands firm with his synthesis of the entire phenomenology of finite being, defective thought and transient action, all opening onto the transcendence of “the One Necessary and Unattainable,” i.e. the God of revealed and positive religion. In France the religious and Christian inflection of existentialism gathers thinkers under the banner of Philosophie de l’esprit who protest against abstract logicism in order to recover the meaning of existence through a more direct and vital participation in Being (Lavelle), a more intense and conscious feeling for absolute Value (Le Senne), or a more assiduous, lightning-like penetration into the sense of mystery (Marcel). In Italy the “Gallarate movement,” which annually brings together Catholic university teachers, devotes itself to metaphysical reconstruction on the basis of rigorous critical method and an integral humanism that preserves rationality as the cohesive factor of personal life, social communion and transcendental elevation.
BIBL.:
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M. Schulze, *Wert und Uncert der Beeteise f. das Dasein Gottes*, Görlitz 1905;
G. Grunwald, *Geschichte der Gottesbevæise im Mittelalter*, Münster 1907;
E. P. Lamanna, *La religione nella vita dello spirito*, Firenze 1914;
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VI. Iconography
God, One in nature and Three in person, as pure Spirit cannot be adequately depicted. When a representation must be given, it can only be that of the Most Holy Trinity, namely the Father, the Eternal, the Son, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, variously expressed even by symbols (v. TRINITÀ, SANTISSIMA).
Nevertheless, the image of God in some compositions, as early as the 3Dura Europos (v.) and in the West from the 4th century onward, was rendered by depicting a hand bestowing crowns or blessing; thus very often in sarcophagi (Wilpert, Sarcofagi, II, pp. 226–27, 233–37), in frescoes, in the mosaic decorations of apses, and in ivories. In Paleo-Christian art the image of God the Father appears in sarcophagi where the creation of man is depicted, as, for example, in the so-called Dogmatic Sarcophagus, in which the Eternal Father is bearded, seated on a veiled throne, while the Son and the Holy Spirit stand (Wilpert, op. cit., p. 226, pl. 65); or in the scene of the offerings of Cain and Abel, in which God the Father, bearded, is seated on a rock or on a folding chair (Wilpert, op. cit., pl. 186, 1 and 190, 8), whereas in some instances of this scene the three Persons of the Holy Trinity are beardless (Wilpert, op. cit., pl. 182 and 191, 5). In a sarcophagus from Saragossa, God the Father drives Adam out of Paradise (Wilpert, op. cit., p. 228).
In the 13th century a new type was created to represent His Person, namely the image of an old man of most noble aspect with long white hair and beard.