This seems to be the right moment to give special discussion to the enlarged sense we have felt compelled to assume for totality in its human context--that is, a humanity inevitably determined by alterocentricity and spirituality.
In other words, we are envisioning the ideal of a man with the fullest implications of some self-transcendence on the human plane. That man, with the self-evident spiritual element that his God-given freedom implies, could never be imagined as contenting himself with a life devoid of meaning. Such confinement would be the diametrical opposite of totality. If we are at all to admit a certain self-transcendence as an essential endowment of the human being, then we are bound to include in that being the following fundamentals of the alterocentric trend: every single thing in the world of his choice, I mean the world he may choose to accept or reject, the world surrounding him and towards which he stretches himself out, is obliged to have a definite aim, a fullness of meaning. And it has that aim, that meaning, not in itself, but outside itself.
Would it then appear as something astonishing that life itself--the most far-reaching thing ever experienced--that this, too, is envisioned as necessarily having a definite meaning?
And now the important historical question, "What has been, in the turmoil of human ideas, the destiny history was seen to have in store for such a reaching out for meaningfulness in human life?" We might answer that the ideal of meaningfulness has had a history coinciding very much with that of the naiveté we have described as the spirit of the genuine child.
Of course naivete has never distinguished itself as particularly philosophical. It is rather fundamentally non-philosophical. So it is not precisely what one should expect to bump into in speculative thought, in any age of human history. But as we pass from century to century there is a visible trend for human ideas to grow harder, more "adult", more destitute of naive idealism. We shall have an opportunity to put the finger on specific manifestations of that development in history only by and by. But we may, already now, in recapitulating the past, foreshadow the future.
We have previously called attention to many a feature, in the philosophy of Aristotle, for instance, which we were obliged to characterize as simply alterocentric. And if we look quite openly at the philosophy of Plato, we shall have to admit one thing: even that famous idealism of his, however disrupted from the concrete realities of practical life--and however high-strung and exaggerated it may have been--to tell the truth, there is still something heartily and inspiringly naive about it, or, at least, comparatively naive. (A really hardened materialist of our advanced world today would probably say that it is ridiculously naive.) In fact, it is simply overflowing with a certain generosity of the human heart. We imagine that this generosity is a feature every philosophy is bound to display, almost in spite of itself, in those special zones where it borders on religion. For Plato certainly had, even in the last analysis--and right in the midst of that theoretical abstractness of his elaborate idealism--some really spiritual elements. We mean spiritual even in a religious and truly human sense. That alterocentric spirituality may have been derived from a most personal contact with his great teacher Socrates, who certainly impressed him indelibly, both through his engaging life and through his pathetic death.
Now there are similar good things, of course, to be said about the great thinkers of the Middle Ages. Most of them seem to have a particularly strong confidence in the reliability of the higher forces governing human destinies and cosmic events. They also show an unwavering attachment to the established authorities of religious life in their age.
And we are not astonished at the relative ease with which they were able to conserve an admirable degree of childlikeness, so far. For here there has really entered, upon the scene of human thought, a gigantic rival who could hardly fail to put a temporary check upon the general spirit of increasing impersonalism and frigidity. We are referring to the angelic giant of Christian faith, a wonderful "intruder", making his "inroads" even right into the realms of professional thinking, and forcing thinkers, in some degree, to modify their thoughts, thus delaying, at least, an otherwise unbridled course towards an increasingly inclement spiritual climate.
So, in view of the special environment out of which medieval philosophy had the good fortune to grow, it is easy to understand its relatively humanizing and personalizing currents.
But it is understandable, also, that this more naive form of spiritual thought could not last forever. The mild vision of meaningfulness and totality was doomed to be tragically obscured in the minds of the men who were to constitute the elite in Western intelligentsia through subsequent ages. This could be foreseen. Only the degree of that obscuration could hardly be foreseen--particularly not as an inevitable consequence of progressing knowledge exclusively, even the most rigorous scientific knowledge.
Let us leave out of account the deeper reasons for such a development, so far, however. Our first step may be to consider the development itself. The historical facts are clear enough. The general trends are indisputable: the ideas of Perfection and Meaningfulness soon reach a stage where they seem to be fighting a losing battle. The tendency of human thinking keeps growing harder and harder, or colder and colder. Those are the adjectives we have repeatedly used as synonyms for egocentric.
Probably the hardest and most frigidly cruel attack ever directed against the naive idea of a true meaning in life was kept in reserve for the nineteenth century. In order to have a vivid demonstration through contrast, just let us, for a rapid moment, go all the way up from the Middle Ages to that distant period. In the latter half of the nineteenth century something burst upon the consciousness of the Western world which we call evolutionism.
But what, then, was the attitude, of this new theory of evolution, towards perfection and finality? Of course it would be wrong to say that it was always so openly and demonstratively negative. As a matter of fact, evolutionism, in its own way, often appears to be most eagerly concerned with a forward-pressing tendency. It sets a goal for the forces of life. It presents an end of the most impressive magnitude, a lofty aim of "meaningfulness" right in the realm of biological science.
Paulus Svendsen's comprehensive treatment of the idea of human progress in his work Gullalderdröm og utviklingstro,[1] shows to what extent that idea of a purely biological evolution was intimately correlated even with ideas of social progress, and, we may certainly add, of spiritual progress.
For instance, in Spencer's mind, evolution had become almost synonymous with an increase in all values in our world. A universal law of blessed necessity was supposed to direct everything towards a wonderful perfection. Even the heart of man could not fail to be lifted up towards increasing altitudes on the surging waves of universal progress. Just as Auguste Comte's stern positivism did not seem to hinder him in any way from including even such sublime values as altruism in his peculiar system of human progress, so Spencer gave prophetic glimpses of a new and better type of humanity, evoking passages of the Gospel rather than of hard natural philosophy.
However, the question we cannot help asking ourselves immediately, is this: How could that universal law of progress lead so inevitably right up to the highest summits of human perfection, in mind and spirit, as well as in body, when it still remains so utterly imperfect itself--imperfect above all in the means it uses in order to reach that end of marvelous perfection?
For one thing should here be pointed out with unmistakable clarity: if this is finality, it is a finality so cold and unfeeling that it certainly has very little in common with that meaningfulness in human lives which is tacitly implied of our terminology.
Could we ever imagine Thomas Aquinas, or any other true exponent of the Middle Ages, as the discoverer (if we do not want to say the inventor) of such a finality; we mean, of course, under equal conditions of scientific knowledge?
We all know the terrible clash which came--and was bound to come--between orthodox Christianity and that new "religion" in the nineteenth century. The simple record of the creation of life, as found in the first chapters of the Holy Writ, was now, more than ever before in the history of natural science, looked upon as a myth exhibiting a naiveté bordering on the ridiculous.
Here we are not, of course, concerned with any proper evaluation of the arguments launched on this occasion by dogmatic Christian theology. We are not concerned with any proper evaluation of the arguments launched by dogmatic biology either. Our task is in no wise to show who was right in the oncoming strife regarding biological and cosmological facts. Was it the evolutionist? Was it the Christian fundamentalist (or special creationist, as he is technically termed in ideological nomenclature today)? Or was it a third group--that of the theological bridge-builders now rising up and trying to reconcile the two extremes? These questions are outside the scope of our examination.
Another question, however, is bound to be of enormous interest to us: In what spirit was the battle fought? Or let us rather go back to the time when there was no open battle at all: In what spirit were those ideas reached which were liable to cause the battle sooner or later? Is it with a heavy heart that the intellectual elite of Occidental culture has arrived at the conclusion that the old opinions, so confidently held by the Christian scholars of "darker ages", must be abandoned as untenable myths? No, often it is with iconoclastic joy, and very seldom with any serious concern about any possible consequences of spiritual tragedy, automatically implied.
What possible tragedy are we speaking about? We are speaking about the tragic fate of the idea of finality, the historic decline of the last hope that human life has a real meaning. For if certain of those new ideas of a boundless evolution were to prove themselves the truth, what would then be the destiny of the ideas of perfection and meaningfulness in the deepest human and the deepest spiritual sense?
Not only to Christianity, but to anything that is worthy of the name of humanism, the idea of personal life and personal meaning is of prime importance. Our Ch. IV discusses Schopenhauer. So far, just a word for contrast: Schopenhauer's pessimism is known to have revealed itself precisely in a total failure to believe in an individual preservation of human life. By the way, as we have seen, it has been a lugubrious idea brooding over this earth, and weighing heavily on the minds of thinking men a long time before either Schopenhauer or Darwin saw the light of the world, that nature seems bent on preserving the species only. Now, however, it is an ever-increasing band of systematically investigating scientists who repeat the proclamation with emphatic force: "Nature is concerned about one thing: the survival of the species. She does not care one brass farthing about the survival of the individual being? For once, laymen and scholars alike seem determined to accept the immediate testimony that appears to their senses. We have already seen how Thomas Aquinas simply refuses to succumb to that same appearance. Why? How could he manage? Was it because he lacked the knowledge added to biological science in the nineteenth century? We believe not. For as far as that conclusion is concerned, he had exactly the same knowledge, or the same appearances, upon which a later generation found sufficient reason to base its public inculpation against nature (or rather against the God who made nature; for if something deficient is made, the Maker is to blame; if, on the contrary, some exquisite properly is discovered in nature, then its Author is so easily forgotten, left entirely out of the picture). No, we believe it was mainly because, in Thomas and in his whole environment, there was a very different determination, a spiritual determination to keep one's faith in a true meaning in human life.
Besides, he had, over Schopenhauer for instance, another great advantage in a sobering direction: he was an Aristotelian, and fairly well protected against Platonic spiritualism.
Spiritualism? Was Schopenhauer a spiritualist?
In a very important respect, yes. In Schopenhauer's mind that general thing called the species is most closely associated with what Plato had called the Idea. The duality of "Wille und Vorstellung"--or the duality of the Idea versus the phenomenal world--inevitably becomes a disruptive dualism of the general versus the individual.
And which of these two is once more immediately considered as the illusory? "Of course" the individual!
Unfortunately, however, the truly meaningful in human life cannot, in any possible way, do without that individual person, whom nature is said to consider as unworthy of being preserved. But notice, this individual, personal life of the human being is the only life that means anything to us at all. It is the only life which has any meaning or any importance in the sense of alterocentric finality.
So any alterocentric philosopher--assuming that such a being exists at all--would simply be bound to pass beyond what was empirically given in the field of biology even long before Darwin's age. Otherwise he would actually have no chance whatever of finding any deeper sense in man's existence.
And then, what happens in the age of modern evolutionism? In fact, the triumph of the species is, all of a sudden, solemnly proclaimed as the eternal law of the universe. And that proclamation is made with the most cynical disrespect for the individual.
One may of course also call it a simple ignoring of the individual. One may even call it idealism. So it was called in ancient Greece. So it was also called in modern Germany. With Hegel the same principle which Darwin applied to biology, is unscrupulously applied to history.
"All individuals, all peoples and states are only instruments in the hand of universal intelligence, and they are pushed aside as soon as they are of no use any longer. Here there is not much room for any consideration of the temporal happiness of the individual. Regarded from a human point of view, history resembles a large slaughter-house more than anything else. Hegel's Weltgeist is a profuse spirit; it uses many souls." Or, as Kierkegaard, Hegel's irreconcilable enemy, put it: "The history of mankind thus becomes an enormous school of herrings in which the individual herring is not worth one whit."[2]
It is most relevant to our study to obtain some reliable notion of the way influential men and historical movements affected the ideas of perfection and meaningfulness in human life. What chances, however, did those ideas have to assert themselves at all within the realms of the theories of evolution?
Professor H.A. Overstreet, in his Enduring Quest (1931), seems to express wonder at the sentimentality of such who make evolution synonymous with something grim and bloody. "They have been impressed by a single phrase, the struggle for survival" (p. 68).
Frankly, is there no justification for associating modern evolutionism with grimness and bloodiness? Of course, very much here depends on one's point of departure, the standard of perfection and finality to which one's moral consciousness and religious aspirations have been accustomed. Through antiquity and the Middle Ages a Christian community had accustomed itself to the idea of a divine Creator who was absolutely perfect. Of course then the method used by that Creator, in bringing about His creation, is not quite a negligible matter. The God of the medieval Church, as well as the God of primitive Christianity, is a God of Love. But is it "love" that manifests itself in the creative method of modern evolution? When did love's specialty become just fighting? In the medieval conception love is still expressed precisely through God's lovingkindness towards individuals. But if the creative principle of modern evolution is inconsiderate hardness and a continual slaughter, for the blessed purpose of making the species survive and reach its ever new peaks of perfection, then evolutionistic creativeness must indeed be a travesty of Christian ideals. It must be very far from medieval humanity's conception of progress and perfection.
And what was bound to be the pedagogical effect of this new teaching which tried to explain the coming into existence of the cosmological and biological wonders presenting themselves to our senses today? It hardly demands any exceptional wickedness and inhumanity in a human observer to be somewhat influenced by the example of a Moloch-Creator as cruel as that. So why should not man, in that type of creation, seek and find a certain "justification" of his own "competitive way of life"? To grow strong, to fight hard, to put the foe out of the running--that is "nature's way". And notice, it has always been, according to modern evolutionism. So that must also be "man's way". Not softness, but hardness. Not giving, but taking. Not compassion, but power. "Strong armies, strong nations, strong business. Nature's way--and man's way."
The really fantastic reaction to such teaching, as far as we can see--and therefore, indeed, admirable enough--must be the one that manages to read beyond the phrase "struggle for survival", perhaps even reaching the ideal heights of Kropotkin's conception of a "mutual aid" as the essential trait of evolution, just one great and continual "process of symbiosis and co-operation"--"nature's great way of love".
Anyway, with the point of view we have here fundamentally adopted as our own, it would be a stroke of almost ingenious inconsistency simply to close our eyes to some oppressive problems automatically conjured up by the evolutionist interpretation of empirical facts in modern natural science. To any man making serious efforts to save his belief in the perfect and the meaningful, as we understand it, this interpretation is bound to be suggestive, first and foremost, of the most cruel meaningfulness. So without any lustre of the faintest excuse or sense-saving explanation--just that whole nauseating panorama of a "creative" climbing up by trampling down, "ichthyosauri and swordfish, the fierce fight of the roaming wolf pack, the cruel leap of the cunning tiger, the sudden dart of the bird of prey"--and intriguing atrocities even far more difficult to integrate into a pattern of true finality than these.
Let us, just for a moment, try to imagine the God of the universe as a God in the greatest possible accordance with the evolutionist explanation of world movements. We are here not so much concerned about evolution on a cosmological level--that aeonian emergence of planetary system out of star dust. We are concerned with evolution on the biological level--the human level.
In order to press forward the degree of perfection we see today in the realms of life on this earth, the great God of evolutionistic creation has based Himself on one unfailing principle. It is called "struggle for life" and "survival of the fittest" through "natural selection". But some have felt that it could be more briefly and more adequately expressed through the old phrase: bellum omnium contra omnes (everybody's war against everybody). And we cannot blame them for thinking that this is "everybody's war against everybody".
Let us even assume the eventuality that the ultimate goal reached by this long carnage is a certain perfection. Still the human observer to that fearful drama would have every right--morally and theoretically--to object with solemn dignity, "Finality to me means something more than a perfect goal. It also means a perfect way towards that goal! Is this a perfect way?"
It is often said, with an awe-inspired divine righteousness, a righteousness, reaching out for the guilty in the last round: the mill stones of God grind slowly. But what a cruel slowness this would have to be. Just think of the streams of blood running from the "mill" of evolutionist creation--down into the sands of eternity. How could any creature with the secret longing for a meaningful life--or any creature with any trace of decent feelings left in his mind at all--discern anything reminding him even remotely of perfection and finality in this process of "natural selection"?
Admittedly, the creationist biologist (or the fundamentalist theologian), too, has to face the facts of a fearful amount of cruelty and suffering in this present world. But as a childish believer in the God of Christianity, and in the revelation handed over to the human race by that God, he may at least refer to the historical accident of the introduction of SIN into this world. Here the responsibility is consistently presented as falling upon the shoulders of man himself, a being with sufficient intelligence and choice between original good and derived perversion.
However, in that mighty slaughter-house of modern evolutionism there is no more room for any tenable theory of moral substance, nor any human argument in favour of a living and loving God. For how could any noble soul, despite his sincere thirst for perfect righteousness, manage to account for the infinite grimness and cruelty and suffering in such an institution of systematic slaughter? One speaks to us about stages in that illustrious race towards "final perfection". But on what "stage", as the modern evolutionist has envisioned it, would the serious theologian here manage to introduce his explanatory historical event of a fall into sin? Was it perhaps the primeval molluscus who fell into sin? Or was it some naughty amoeba, way back at the dawn of the oeons, who brought this guilt and misery over our world in secula seculorum?
This is not a sarcastic joke. It is rather the desperately serious question of that fairly noble creature whom Kant describes as still harbouring an endless yearning for justice and perfection in his human breast. How is he expected to find a trace of divine respectability in such perennial trampling down of individuals--individuals more or less provided with senses and feelings? What a truly inhuman carnage through millions and billions of years, for the purpose of paving a road towards eventual "perfection"!
There may be any amount of ingenious philosophical elucubration in such a theory. There may be other admirable things also. But one thing there is not: meaning- not the faintest trace of it; so there is no trace of Christianity in it either, for Christianity cannot exist without meaning. It requires something which consistently can fill human lives.
Christianity could never be imagined at all in terms of "stages" through a desert of chance, called "Creative Automatism"--or however you might like to "christen" that phenomenon.
Small wonder that a hitherto unheard-of wave of de-Christianization was destined to follow in the wake of evolutionist theories in every territory where they came to be taught with force of persuasion. How could Christian theologians hope to "integrate" this crudest paganism ever devised into Christianity? How could they connive in reducing God to a Creator who creates in that way, and still blame a new generation of parishioners for ceasing to come to church? Young people of the common stock are not that dishonest and inconsistent. At the bottom of their hearts all intelligent children of this new age discern, after all, the inexorable pointedness of the issue: either the Christian meaningfulness of special creationism, or the frankly pagan absurdity of modern evolutionism; either the individual or the species; either Christ or Plato; you cannot have both.
As far as we can see, this relentless "scientific" attack against the individual, launched from the second half of the nineteenth century, is the most cunning and cruel one ever registered throughout the history of the giant battle.
More profoundly considered, it is man's Value among values that is here being torn into shreds. It is his vital connection with the supreme reality of his whole environment: God. And one more question: What has been most conducive towards preparing the territory for a general acceptance of a theory so fatefully laden with tragic disruption in a human civilization, and even in the very heart of an elite called the spiritually-minded?
That soil-preparing fermentation has been nothing but the cold and inhuman spirit of a stunning impersonalism, inherent in idealist philosophy.
The one who has once discovered the intimate relationship between modern evolutionism and age-old spiritualism is not so easily deceived by bold and boisterous claims that the theory of evolution is the very crown of realism. Consider the boldness with which the proponent of this theory have managed to obscure the fact that it is still just a theory. Consciously or unconsciously suggestions are being made to make it appear as an empirical datum rather than a tentative theory. The truth still remains that evolutionism is a theory, a special interpretation, tentatively applied to a number of empirical facts in nature, so it is no more than an alternative which may be chosen among those presenting themselves. And one thing is well known regarding the choice between alternative interpretations, whether the problem seriously presenting itself is one in the natural sciences or in another field of human learning: the theoretical alternative chosen by such and such a man, to account for such and such a fact objectively given, will often tend to be more dependent on subjective conditions inherent in the mind of that special individual, than on the inherent objective superiority of the alternative.
And now what about the most varying attitudes adopted by individual men to the Supreme Reality of their environment, God? Just in that most existential field of problematic decision, they are seen to give evidence of their respective degree of totality (or lack of totality), their respective degree of spirituality (or lack of spirituality). Here a really significant difference of essential attitudes comes out, not only from one individual to the other, or from one group of individuals to the other, but also--remarkable phenomenon!--from one historical era to the other. So there may be various aspects to the significance attached to the distance we observe between the God of Thomas Aquinas and the God of Hegel. Anyway, that distance happens to correspond fairly well to the notorious distance between medieval peace (harmonious human totality) and modern unrest (inward human disruption).
Hegel's God, obviously enough, is a God who, in Himself, suffers from a fatal lack of elementary totality. So how, then, could He be supposed to bring any amount of true totality and inward composure into the lives of human creatures? It appears rather symptomatic to us that Hegel's God finds His only means of realizing Himself in a sort of alienation (ein Sich-unterscheiden). He becomes "another to Himself". And what, exactly, is that "Entfremdung des göttlichen Wesens"? Is it in any way related to the peculiar self-transcendence we have described as alterocentricity? I am afraid not.
Now, first of all, what does Entfremdung actually mean? It means alienation. So it is literally the process of making oneself alien, a real stranger. A stranger to whom? In this case just to oneself. We do not find it surprising that the word "alienation" in French, for instance, has become a psychopathological term. In the "asyle d"aliénés" you must expect to meet people who are not in any way "at home with themselves". They are estranged from themselves, estranged from that peculiar centre of refuge where they could otherwise have a sacred rendezvous with themselves, and with their Maker at the same time, thus becoming a sanctuary in the most proper sense (the sanctuary of human conscience, and of human consciousness).
Anyway, it is precisely at the moment when one becomes a stranger to oneself that the situation becomes precarious for the internal equilibrium of man. The war with oneself (an inward turmoil we have termed disruption) reaches fateful depths which finish by precipitating a human life down into the dark night of madness--"l"aliénation mentale".
However, when Hegel wants to give an account of this strange phenomenon we call creation, what he starts speaking about is just "eine Entfremdung des göttlichen Wesens". That is, God becomes, in some manner, a "stranger to Himself". In other words, "creation" becomes identical with a downright disruption, so to speak. We do not see how we could more closely translate into our own nomenclature what we feel to be characteristic of Hegel's "divine estrangement". Of course, hardly any one could tell what this mysterious "dementia divina" actually stands for. What we do learn about that "Sich-unterscheiden", however, is pathetic enough: it has to be followed by an In-sich-zuruck-gehen". So if God's movement of creation (obviously a rather "improper" phase of His essence) may be regarded as one in which He "loses Himself", as it were, then that is followed by an opposite movement. "Das In-sich-zurück-gehen" is a sort of homeward journey in which God "finds Himself again".
So the more proper thing for God is not to create, it seems. We hardly expected, in a true spiritualist, any view different from that; creation is envisaged as a "rather inferior" business. It is the alienating movement of a certain painful "Sich-unterscheiden". Characteristically enough, the individual consciousness is viewed as a moment of that strange alienation.
Still, these "improper", this-worldly "passages" in God's life are something that cannot be avoided, it appears. The creation of a world of particular beings is a necessity for God. It is even the only way He can become God. In fact, we can see Hegel's God as nothing but a sad split between two necessities.
He only gains his truth by finding himself in absolute conflict.[3]
Tresmontant calls this movement tragical. And we are convinced that his qualification is no exaggeration. Probably to a much larger extent than with Plotinus and Spinoza, this cyclical movement in Hegel's case is a definitely tragic one. If our own negative terms have ever been appropriate, it must be here. Hegel's God has the characteristic of splitting Himself, lacerating His very essence. That is: his God is a living God only in a disruptive movement of constant pendulating between "Entfremdung" and "Sich-wielder-finden".[4]
And most characteristic of all, in terms of spiritualistic automatism (the tragedy of tragedies): this eternal disruption asserts itself as a cold necessity. The relation between Creator and creation is conceived in terms of an automatic rigidity or constraint, a definitely God-forsaken fatality, as compared to the never failing autonomy of Christ's agape.
Plato's curious cosmogony in Timaios repeats itself in the spiritualism of his "Urenkel" Hegel of modern Germany. And it goes on repeating itself in the Occidental children of the great Greek master spiritualist until the end of time, always at an ever-accelerating pace.
Seen from this point of view the Middle Ages actually represented a certain lull in the progressive movement, thanks to the still working effects of original Christianity. Of course even in medieval philosophy we do find definitely non-Christian ideas, of God and creation, arising from time to time. But they are most often rapidly rejected as heresies. In fact, Plotinus and the gnostic teachers have ideas about God (and his relation to the world) resembling Hegel's ideas very much. Baur, in his work Die christliche Gnosis has clearly pointed this out:
The Gnostic systems are also based on the presupposition that God is only in this process (of differentiation) a living God, the absolute spirit, the thinking reason, because life is not without movement, thinking is not without mediating activity.[5]
To be sure, Thomas's conception of divinity and world is infinitely far from this. And so is the theology of scholastic philosophy in a general way. Is this because Thomas, for instance, bases his philosophy on Aristotle rather than on Plato, on a certain realism and totality, rather than on idealism and disruption?
We would prefer to express it as follows (although this too may be a seriously modified truth). The Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages base themselves on Christianity. Their conscience is to a large extent bound, even at this late date, by Christian orthodoxy, for their thinking and for the way they express it. The great pattern governing this thinking--and its expression, too--may be given in one word, lowliness. What then is the thing striking us as curious and significant--or symptomatic--in the way idealist "theology" expresses its views on God as a Creator? It is not so much that the idealist sees a God who has felt an urge to "separate Himself" from what is "properly His". For that might be a selftranscendence in a really Christian sense. No, it is rather the way he insists on qualifying and evaluating that "separation" which amounts to saying, the way he evaluates creation by and large. In that "movement" of God he sees something rather inferior, a sort of divine mistake or waywardness in other words, a breach which should be repaired as soon as possible. So God's "extravagant" act of creation is immediately bound to be followed by a sort of self-resorbing movement in which He "returns to Himself" and "finds Himself". This is assumed to be the only "proper" movement of God, the "reparation" through which He saves His dignity, as it were!
So the successors to the throne of Plato--even in the most distant outskirts of his kingdom, and towards the evening of its age--have conserved all Plato's distrust in the concreteness of a created world. The surest evidence of that distrust is found in this fact: creation cannot be accepted as properly divine except to the degree that it may accommodate itself to being regarded as an automatic necessity, just another triumph of blind determinism. At the very moment when it has the volitional boldness to break out from the framework of that automatism, it runs the risk of being classified among events that are nondivine, or "improperly" divine. It seems an indecent idea to the spiritualist philosopher that a Creator should take it into his mind to cherish any personal and spontaneously rising motives for the coming into existence of a material world.
No wonder that the "problem" of the very existence of a material and visible world affects the conscientious idealist as something of a nightmare. It evokes in his mind the distressing suspicion of some kind of metaphysical "faux pas" committed by the gods themselves.
Does Thomas Aquinas appear to have this uneasy feeling that all things could not have happened quite decently, since God has had a certain movement "away from Himself", that is, into the act of creation?
No, the conception Thomas Aquinas has of divinity is infinitely far from this. And so is the theology of scholastic philosophy in a general way. The Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages certainly feel much more dependent upon orthodox Christianity in all their thinking. That dependence and childlike docility is a principal point here.
By the way, as far as Thomas is concerned, he would obviously have serious hesitations in speaking about a movement in the Supreme Being at all. His reasoning is, "Quidquid movetur, ab ablio movetur." And God is precisely the Being who is not moved by anything outside Himself. He is the eternally Unchangeable One. According to the doctrine of efficient causality, change is a sort of oscillation, a passage from one state to another, during which the real in potency becomes the real in act. But that same principle of efficient causality claims that some outside influence is absolutely necessary for any change in any being. In nature such efficient causes are found everywhere. In fact, nature is an inextricable tissue of those passages from potency to act.
What then about God? According to Thomas, God is precisely the Being who has no potentiality in Himself.
He is absolute perfection, the Infinite One. To Thomas, then, it would certainly be an absurd thought that God should in any way depend upon creation for His own realization. Thomas has the Bible's elevated vision of God's relation to creation. Not for one moment was God forced to create simply in order to be God. His freedom here was rather the one expressed by a Norwegian hymn: "Gud er Gud om alle land lĺ řde. Gud er Gud om alle mann var dřde." (God is God though all lands be a desert. God is God though all men be dead.) Compare the idea that material things exist only as phenomena dependent on the presence of an observing mind--a spirit perceiving them; this is spiritualism, and not at all biblical realism.
Creation is, on the contrary, the entirely free gift of God's love. God is perfectly able to maintain peace with Himself, and at the same time peace with the world which He calls into existence. Disruption is by no means any inevitable condition of this universe.
The real disruption is always exclusively in the mind of the pagan philosopher himself. His idealistic and spiritualistic radicalism constantly makes that convulsive effort to press things "all the way up". After that, "the way down"--which he is forced to admit as a fait accompli, an inevitable reality--becomes to him nothing less than a tragedy. Hence the interminable rupture and oscillation between two opposites.
On one hand, God is the Good (philosophically speaking), i.e. the perfect apotheosis of selfsufficiency, quietude, the undisturbed unity where He finds Himself, nothing more.
On the other hand, God is goodness (more humanly speaking); i.e. He makes His incredible descent into the world of generation--and re-generation, as Christianity adds.
The only way intelligible to the pure speculative philosophy is the proud way up. But the way of the Christian religion was above all just the humble way down--even the way of the Incarnation and the Cross. This is a way not of the rational, but rather of the irrational. In fact, "pure" human reason has invariably led away from the Cross. It has also led away from the truth, sometimes even the plainest truths of objective and properly scientific order.
Notes: