While continuing my travels in the land of Aristotle (specifically, entering passages from his Metaphysics into my digital commonplace book), I chanced recently upon the shoreline of the vast ocean of theology. Knowing that I would quickly drown if I ventured too far from shore, I merely picked up a few seashells, waded in up to my knees, and enjoyed the view of the endless depths. Even though these are mostly uncharted waters for me (despite a few related posts almost twenty years ago), I'll give a short report on my excursion.
Medieval theology produced a large number of arguments for the existence of god. Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Maimonides, and others applied their great minds to the task. After first assuming an individual divinity, they attempted to prove its being.
Yet if we undergo a kind of religious inversion, we can adopt a very different perspective: first we accept being and then we try to understand its divine aspects. This is not pantheism or even panentheism, but a two-fold amazement at the fact of existence and the fact that we have awareness of it.
Aristotle scholar Aryeh Kosman spelled out this inversion in his book The Activity of Being:
Instead of imagining ourselves discovering what is divine and then coming to see it as the principle of being - of ousia - think instead of coming to see that which is the principle of being as, just because it is the principle of being, divine.... Instead of imagining a cardinal feature of god as awareness, think instead of coming to see the principle of the awareness that we have of the world - of the consciousness that we know as nous - as for that very reason divine.
Here we can glimpse a radically naturalistic standpoint on the divine. There's a passage in the Metaphysics that points in this direction:
If the divine being is always in this condition that we sometimes are, that is to be wondered at; and if it is in it to a greater degree than we are, that is to be wondered at still more. (1072b24-26)
What Aristotle seems to be doing here is extrapolating from our human moments of highest awareness - of theoria - to the life of a being that could enjoy such awareness not as an occasional "peak experience" but as an endless, continuous activity. Then he concludes: wow, that would be a god if anything could be!
Another way to think about it was identified by Hannah Arendt in her book The Life of the Mind: the god of the philosophers is not Zeus (or Yahweh or Allah or Shiva or even Zarathustra), but Being itself. This new god launches a revolution in which myth is replaced by reason, theology by ontology, religion by philosophy.
Yet fomenting revolution is a dangerous business. Recall that Socrates was condemned to death on two counts: corrupting the youth and inventing a new god. The latter is usually interpreted as referring to the inner voice - or daimonion - that warned Socrates away from doing the wrong thing, but perhaps the unknown god that spoke to him was this new god of the philosophers.
It's something to wonder about, for sure...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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