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“What sort of being is God?” S. Anselm asked this question not as a scientific query, but as the opening of a contemplative prayer. His Ontological Argument is frequently misunderstood, and it is a pity that it remains so neglected today. — This article first appeared in Faith Magazine in May/June 1979.
All religious language, all doctrines, all mystical insights, are about God. The core of Christ's mission was to bring greater knowledge of the Father. The fact of our original sin, our redemption and the presence of the Spirit in the Church — all these are primarily truths about God. They tell us what sort of a being God is. That is why all religious talk can be called “theology” — God-talk.
Knowledge of God is given in many ways. Through the liturgy we commemorate God's dealings with his people and in praising him, describe him. The lives of saintly people reveal him to us. The moral law makes his will known to us. So do the commandments of the Church. The prayers we are taught to say tell us much about God. And God is revealed supremely in the life and death of Christ, which indeed is the precondition of all the other channels of revelation.
Because of this, it is nowadays rare for people to address themselves directly to the question “What sort of being is God?” Instead, their picture of God builds up subtly, cumulatively, through the understanding of the Bible, of the liturgy, of what holiness means. But if that is enough, why pray? In the second section of this article, I go into one direct asking of the question “What sort of being is God?” Saint Anselm asked this question in his famous Proslogion, but it must be always remembered that he asked his question not like a sort of scientific query, but as the opening of a contemplative prayer. He asked “God, what sort of a being are you?” just as one might open a relationship with someone by in effect saying “Tell me about yourself”.
We cannot ask “What sort of being is God?” as if we could answer with a description. God is too great to be encapsulated by our minds; our concepts cannot circumscribe him. Saint Augustine said: “God is that being than which there can be no greater, nor can any greater be thought of.”
This idea received its fullest presentation yet in the eleventh century Proslogion of Sanit Anselm. The form in which it is best known has been labelled the Ontological Argument. In its original form it went something like this: It is inconceivable that there be anythnig greater than God: God is (by definition) that than which there can be nothing greater. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that God does not exist in reality, but only in the mind. And it is greater to exist in reality than merely to exist in the mind. But then, if God exists in the mind only, then there is something conceivably greater, namely, a God who exists in reality. But God cannot conceivably be less than anything: therefore, God must exist in reality.
Ever since it was written, this has been taken as an attempted proof of the existence of God (and at times, Anselm seems to think of it that way.) It has been hotly criticized and defended in a nine-century controversy which recently culminated in an apparently unimpeachable and formally valid version by Alvin Plantinga in 1975, using the latest techniques of formal logical analysis. Perhaps because of this dissent, the Church has (unjustly) neglected the argument for some time. But the real meaning of the argument is not really a proof of God's existence at all, so much as an insight into God's existence (which is only demonstrated, so to speak, by a by-product of that insightful examination). It is clear that Anselm understood this argument mainly as an insight of faith for the believer, not as an attempt to win over the non-believer. For the rest of this section I unfold this thesis.
Anselm contends that the idea of God actually includes that of existence:
this is his insight. God's non-existence is inconceivable; it is part of what
we mean by “God” that he must exist. To say “God does not
exist” is like saying “a square has three sides only”.
Talking like this about squares shows either that you do not know the meanings
of the words, or else that you are thinking, as well as talking, nonsense.
And this consequence is interesting: when someone says “God does not
exist” or even “I can't make up my mind whether God exists or
not”, he cannot mean the same by “God” that we do.
So it is that Anselm quotes the psalm: “The fool says in his heart,
— the man must be a fool,
since what he thinks is unthinkable!‘There is no God’
”
Let me now justify what I said earlier about this not being an argument to prove God's existence. If, for the believer, God cannot but exist, then how can this be a proof of God's existence in the same sense that one might prove the existence of neutrinos or extra-sensory phenomena? How can one “prove” that a triangle has three sides? One can only contemplate the idea of “triangle” and see what is contained within it. Similarly, this argument contemplates what we know of God and sees what infinite riches are contained within that idea. Now if that is right, then to regard the Ontological Insight as an argument for the existence of God is to be a “fool” in the sense of the psalm — or, at any rate, in the sense of Saint Anselm.
Let me now show that this argument highlights the self-sufficiency of God. If the idea of God contains the idea of his existence, this is because the reality of God to which our idea corresponds likewise contains its own existence. In all the universe, we can seek the reason for the existence of things, but we always have to look elsewhere: nothing explains its own existence. And there is nothing in the description of any thing that excludes non-existence. But God is different. He does contain the reason for his own existence: he is self-explanatory (“self-existent”). I will return to this when I mention how Saint Thomas Aquinas made this idea one of the keystones of his system.
Let me now instead turn to an exactly parallel circumstance in the experience of God. Most of us have at some time a very strong and distinct impression of the presence of God. (All of us have some experience of God – this article is trying to communicate mine.) When people have this kind of experience, they often say that they cannot doubt that the experience was produced by something real. The experience in some mysterious way cannot be at once taken as a complete illusion and yet the kind of experience it is. The experience in some way guarantees its own truth – it is self-authenticating or self-guaranteeing. Look at the psalmist's experience (Ps. 115) where he speaks of a sudden fear of the power of death, which caused him to call on the name of the Lord. The Lord released him from his terror, and in his relief the psalmist cried out “All men are liars!”. Confronted suddenly by uncertainty, the psalmist finds certainty in God, and his reaction is that all familiar certainties are uncertain when compared to the certainty of God. Saint Paul says in Romans (3:4) “Let God be true though every man be false..." What came first to the psalmist as an expression of new insight, so intense as to make all else look false by comparison, becomes in the reflections of Saint Paul the theologian the acceptance that God, and not man, is the guarantor of truth. Hence it becomes natural to speak of experience of God as “self-guaranteeing”: it is its self-guaranteeing character, indeed, which marks this kind of experience off as experience of what is wholly and uniquely a divine characteristic. This, it seems to me, is exactly the same insight as the one Saint Anselm has in the Proslogion. For him, it is not the idea, or the experience, which is self-guaranteeing, but God who is self-existent.
Here we are again with the Ontological Insight – the self-explanatoriness of God. By making us ask why the universe exists, Saint Thomas invites us to make sense of that question and admit the self-explanatory nature of God. Interestingly, Duns Scotus tried to point out that the very possibility (let alone the reality) of the universe made it necessary to believe in the self-existent God; and for Anselm, “believing in order to understand” rather than addressing the sceptic, the existence of the universe was an irrelevance beside the incomparable majesty of God's wholly unique and divine mode of being.
Saint Thomas shows up the fact that God's existence is not only contained within his essence (that is, the way in which God exists): they are in fact one and the same thing. To put this more suggestively: there is no difference between God's existence and the form which that existence takes. To reflect upon the manner or nature of God's existence is not by virtue of any characteristics he might have, but by virtue of the kind of existence he has (or is). God is ipsum esse subsistens, being-itself.
All this is just repeating, re-forming, re-phrasing, re-understanding the one infinitely rich and suggestive, self-enriching and self-suggesting mystery of God. This way of looking at God is as inexhaustible as God himself. All that this section of the article set out to achieve was an impression of how many variations may be performed on this one theme.
I recently asked a teacher at one of our seminaries exactly what was taught about the Ontological “Argument”. He replied that if it was taught at all, it was not taught as being in any way important or part of the deposit of faith. It was seen rather as a somewhat oddball argument — and one not regarded as “valid” by many contemporary Catholic theologians. (I refer these learned and reverend gentlemen to A. Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity, OUP 1975.) I was then introduced to a few student seminarians, none of whom appeared to have heard of the argument. This, to me, is a pity: it wastes a quite valuable piece of theology which, though difficult in its phraseology, deserves to be read in a good translation by everyone who possibly can. Why is it being wasted?
To get the most from theology, one needs to apprach it in the author's spirit. It is fair to say that even at times in the Proslogion Saint Anselm hardly understood what his argument was actually doing: for him, the experience was too hot, too blinding. But he comes near to the white-hot centre when he says, at the very end: “I thank thee, gracious Lord, I thank thee; because what I formerly believed by thy bounty, I now so understand by thine illumination, that if I were unwilling to believe that thou dost exist, I should not be able to understand this to be true.”.
A piece of music can re-create the author's experience in the listener only if the listener will ask himself what the composer's experience must have been. Likewise, all theology should be read with this question in the reader's mind: “What is this theologian's understanding/experience of God?”. If it is true theology, then the core of the message will assuredly be about God. If one learns nothing from it about God, then it isn't theology, whatever else it might be. But the greatest asset of this approach is that our understanding of the theoogy becomes the means: our knowledge of God, the end; and that is as it should be.