The argument for a finitist theology

Front matter

' THE ARGUMENT

FOR A FINITIST THEOLOGY

BY

Table Of Contents

Chapter Page

I. Introductory Considerations 1-10

II. The Monistic Absolute as the Philosophic Equivalent of God 11-21

I. Introductory Considerations

1. The Method of Theological Inquiry. — Theology may adopt any one of three methods or it may combine two or all of them with varying emphasis npon each. It may appeal to the immediate experience of the mystic, or it may simply affirm and arrange in systematic form the doctrines authoritatively taught by the Church and the Bible, or it may depend upon the "reason" and "conscience" of the individual inquirer.

The first method would of course be the best if the experience in question were not so rare. Assuming that the experience of the mystic constitutes a genuine insight into the fundamental nature of reality, he nevertheless stands in the same relation to his fellowmen as a man with normal vision to a race of men blind from their birth. It would be vain for the seeing man to discourse of the beautiful colors to be seen on every side. Indeed, it would be impossible for him to express his experience in words, since language is a social product, and the social mpid of the hypothetical race would know nothing of color. Thus the mystic's direct vision of God can not be described in terms which can be understood by ordinary men, and, even from his own point of view or from that of a fellow mystic, his experience must ever remain in a measure ineffable. Moreover, the difficulty of the mystical method is aggravated by the fact that the non-mystic may not be willing to grant the objectivity of the mystic's experience. And the rarity of his experience may be made a reason for regarding it as illusory. Indeed, it may be very plausibly maintained that the alleged " revelations " of the traditional mystic are evidences of a pathological condition produced by his long-continued vigils and fastings. This hypothesis is suggested, at least, "by phenomena such as those which William James has described under the name of the " anaesthetic revelation." 1 Accordingly, the non-mystic may be justified in believing that his lack of the sense of immediate fellowship with absolute reality is not an indication of spiritual poverty, but rather an evidence of sanity.

The second method — that of external authority — received a mortal wound in the time of the Reformation, when it was discovered that the two sources of authoritative teaching, the Church and the Bible, did not always agree. To be sure, the Protestant as well as the Roman Catholic still retained the method of authority. But the mere knowledge that the schism had occurred operated to impair the confidence of the intelligent layman in authority of any kind ; and for the theologically trained man the Protestant appeal to the Bible as the only rule of faith and practice contained the seed of its own destruction. For the careful study of the sacred writings which was logically required by the formal principle of Protestantism soon showed that these writings, instead of containing one uniform and consistent revelation, contain several different and even conflicting systems of doctrine, and bear clear evidence of having been produced in much the same way as the other sacred books of antiquity. Thus, although this was certainly not the intention of the original Reformers, the logical and historical result of the Reformation has been to refer all questions of doctrine to the "private judgment" of the individual Christian.

The third method, that of reliance upon reason and conscience, is, accordingly, the one that is dominant at the present time at least among enlightened men and women. Having thrown off the authority of the Church, and being distrustful of the genuineness of the mystic's experience, they take as

iThe Will to Believe, pp. 294 ff. (Note: For full titles, etc., see the appended bibliography.)

their only criterion of truth the reasonableness and ethical attractiveness of the doctrines in question.

It is important to note, however, that these three theological methods — that of the mystic, that of the authoritarian, and that of the self-reliant reasoner — are almost never found pure. The traditional mystic has usually been, or at least supposed himself to be, a loyal son of the Church ; and his revelations have usually been in superficial agreement with its teachings. St. Thomas Aquinas employs the method of authority ; but he also reasons, so long, at least, as reasoning serves his purpose. The "modern" man is no more consistent. Theologians who in theory have given up the appeal to any external authority nevertheless slip back now and then into the argument from Scripture and tradition. And among religious people who are not theologians, one result of the modern revolt against the authority of the Church and the Book has been a curious sentimentalism in religious thinking, a sort of mitigated mysticism, which exalts " intuition " and " immediate feeling " as over against " reason."

It must be admitted, I think, that there is a sense in which the Scriptures possess authority, and ought to possess authority, even for the completely emancipated thinker. Their authority may be described as suggestive rather than coercive, as accidental rather than constitutive. Many biblical doctrines are found to be true, but their truth neither consists in nor is established by their quality of being biblical. In other words, the authority of the Bible is not like that of a constitution or of a legal code, but rather like that of a textbook in chemistry or some other laboratory science, the statements contained in which are to be accepted or rejected by the student according as they are, or are not, experimentally verified.

There is also a relative justification for the claims of " intuition," "instinct," or "immediate feeling." This justification consists in the obvious fact that " reason " in the sense of mere intellection is barren. Before there can be any reasoning in this narrow sense of the term, there must be (a) sense-perception, and (b) perception of "goods" or of relative values. Viewed in this way, reason does not bring forth truth ; it has the humbler office of determining which of the offspring of " intuition " may be worthy of preservation and ought to be acknowledged as true. In other words, we may be said to reason when we inquire which of our immediate perceptions of fact or of value are implied by or are incompatible with other immediate perceptions. Thus there is a sense in which both sense-perception and the perception of values are more fundamental than reasoning. But immediate perception alone is not a sufficient criterion of truth. For one of our perceptions of fact is that immediate perceptions, whether we limit our view to the experience of one mind or consider the experience of a larger or smaller group, are not all logically compatible; and that they ought to be logically compatible is one of our perceptions of value. If this perception of value is to be accepted as genuine, some immediate perceptions and some inferences from such perceptions must be rejected as illusory or mistaken. But when immediate perceptions are found to be mutually repugnant, that is to say, when it is impossible for all of them to be genuine in the same logical universe, the only arbiter that can decide between them is the reason. Indeed this deciding between incompatible verdicts of " intuition " is what we mean by reason, when we say that the method of theology must be the method of reason, rather than of mystical experience or of dependence upon authority. 2

2. The Religious Value of the Idea of God. — We value the idea of God, and seek to convince ourselves that the idea is " real," because we feel the need of God. Our interest, however, is practical rather than theoretical. As far as the man of science is concerned there may be a God ; but the scientist long ago discovered that he, as scientist, has "no need of that hypothesis." If, for example, a geologist should tell us that the strata of rocks occur in a given order because God laid them down in that way, or if a botanist should say that a cer-

2 Cf. Russell, Scientific Method in Philosophy, pp. 21 f .

tain flower has five petals because God made it thus, even the least enlightened theist would admit that the assertion is from the standpoint of science irrelevant. And, in general, to " explain " the occurrence of any particular phenomenon or group of phenomena by reference to divine agency is an evasion of the problem at issue.

The value of the idea of God is, then, to be sought in the domain of practice rather than of theory. It is moral and religious rather than scientific. Traditional theology has given the Divine Being the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and moral perfection. Modern theology places moral perfection first, and rightly insists that the other attributes have religious value only when moral perfection is presupposed. First of all, God is good ; and his infinite wisdom and might are subservient to his infinite love. 3

Beginning, then, with the thought of the infinite goodness of God, one use of the notion of Deity at once suggests itself. God, as the absolutely good being, is man's moral goal or pattern. "Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect," becomes the maxim of the truly devout worshipper. God is the supremely perfect hero, the supreme object of imitation.

Next, combining the notion of perfect goodness with that of omniscience, we derive the idea of God as the righteous and completely informed Judge of human conduct. The more naive worshipper thinks of a day of judgment at the end of the world; the more sophisticated, of a judgment continually going on. Whichever way the thought is taken, the believer in an all-wise and perfectly good Being has always before him the idea of an impartial and all-seeing Spectator who " searcheth the reins and the hearts." What is concealed from one's fellowmen is fully known to him. Wherein one has been misjudged by his fellows, he is judged rightly by God. At the tribunal of the Omniscient One, absolute justice is dispensed.

Furthermore God is all-powerful. He is the Sovereign of the Universe. He has created, and now upholds and governs

3 Cf . Clarke, The Christian Doctrine of God, pp. 70 ff.

all. Because he is omnipotent his universal purpose will eventually be completely fulfilled. The life of the believer himself and that of the group to which he belongs can not become a failure. Defeats are merely reverses, suffering is chastisement. Faith in an omnipotent God is the ground of an assured confidence in the ultimate triumph of the right and the eternal survival of the good.

Lastly, the attribute of omnipresence makes possible the thought of a divine Companion and Friend. Though foes may scorn and friends forsake, there is a heavenly Father to whom one may flee for sympathy. Though the believer is alone in the world, he is not alone, for God is with him.

Such, crudely and inadequately expressed, is the meaning of God in the experience of his worshippers. In a word, the heart of the true believer is filled with peace — with the " peace of God which passeth all understanding."

But the peace of God is not a peace of quiescence. The truly religious man is not simply the contented man. His contentment is combined with a divine discontent with himself and his world. A " spark " has disturbed his " clod." He, indeed, takes " no thought for the morrow," but he labors for the morrow and for many days thereafter. He seeks " first the kingdom of God and his righteousness," and yet is a man of affairs. He believes that the sin and the suffering and the sorrow of life have their place in the divine economy, yet he is a reformer and seeks to make the world better and happier.

3. Some Antinomies in the Popular Notion of God. — Such a paradoxical emotional attitude can hardly be supposed to be grounded in a logically consistent doctrine of God. Indeed the paradoxical character of the typical religious experience would suggest a self-contradictory ground. And no very profound study is required to show that the popular notion of God is shot through with contradictions. Some of these are evident to the popular mind itself; others do not appear until the notion is examined with more than ordinary care.

A few of the more obvious of these difficulties are the following.

(a) Goodness versus Power in Relation to the Existence of Evil. — According to traditional theology the world is partly evil, and is nevertheless the work of Infinite Power and Perfect Goodness. The antinomy is obvious: How can Omnipotent Goodness be supposed to have produced or to be the ground of an imperfect world? Attempts at reconciliation merely repeat the difficulty in a new form. Thus we hear men say that if God had not permitted some particular evil a greater evil would have occurred; that the pains and sufferings of life are means of chastisement and moral purification; that sin makes possible forms of goodness which outweigh both the sin itself and the evil consequences resulting from it. But it is obvious that this mode of explanation itself presupposes some limitation of divine power. It assumes that evil is a necessary condition of the perfection of the world, and that even Omnipotence is bound by this condition. The existence of evil is a proof of God's inability to remove it from his world, or, what amounts to the same thing, of his inability to remove or prevent it without defeating his universal purpose. Again, if we adopt the evolutionary point of view, and admit the idea of a temporal process into our reasonings about good and evil, we may say that, while God's world is not yet perfect, its perfection will come at the end of the evolutionary process. But the idea of evolution, the very notion of a process, is irreconcilable with omnipotence. For the idea of a process implies hindrance or retardation, and therefore the finitude of the energizing agent.

(b) Righteousness versus Predestination. — This is a special and aggravated case of the preceding difficulty. If God is omnipotent, he is the absolute Sovereign of his world, and all events are in accordance with his will; but if all events, including human actions, bad as well as good, are willed by God, then God is the real author of human sin.

(c) The Hearing of Prayer versus Omniscience. — If God be thought of after the analogy of an ancient oriental monarch, prayer may be regarded as necessary in order to propitiate the Despot when he is angry, or to overcome his carelessness, or his indifference to the well-being of his subjects. But, surely, in the case of a Sovereign who is perfectly good, prayer is not needed for this purpose. Again if God's power be limited, it may be maintained with considerable plausibility that prayer is a means of supplementing the energy which is insufficient for the accomplishment of some good purpose. But, according to the traditional doctrine, there is no defect of power, and prayer can not be justified in this way. Once more, if God's knowledge were limited, prayer, in the sense of petition for some definite boon, might be regarded as a means of informing God concerning human needs. The analogy of the eastern monarch here recurs, and doubtless has figured largely in the common theory of prayer. But if God is omniscient, we cannot tell him anything, and the antinomy remains unsolved.

(d) Personality versus Immutability. — According to traditional religious thought, God is a person, a Friend or Father with whom men may enjoy fellowship. On the other hand, he is also said to be "eternal," not merely in the sense that his existence is without beginning or end, but in the sense that he is supertemporal and immutable. But the attributes of personality and immutability are plainly contradictory. For a person is the subject of experience, and experience implies time. At any rate, human persons are in time; succession is of the very essence of their life ; and therefore a divine Person who is assumed in any meaningful sense to know them and to fellowship with them must also be in time.

4. A Prospectus of the Ensuing Discussion. — We have seen that the attempt to think of God as omnipotent, omniscient, and immutable, and at the same time as a personal Being who is perfectly good, and who enters into communion with men and may be influenced by their petitions, is logically impossible. Accordingly, the next three sections will be devoted to a critical exposition of two rival attempts to rationalize or to find a substitute for the traditional (Christian) conception of Deity. These contrasted theories are the theory of monistic idealism, which in its specifically theological aspect is a theory of the divine immanence, and that of pluralism, with its doctrine of a " finite " God. As my examination of these rival theories leads me to the acceptance of the latter, I have called the whole discussion " an argument for a finitist theology."

God has been said to be in-finite in two different senses : (1) He has been said to be the Whole of reality, or at least to be the Ground and Source of all that is. (2) He has been said to be infinite in the literal numerical sense of the word; for example, to know an infinite multiplicity of knowledge-elements, or to be " eternal,' 7 either in the sense of living through an infinite sequence of moments, or in the sense of being supertemporal and yet in some manner containing infinite time. The God of monistic idealism, for example the "Absolute" as described by Josiah Royce, is held to be infinite in both of these senses. The Absolute is the all-inclusive Reality; and, by virtue of Royce's fundamental epistemological presuppositions, his one eternal or timeless Purpose includes or implies an infinite multiplicity of elements. Over against this monistic theory stand the theory of John Stuart Mill and William James, on the one hand, and that of Charles Renouvier. on the other. These theories, which I shall call respectively " ethical finitism" and "logical finitism," are mutually compatible, but, as we shall see, do not necessarily imply one another. The doctrine of a " finite " God as it is expounded by Mill and James consists essentially in the denial of God's infinitude in the former of our two senses. According to this view, God is not omnipotent. It is a view which is founded chiefly upon the difficulties of theodicy, upon the impossibility of " justifying the ways of God to man," if God is assumed to be infinite in the sense of possessing all knowledge and all power. According to Renouvier and his school, the finitude of the world and of God logically results from the self-contradiction which lurks in the conception of a " realized infinite."

The discussion of the theories of Royce and Renouvier will lead us to an examination of the so-called New Infinite of recent mathematics, as it has been .defined by Richard Dedekind and Georg Cantor; for by his own account the idealism of Royce is logically dependent upon the validity of this conception, and the entire Renouvierist philosophy must go by the board if, as is maintained, the formulation of this new definition of infinity frees the notion of a realized infinite from the difficulties which Renouvier found in it. In view, therefore, of the strategic importance of this subsidiary issue, I shall devote Section VI to an examination of these contrasted ways of thinking about the infinite. My conclusion will be that the formulation of the " new " infinite has not removed the logical objections to monistic idealism, nor at all impaired the cogency of the reasonings of Renouvier and his disciples.

The last section will contain a brief summary of all that has gone before, together with a further examination of the conception of a " finite " God.

II. The Monistic Absolute as the Philosophic Equivalent

of God.

In our attempt to find a conception of God that is both rationally satisfactory and religiously serviceable we turn to the philosophers. Two types of theory may be distinguished : the monistic and the pluralistic. According to the monistic theories, God is the whole of existence; pluralistic theories, on the other hand, make God the part, but the controlling part of existence.

1. Monistic Idealism as a Fulfilment of Traditional Theology, — In this chapter we shall consider the monistic revision of the traditional conception of God. The theory of Josiah Royce may be taken as a typical expression of this class of theories. 4

Royce's conception of God is regarded by its author, "not as destroying, but as fulfilling, the large collection of slowly evolving notions that have appeared in the course of history in connection with the name of God." 5 He insists that "what the faith of our fathers has genuinely meant by God is, despite all the blindness and all the unessential accidents of religious tradition, identical with the inevitable outcome of a reflective philosophy." 6 This conception "undertakes to be distinctly theistic, and not pantheistic. It is not the conception of an Unconscious Reality, into which finite beings are absorbed; nor of a Universal Substance, in whose law our ethical independence is lost; nor of an Ineffable Mystery, which we can only silently adore. On the contrary, every ethical predicate

*For Royce's account of his philosophic ancestry, see The 'Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. ix ff.

6 Royce, et ah, The Conception of God, p. 48.

6 Ibid., p. 50; see also The Problem of Christianity, Preface.

that the highest religious faith of the past has attributed to God is capable of exact interpretation in terms of our present view." 7

Professor Royce's contribution to the theistic discussion consists, then, in the identification of God with the Absolute of idealistic philosophy; and in attempting so to define the Absolute as, on the one hand, to avoid the self-contradictions which are to be found in the notion of Deity as ordinarily conceived, and, on the other hand, to enrich the notion of the Absolute so that it shall be a fit object for the religious emotions or attitudes of awe and reverence, of faith, loyalty, and love. It is important to remember, however, that many idealistic philosophers have not been willing to regard the Absolute as personal, or in any significant sense as a Self. Thus Mr. P. H. Bradley does not apply the name God to the Absolute, 8 and, if Dr. McTaggart is right, Hegel himself, who is commonly regarded as the father of this general way of thinking, ought not to have done so. 9 His use of " God " and of other religious terms, says McTaggart, was merely an accommodation to the " current mythology " of the time. According to Professor Royce, however, the Absolute of monistic idealism is what the Church has really meant all along by God; but this meaning has been only vaguely apprehended, and therefore only imperfectly expressed.

As defined by Royce, God, or the Absolute, includes in his own consciousness and will the content of all finite minds. The individual self is an identical part of the Divine Self. 10

" Let us sum up, in a few words," says Royce, " our whole

argument. There is, for us as we are, experience. Our

thought undertakes the interpretation of this experience.

Every intelligent interpretation of an experience involves,

however, the appeal from this experienced fragment to some s Appearance and Beality, pp. 446 ff.

o Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, pp. 59 ff., 213.

io The Conception of God, p. xiii ; Hibbert Journal, I, 44.

more organized whole of experience in whose "unity this fragment is conceived as finding its organic place." 1 x " There must be an experience to which is present the . . . actual limitation and narrowness of all finite experience." 12

Furthermore, since every reality exists "just in so far as there is experience of its existence," 13 since, in other words, everything that is, is the content of mind, it follows that the "things" which we ordinarily think of as non-mental are ineluded in the content of the Absolute Self.

" The reality that we seek to know," says Royce, " has always to be defined as that which either is or would be present to a sort of experience which we ideally define as an organized — that is, a united and transparently reasonable experience. We have, in point of fact, no conception of reality capable of definition except this one." 14 " To assert that there is any absolutely real fact indicated by our experience, is to regard this reality as presented to an absolutely organized experience, in which every fragment finds its place." 15

Professor Royce's conception of the Absolute is attained,' then, by combining the traditional attribute of omniscience with the idealistic presupposition that to be is to be known as being. It may be remarked in passing that if this presupposition is denied, the whole edifice of monistic idealism falls to the ground. We are not now concerned, however, with the question of the existence of the Absolute, but only with its definition. If the presupposition is granted, it is evident that, as Royce maintains, "In order to have the attribute of Omniscience, a being would necessarily be conceived as essentially world-possessing." 16

The error and suffering and sin of our finite lives are all due to the fragment ariness of our experiences. When taken

11 The Conception of God, p. 42.

12 Ibid., p. 41. Cf . The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 441. is The Conception of God, p. 43.

i* Ibid., p. 30. is Ibid., p. 42.

Mlbid., p. 13.

up into the infinite completeness of the Universal Self, all the imperfections of existence cancel out, or better, all are required to constitute the perfection of the Whole. We, as fragments of the Absolute, may be victims of misfortune, unhappy, discontented, sinful. But the Absolute is perfectly good. Our imperfection, and our thought of the world as imperfect, are the consequence of the limitation of our knowledge. We know in part; the Absolute knows the Whole, and pronounces it complete, and perfectly good. 17

" Misfortune comes to us, and we ask : What means this horror of my fragmentary experience ? — why did this happen to me ? The question involves the idea of an experience that, if present, would answer the question. Now such an experience, if it were present to us, would be an experience of a certain passing through pain to peace, ... of a certain far more exceeding weight of glory that would give even this fragmentary horror its place in an experience of triumph and of self-possession. In brief, every time we are weak, downcast, horrorstricken, alone with our sin, the victims of evil fortune or of our own baseness, we stand, as we all know, not only in presence of agonizing fragmentary experiences, but in presence of besetting problems, which in fact constitute the very heart of our calamity. . . . Well, then, if the divorce of idea and experience characterizes every form of human consciousness of finitude, of weakness, of evil, of sin, of despair, you see that Omniscience, involving, by definition, the complete and final fulfilment of idea in experience, the unity of thought and act, the illumination of feeling by comprehension, would be an attribute implying, for the being who possessed it, much more than a universally clear but absolutely passionless insight. An Omniscient Being could answer your bitter Why? when you mourn, with an experience that would not simply ignore your passion. For your passion, too, is a fact. It is experienced. The experience of the Omniscient Being would include it.

17 The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 444 and 449; Sources of Beligious Insight, p. 224.

Only his insight, unlike yours, would comprehend it, and so would answer whatever is rational about your present question. ... In order to have the attribute of omniscience, a being would necessarily ... be conceived as omnipotent, and also as in possession of just such experience as ideally ought to be; in other words, as good and perfect." 18

2. Some Difficulties of Monistic Idealism. — As has already been remarked, Professor Koyce's proof that there is such an Absolute Being as he has defined, rests upon the presupposition that all being is being known, that all existence is mental. Unless this assumption be granted, the argument goes to pieces. Moreover, in Chapter V we shall meet a consideration, which will make it impossible for us to conceive that the Absolute Self is real. This is the self-contradiction involved in the notion of a " realized infinite." For the present, however, I shall limit myself to pointing out certain other difficulties, which, it seems to me, are inseparable from the conception of the Absolute as it is defined by Eoyce.

(a) The first of these may be called the religious difficulty. We may approach it by considering a conception near akin to that of the monistic Absolute, namely, the conception of God as immanent in his world. If God is thought of as transcendent, and the supernatural and the natural regarded as mutually exclusive categories, then the friend of religion must view the progress of science with alarm. A division of the world between science and religion, between Nature and God, might be reasonably satisfactory, if one could be sure that the boundary would remain permanently fixed. But, if we define the natural as that which is explicable in terms of scientific law, then, as science extends its territory, and proclaims its belief in the possibility of a universal conquest, the outlook for religion becomes dark indeed. If the supernatural is defined as that which is not natural, the scientific view of the world leaves no place for God.