Theology and Metaphysics

Theology and philosophy have always been deeply related, though each has often tried to disown the other.  The ways in which they have related to each other are often overlooked by those believing they already know what the relationship is or ought to be.  

We hear much these days about the destruction of the history of onto-theology.  Theology, we are told, must move forward without the help of metaphysics.  The story is that metaphysics is bad, that metaphyscis is, in the words of one Christian theologian, "death dealing."  But why the rancor against metaphysics?  

The story of the exclusion of metaphysics from theology is a long and complicated one, a story whose tellers carry presuppositions about which they are often unaware.  I tell the story in the following paragraphs.   

Once upon a time 2,400 years ago, Greek philosophers, thinking deeply about things, recognized that there were certain problems connected with knowing the world and our way around in that world.  If everything that is, is in process (Heraclitus), then how could it be that there is anything stable in the world to know.  If one can never step into the same river twice -- that is, if the matter of the river is alway changing -- then how can one speak meaningfully about a river at all? But we do speak meaningfully about rivers.  Thus, there must be something stable about which we speak when we talk about things in the world, especially when we talk about how things in the world change.  It seems that the condition for the possibility of change is that there is something stable and enduring to which change might be attributed.  After all, it is the same sheep in the field, though this ewe no longer has wool.  

I marvel at the work of Plato and Aristotle in their attempt to give an account of how knowledge is possible and how change is possible.  Plato, of course, advocated that there must be some stable and enduring forms which we know and about which our talk is about.  The form sheep, instantiated in this object before me, allows me to speak truly the statement, 'this sheep has lost its wool.'  

Aristotle gave us a metaphysics of primary substances, accidents and secondary substances that allowed us to make sense of our world.  There are basic unities called substances, of which certain can be "said of", and of which certain things are "present in."  The primary substance is this sheep, and the whiteness of its wool is "present in" this sheep.  However, 'sheep' can be 'said of' this sheep, and so can 'mammal' and 'animal'.  

Plato and Aristotle knew that before we can go about clearly investigating the natural world around us, and the complexity of ourselves, we needed language to do that investigating, language presupposing categories by which anything as such is know, and through which anything as such is.  A world in which there is only becoming would be a world unknown to us.  What was needed is the logos, the permanent possibilities by and through which things become.  

Christian theology found the work of Plato and Aristotle very handy when it came to talk about the divine.  Just as becoming needed forms by which the becoming my be and be known, it seemedthat God  was in need of such forms as well.  Without such forms, it would seem we could no more utter a word about God as we might utter a word about ceaseless becoming.   

But talk about God appears quite different than talk about the world of becoming all around us.  After all, we can see, hear, touch, smell and taste the world around us, but this seems not to be true of the divine.  God is supersensible; the divine is beyond all sensible finite being.  Categories by which we might know the world are categories we use when talking about God.  Metaphysics is born again in its attempt to take the categories that apply to the temporal and finite and use them to speak of the eternal and infinite. This seems quite reasonable because the categories themselves in their universal applicability seem to suggest the eternal, immutable and infinite.  The categories are not themselves comprised of the material becomings to which they apply.  If they were so comprised, they would not be categories, and the problem of stability and change would come back upon us again in full force.  

Medieval thinkers knew their metaphysics, and realized that reason itself dictates the use of metaphysical categories if there was to be anything stable about God and his mighty deeds that they human mind might know and that human language might speak.  Seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers often divided on where to put their attention, with Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz arguing passionately that rationality itself connects to the forms by which reality is grasped, a connecting that concerns the supersensible.  These great "continental rationalists" thought that proper application of reason could eventuate in knowledge of the supersensible, and ultimately through this, knowledge of the sensible itself could occur.  

Christian theology from the fourth century onward had linked itself arm and arm with the metaphysical.  And why not?  God as the eternal, immutable, impassible, infinite being is a denizen -- one might say the paradigmatic denizen -- of the realm of the supersensible itself.  No matter how large the field of the supersensible, God fills it, and even, at times, seems to strain against the borders.  After all, God as "that which none greater can be thought" must occupy the highest region of Being, though one must allow that God could at any time go to live in another realm entirely. 

God as the highest being quite naturally assumed the Grund (ground) role within all of being. While all beings in the supersensible have some reason to be that appeals to something outside themselves, God's raison d'etre must be included within Himself alone.  God is the uncaused cause, the unmoved mover, the necessary being grounding all contingency, the perfection of the medieval transcendentals of goodness, beauty and truth, and that by virtue of which the world has a consistency and stability allowing for human life.  

God as the ineffable, impassible, uncaused causer is the condition for His own actuality as well as the actuality of the world as such.  Why is there being and not nothing?  There is being because there is God and God is the one activity of being in all activities of being and the highest being.  Because there is God, there is metaphysical and physical order.  God has more being than His angels, who have more being than human beings, who themselves have more being than the animals, plants and minerals.  The "Great Chain of Being" determines the hierarchy of being, and every being on that hierarchy.  

The metaphysical realm of the supersensible is closed to all human sensing, but not to human thinking.  One can know something about supersensible hierarchies through reason, and through the reason-transcending showings of the supersensibe to human beings.  In the tradition, revelation stands on the side of reason and not on the side of the empirical.  Revelation and reason deal with the eternal verities, while the senses concern the temporal.  The first deal with Plato's realm of Being, the second with his realm of Becoming.  

Kant famously argued that the traditional province of human thinking, the realm of metaphysics itself, was epistemically inaccessible to human thinking. What can be known are those determinate perceptions (intuitions) that have been synthesized by our concepts into determinate objects of experience.  Human thinking as such could proceed in orders of conditioned and that which conditions, but such thinking does not access the supersensible it itself.  It does not carve the beast of reality at its joints. Such thinking is regulative; it is how human beings must think something, but there is no justified reason to think that how we must think something is the way that the supersensible thing to be thought is.  The transcendental subreption occurs when we confuse the necessity of our thinking with any necessity that the thing thought might have. 

With one fell swoop, Kant seemingly broke up the 14 century long marriage between theology and metaphysics.  "Doing away with knowledge to make room for faith" sounded good to many people in the day, but the pesky problem since the time of Kant has concerned what exactly does one have faith in?  

Fichte, Shelling, Coleridge, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and many others scavenged about for ways to think God beyond traditional supersensible formulations.  Perhaps one might think God as the whence of the human feeling of absolute dependence.  Perhaps God is found in the dynamism of the ego as it creates and surpasses the forms by which the world is known.  Perhaps God can be identified as the human effort to know the world through history, a knowing that is absolute when all that has been and can be known is known, a knowing that is simultaneously God reaching complete self-consciousness. 

But metaphysical ways die hard, and the post-metaphysical ways to think God suddenly seemed to be thinking God all over again through a new type of metaphysics. To think God as the transcendental field allowing knowledge to happen as a "laying out" or interpretation of God simply moves that which ultimately is from the prohibited traditional metaphysical transcendent to the newly permitted transcendentally unconditioned.  As that which ultimately conditions all knowledge, God is now thought as unconditioned conditioned, a step away from the uncaused causer, as it were, but a step that appeared to many to be not far enough.  

So it was the young Heidegger, reading the young Luther, who came to the conclusion that all of metaphysics, transcendent or transcendental, merely occludes that be-ing which is closest to us and in which we unavoidably dwell.  Heidegger declared that metaphysics is a practice in the "forgetfulness" of being because metaphysics simply lays out ultimate things with putative objectivity (present-at-hand being) while occluding the (ready-to-hand) practical fields of being in which human ultimately dwell.  Later Heidegger develops a radical critique of the "onto-theological tradition" of thinking God through derivative categories that ignore the factic life of Christians living always already ahead of themselves in anticipating the Second Coming of Christ.  One might say that onto-theology is the problem that has beset Christianity from its beginning and continually derails theology, which itself must ultimately concern human existence as they are "placed" or as the "find themselves" before God.  

This is the story of the great divorce between theology and metaphysics, a story that leaves Christian theology in the uncomfortable position of having to say something about God without using metaphysical categories.  But what can we say about God without metaphysical categories?  Although many books deal with this topic, It is actually quite difficult to answer this question.  If we don't talk about God then don't we fall into the black hole of apophatic theology?  This will be my topic in a later post.