The French polymath Blaise Pascal wrote in his famous “memorial” about his “night of fire”: “The God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob – not of the philosophers and scholars.”
We can understand this desire not to turn the personal God in the Scriptures into an abstract idea. But there are good reasons not to pit the God “of the philosophers” (especially those like Thomas Aquinas) against the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Étienne Gilson pointed out that we have lived so long with the Christian notion of a God who is both personal and the highest, most fundamental cause of all things, that we often fail to realize that uniting the two was one of the great accomplishments of Christian philosophical reflection: “After so many centuries of Christian thought, it has become exceedingly difficult for us to imagine a world where the gods are not the highest reality, while that which is the most supremely real in it is not a god. It is a fact, however, that in Plato’s mind the gods were inferior to the Ideas.”
The problem, however, is that “an Idea is not a person; it is not even a soul; at best it is an intelligible cause – much less a person than a thing.” Aristotle’s “god” is an Act of self-thinking Thought,” which “eternally thinks of itself, but never of us.” “Perhaps we ought to love the god of Aristotle,” notes Gilson wryly, “but what would be the use, since this god does not love us.”
“Man knows himself,” Gilson continues, and “because he knows himself, man can say ‘I am.’” The question is whether Plato or Aristotle’s highest principle can say the same. Is it self-aware in such a way that it can say “I am”? And is it aware of itself such that it can act freely and care for others? This remained a challenge for Greek thought.
Pope John Paul writes in his encyclical Fides et Ratio that one virtue of the Greeks’ philosophy was that it “no longer rested content with the ancient myths but wanted to provide a rational foundation for their belief in the divinity.” As a result, “superstitions were recognized for what they were and religion was, at least in part, purified by rational analysis.” And yet something was still missing. It was the God who could say – and say in relation with others – “I am.”
Plato’s divine principle, the source of all Being and Goodness, was no longer like the gods in Greek mythology, capable of gross immorality. This was a purification. But what Plato’s divinity had gained in purity, it lost in personality. It was a principle, not a person. It was not someone who could hear prayers or care about the lives of people in trouble.
What Christianity achieved was the unification of this fundamental principle of all being and goodness with the personhood of a God who knows and cares about human well-being. This is the God who can say both “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” and “I am who am. Tell them, I am has sent me to you.” (Exodus 3:14)
We find in these two statements both the “I-thou” relationship that Jewish philosopher Martin Buber speaks about, not “I-it.” And that relationship has a history and a particularity – “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” It does not remain distant and abstract. This is the God who has a relationship with particular people and who intervenes on their behalf in time and history.
And yet, this is not the “house god” of the Israelites, but the God of all creation. As Benedict XVI affirmed about the authorship of the Genesis creation account, which likely was written during the Babylonian Captivity:
At this moment the prophets opened a new page and taught Israel that it was only then that the true face of God appeared and that he was not restricted to that particular piece of land. He had never been. He had promised this piece of land to Abraham before he settled there, and he had been able to bring his people out of Egypt. He could do both things because he was not the God of one place but had power over heaven and earth. . . .And so it came to be understood that this God of Israel was not a God like the other gods, but that he was the God who held sway over every land and people. He could do this, however, because he himself had created everything in heaven and on earth. It was in exile and in the seeming defeat of Israel that there occurred an opening to the awareness of the God who holds every people and all of history in his hands, who holds everything because he is the creator of everything and the source of all power.
On the one hand, the Christian God cannot be reduced to categories of being because God is Being Itself. So too, one cannot measure the goodness of God in comparison with the goodness of any created thing, even the goodness of the entire universe itself, because God is the Source of all Goodness.
And yet, to the claim so often made by modern theologians that God is so transcendent, that He can’t be known, and thus all doctrines about Him must be relativized, the pope replies: “As the source of love, God desires to make himself known; and the knowledge which the human being has of God perfects all that the human mind can know of the meaning of life.”
Although God is transcendent and beyond the categories of human reason, He wants to be known, and He has made Himself known, in ways humans can understand Him, in the self-communication of Himself in revelation.
Thus, properly understood, we need not – indeed must not – oppose “the god of the philosophers” – the god of Being and Goodness – to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
