GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob

not of the philosophers and of the learned.

Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.

GOD of Jesus Christ.

My God and your God.

Your GOD will be my God.

Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD.

He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel.

Grandeur of the human soul.

Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.¹

With these words Blaise Pascal begins his famous Mémorial, in which he records the overwhelming impact upon him of what he came to regard as an encounter with the living God. In the light of this experience, he makes a fundamental distinction between the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob and the “God” of the philosophers and of the learned. Throughout the Pensées Pascal returns, explicitly or implicitly, to this distinction, insisting that the “god of the philosophers”, whose existence will seem obvious to those who are already convinced but is not at all deducible from supposed evidence drawn from nature, is not the God who spoke through the prophets and revealed himself, definitively, in the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

So who or what was/is the “god of the philosophers”? When we find references to “god” in the ancient teaching of oriental, Indian and Greek thinkers, who or what, are they referring to? Are there any features in common between the “gods of the philosophers” and the God that Pascal believed he had met and whose presence filled him with such joy? Is there anything in the teaching of the ancient or the modern philosophers that might prepare their hearers or readers for the kind of encounter that Pascal experienced, or is there an unbridgeable chasm separating the god of philosophy from the God who uniquely revealed himself in Christ, as Pascal and generations of Christians before him and after him have believed?

Ancient Hindu and pre-Socratic traditions²

Some sense of a Supreme Being, or the Ultimate Reality to which we are subject or of which we form part appears to be consubstantial with humankind. We often think of philosophy, and the exploration of the nature of reality, as having begun with the Greeks. As a matter of fact, many non-European philosophical and religious traditions predate the Greek philosophers not by centuries but by millennia!

According to the Vedas and the Upanishads, said to have originated as far back as the 3^rd millennium BCE, then handed down from generation to generation and formulated into a philosophical system by Hindu mystics during the first millennium CE, the human soul, Atman, is one with the Brahman, which is Ultimate Reality. The Creator of the cosmos, the Brahma, is actually a secondary deity. We live, unavoidably, in the Samsara, the phenomenal world of objects of our perception, which is constantly changing. We achieve liberation (Moksha) from the phenomenal world through the endless cycle of death and rebirth, on the basis of the principle of Karma, whereby the human soul faces (or enjoys) the consequences of its actions, both in this life and in their next rebirth. But the Ultimate Reality is one with the human soul, it is not a transcendent being to which each individual is subject. In present-day eastern (and in some western) philosophy we find many variations on this same theme: there is no Ultimate Reality, or God, which or who is external to human Self. The Self is represented as consubstantial with the Divine. Every human soul is his or her own divine reality. This conception of reality is known as monism and elements of it have permeated many different philosophical traditions for millennia.

As regards Western philosophy, and specifically Greek philosophy, the names that most readily spring to mind are Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. But these philosophers countered, or developed and refined ideas that preceded them. As in the case of the oriental traditions, the definition of Ultimate Reality and humankind’s relation to it was of utmost importance to these Greek philosophers. The preceding “mythological” age had been characterised by a pantheon of competing deities, who were larger than life versions of human heroes, with their very human foibles and phobias. It was the philosophers, probably starting with Thales (600 BCE), not the poets, who began to grapple with the true nature of the realities that shaped human behaviour, and they mocked the simplistic beliefs that were enshrined in the works of Homer and others. But that did not mean that these philosophers were atheists. Xenophanes, for example, who poured scorn on “the gods” and those who believed in them, nevertheless sounds like a monotheist when he said, “One god, greatest among gods and men, in no way similar to mortals in body or in thought.” And “Always he remains in the same place, moving not at all; nor is it fitting for him to go to different places at different times, but without toil he controls all things by the thought of his mind”. This will remind us of the concept of the “unmoved mover” later developed by Aristotle.

When Thales said, “everything is full of gods” he was not referring to transcendent beings worthy of worship and reverence. He meant something like the forces that made people and matter behave in one way or another. Matter preceded the “gods”, not vice versa. At the most, “the gods” shaped and imposed order on the stuff that the universe was made of. Even when they seemed inclined towards monotheism, for the Greeks God did not create the cosmos. The very term cosmos refers to the order which this creative force (god) imposed on the original chaos. This creator did not originate the system whereby chaos and cosmos are kept in tension, he/it is part of it. The universe is an emanation from god, and is therefore part of god, and vice versa. In a sense, everything is God. God is somehow the energy that inhabits the universe, moving and directing it to optimal effect.

But what did the stuff of the universe consist of? What was the primal substance of which it was made, the arche as they called it? For Thales this primal substance was water, while for Anaximander it was what he called apeiron, that is a substance without boundaries or limits. This limitless, infinite substance held opposite qualities in tension, in a state of equilibrium. The earth itself is held in place by being equidistant from everything surrounding it. Anaximenes held that everything had its origin in air. Heraclitus, for his part, argued that everything is in a state of flux, which is the theory that is most often associated with him. However, he also deserves to be credited with originating the concept of logos, the basic principle that held all the fluctuating phenomena together.

Parmenides formulated the concept of Being as the arche. Hence, he insisted on the necessarily eternal existence of matter. Nothing that is can ever not have been. He saw no difference between contingent and non-contingent reality. Whatever is has always been, being is indistinguishable from existence. Ultimate reality is simply that which exists, that is to say, the universe itself. By contrast with Parmenides’ monistic representation of reality under the concept of being/existence, Leucippus and his more famous disciple Democritus, proposed a dualistic model consisting of constant, and eternal, interaction between atoms and void. For these thinkers, atoms and void were the sum total of all that had ever existed. Every material object, living or inanimate, was the result of atoms colliding and combining in different ways within the void. Although their model was dualistic in one sense, it was also entirely materialistic. They had no concept of an Ultimate Reality acting upon the universe from the outside. If the gods existed they were part of this eternal interaction between atoms and void, and had no power over it. Democritus denied any kind of transcendent telos, or purpose, guiding the universe, or humankind, towards the fulfilment of an ultimate purpose. Every human being and human society is the result of a random process of collision and combination of atoms in the void.

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle

Plato, a younger contemporary of Democritus, challenged the latter specifically in relation to the absence of purpose that his philosophy entailed. It could be said that Socrates, like his pupil Plato, devoted his life to combatting the fatalism and purposelessness of the Atomistic model. He picked up and developed Anaxagoras’s concept of all-encompassing Mind as that which explains the emergence of the universe, and posited that this Mind implies a rational principle standing behind and directing the development of the universe. He made it his life’s work to determine the purpose towards which the universe, and every individual human life, was being directed. He saw himself as an instrument in the hands of “god” to guide his interlocutors towards an understanding of the purpose for which they had been created, but without prescribing what that purpose might be. Just as the mind of each individual shapes and guides the actions of his or her body, so there is a cosmic Mind which directs the universe towards the fulfilment of a cosmic purpose. This was as close as Socrates came to a position that we would regard as “theological”. Although he often referred to “gods” in the plural, Xenophon quotes him as referring to the Supreme Being who “created man from the beginning”.

The influence that Socrates’s teaching, especially concerning a purposeful Mind separate from the cosmos and shaping it, had on Plato, Aristotle, and through them on western philosophy as a whole is unquestionable. Plato developed Socrates’ concept of the “good” purposes of Mind into a concept of “the Good” as an entity in its own right which imparts its “goodness” to ideas, or “Forms” as he called them, such as Beauty, Courage, Justice etc. These Forms exist independently of the particular instances of virtue, beauty, courage, justice that we find in the world. The primary source of anything that we regard as beautiful or good is “the Good” which imparts the quality of goodness to the Forms, from which beautiful or good things acquire that which we identify in them as “beautiful” or “good”. Thus, there is a kind of hierarchy of being. The Good is the Ultimate Reality at the pinnacle of this hierarchy, followed by the Forms of Beauty, Goodness, Courage etc., followed in turn by particular instances where these qualities are reflected. For Plato, “the Good” occupies the place which theists would now ascribe to God, though Plato would not have understood “the Good” to have any of the attributes of personhood, such as consciousness, choice or agency, that are associated with the God of Judaeo-Christian theology.

Aristotle took issue with Plato’s conception of Forms as preceding the particular instances of these Forms. His approach, by contrast, was inductive, based on his observation of the world of objects. He collected specific, particular examples and proceeded to observe what these particulars had in common, and how they were related to each other. For Aristotle, Forms did not exist as entities independently of their embodiment in particulars. Aristotle also formulated the concept of everything being the result of four causes: the material cause (the substance of which it is made), the efficient cause (the person who made it), the formal cause (the shape and function the maker had in mind) and the final cause (the purpose which a given object was meant to serve).

In positing an “efficient cause” for the cosmos, Aristotle did not have in mind a Creator in the Judeo-Christian sense of bringing the cosmos into being. As he held that the cosmos was eternal, he saw the role of the efficient cause to be to generate motion in order to enable each element of already existing matter to move from potential to actual. The source of this motion is something that cannot be moved by anything else. In this sense, it is non-contingent and self-existing. The term that he used for this non-contingent source of all motion was “the Unmoved Mover”. This raises questions concerning how something that is motionless can generate motion in other objects. To deal with this problem, Aristotle invoked Anaxagoras’s concept of Mind (nous), which guides the potential into actuality. As this Unmoved Mover is non-contingent, it must be utter perfection; that is, it must be perfect Mind. It must not itself contain potentiality, as it is not subject to any kind of motion, but must already be pure actuality. Aristotle refers to this Mind and its action as divine. Once again however, what he means by this is very different from the activity of the mind of God that we find in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. The thought of Aristotle’s Divine Mind is entirely, and necessarily, self-directed, rather than being directed towards interacting with, sustaining, caring for or providing for the cosmos. It is a Mind whose relation to the world, and to humankind, is that of absolute indifference.

The teachings of Plato and Aristotle have remained extraordinarily influential in the development of Western (and indeed Islamic) philosophy. Many thinkers of the Christian era, Christian or not, were already deeply immersed in Platonic and/or Aristotelian conceptions of reality, including Ultimate Reality, even if they embraced Christianity, and in many cases they continued to interpret the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures through the prism of Platonism and/or Aristotelianism. Also influential before, during and after the Christian era were the teachings of the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers: the former characterised by their commitment to Reason, the Logos, as the bedrock of the universe, and the latter by their espousal of Democritus’s atomism, a worldview in which even if the gods existed they were powerless and irrelevant.

Roger Marshall, English language and literature teacher in Barcelona, Spain.

Notes

1. The Mémorial is Pascal's most personal religious work. It records, on a scrap of paper found in the lining of his coat after his death, Pascal's experience of an encounter with God on one unforgettable night in 1654.

2. For the section on ancient Hindu and Greek philosophy I found the book Finding Ultimate Reality by Professor David Gooding and Professor John Lennox particularly helpful. Publisher Myrtlefield House ISBN 978-1-912721-06-1 www.myrtlefieldhouse.com