Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: Thomas; Transformation der drei Offenbarungen Gottes in ein ontologisches Verständnis; Gefahr einer "voreiligen" negativen Theologie; Nicht-Wissen nur als Anbetung

Kurzinhalt: ... we can know that God is but we cannot know what he is; we even remove from him this very 'is-ness'; But this ignorance is knowledge, as this silence is itself a language-the language of adoration

Textausschnitt: 70a I shall not deal in detail with the substance of the argument he incorporated within this structure, but two general aspects of it require comment. Call them his agnosticism and his gnosticism or, to use the patristic terms, his agnosia and his gnosis. (Fs)

70b First, throughout the whole of his probing inquiry into the problem of God, Aquinas' constant concern was to protect the mystery of the divine transcendence from prying scrutiny. He was not the Arian dialectician who, in Gregory Nazianzen's sarcastic description, discoursed on the generation of the Son as if he had been there as midwife. Aquinas was the Christian theologian. His thought was directed by a sense of the awesome biblical truth that God is the Holy One whose Name is ineffable. As a theologian he states this truth in metaphysical form: "One thing about God remains completely unknown in this life, namely, what God is" (Commentary on Romans, chapter 1, lesson 6). He states the truth so often and so uncompromisingly that some of his commentators have become a bit alarmed at the patent poverty of the knowledge of God he permits to man in this life. (Fs) (notabene)
70c He makes it utterly clear, of course, that we can answer the question of existence, whether God is, and whether he is wise, good, and so on. Hence we can make affirmations about God that are true and certain. This is indeed cardinal. It insures God's presence to us and our presence to him, for, unless we know that the Other is, we cannot say that the Other is-with us. On the other hand, Aquinas makes it equally clear that with the exercise of the primary act of intelligence, which is to make affirmations or judgments of existence, the capacities of human intelligence in regard to God are exhausted. We cannot go on to answer the question of essence in its positive form, what God is. We cannot positively understand the God whose existence we have affirmed. We cannot, as it were, crowd him into a concept; in his transcendence he escapes our concepts. (Fs)

71a Aquinas does not pretend that his doctrine of the analogy of being does any more than rescue our discourse about God from sheer equivocation. It lets us know that, when we are thinking and talking about God, it is really about God that we are talking and thinking. It does not assure us that what we think and say about God is what God is. With his gnosticism of affirmation, Aquinas joins what Sertillanges has called an agnosticism of definition. To be a bit monotonous on the point, as Aquinas himself was monotonous, we can know that God is but we cannot know what he is. In the end, our presence to him, which is real, is a presence to the unknown: "to him we are united as to one unknown," says Aquinas. (Fs) (notabene)

71b The doctrine was not new. It was the echo, in another form of thought and language, of the awesome utterance in Exodus, "I shall be there as who I am shall I be there." The text had found an earlier echo in the patristic era in the paradox that the confession of no knowledge of God is itself the great knowing of him. The further achievement of Aquinas was that he exploited all the rational resources of a sophisticated ontology and an elaborate theory of knowledge to enforce the conclusion that all human knowledge of God ends in ignorance. Where the Bible and the Fathers had simply asserted that so it is, Aquinas demonstrated why it must be so. He transformed the paradox of Exodus, which had been paraphrased by Cyril of Jerusalem, into a state of systematic scientific understanding. (Fs)

72a The biblical doctrine that God's creation is somehow like its Creator and Lord is transposed into the gnoseological technique of the first of the three ways of knowing God-the way of affirmation. The biblical doctrine that God is wholly unlike his creation is transposed into the second way, the way of negation. The biblical doctrine that God is God, not man, is transposed into the third way, the way of transcendence or eminence. As this third doctrine is decisive, so the third way is determinant. It determined Aquinas to a remorseless pursuit of the exigencies of the second way. (Fs) (notabene)

72b We must, he says, deny to God, remove from God, all similarity to the corporal and spiritual worlds as we know them. God is not what anything in these worlds is. In point of essence, God's unlikeness to the finite world is total. When we have done this work of denial, he goes on, "There remains in our minds only [the affirmation] 'that he is,' and nothing more. Hence the mind is in a certain confusion." Obviously. How can intelligence affirm that God is at the same time that it denies that he is what anything else that it knows is? But even this is not the end: "As the final step, however, we even remove from him this very 'is-ness,' as 'is-ness' is found in creatures. And then the mind dwells in the darkness, as it were, of an ignorance. It is by this ignorance, as long as this life lasts, that we are best united to God, as Dionysius says. This is the darkness in which God dwells." Thus the theologian echoes the prophet: "Truly thou art a God who hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Savior" (Isaiah 45:15). (Fs) (notabene)

72c Perhaps a word of caution is needed here. For all his final agnosticism in what concerns the definition of God-the understanding of what he is-Aquinas demonstrated what the Fathers had implied, that the confession of our ignorance of God is not to be made effortlessly, at the outset of inquiry. In that case our ignorance would be a sheer absence of knowledge and not itself a mode of knowing. There is nothing more disastrous, as someone has said, than a negative theology that begins too soon. Ignorance of God becomes a true knowledge of him only if it is reached, as Aquinas reached it, at the end of a laborious inquiry that is firmly and flexibly disciplined at every step by the dialectical method of the three ways. This method not only governs the search for the supreme truth but also guarantees that the search will end in a discovery. There is a knowledge of God, as there is a way to it. There is a valid language about God, as there is a true knowledge of him. "As who I am shall I be there." The way of man to the knowledge of God is to follow all the scattered scintillae that the Logos has strewn throughout history and across the face of the heavens and the earth until they all fuse in the darkness that is the unapproachable Light. Along this way of affirmation and negation all the resources of language, as of thought, must be exploited until they are exhausted. Only then may man confess his ignorance and have recourse to silence. But this ignorance is knowledge, as this silence is itself a language-the language of adoration. (Fs) (notabene)