The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  In the Muslim world, Jews, Christians, and Muslims were able to collaborate and learn from one another. But in Western Europe, during the last years of Anselm’s life, the first Crusades were launched against Islam. In 1096, some of the Crusaders attacked the Jewish communities along the Rhine valley, and when they finally conquered Jerusalem in July 1099, they massacred some thirty thousand Jews and Muslims; the blood was said to have come up to the knees of their horses. Crusading was the first cooperative act of the new Europe as it struggled back onto the international stage. It appealed to the knights, who were men of war and wanted an aggressive religion, and would remain a major passion in the West until the end of the thirteenth century. This was, of course, an idolatrous catastrophe and one of the most shameful developments in Western Christian history. The Crusaders’ God was an idol; they had foisted their own fear and loathing of these rival faiths onto a deity they had created in their own likeness and thus given themselves a sacred seal of absolute approval. Crusading made anti-Semitism an incurable disease in Europe and would indelibly scar relations between Islam and the West.

  But it was not the whole story. At the same time as Christians were slaughtering Muslims in the Near East, others were traveling to Spain to study under Muslim scholars in Cordoba and Toledo. Here they discovered the works of Aristotle and other Greek scientists and philosophers whose work had been lost to them after the fall of Rome. They also encountered the work of the Jewish and Muslim faylasufs. With the help of the local Jews, European scholars translated these writings from Arabic into Latin, and by the beginning of the thirteenth century, a wide array of Greek and Arabic scientific and philosophical works had become available to Europeans. This influx of new knowledge sparked an intellectual renaissance. The discovery of Aristotle in particular showed theologians how to present their doctrines in a coherent system.

  This reminds us that in any age, the religious life is always multifarious, varied, and contradictory—even within a single individual. One of the most famous Europeans of the period was Francis of Assisi (1181–1226). His life and career show us that while some Europeans were engaged in scholarly rationalism, others like Francis had no time for theology of any kind and were far more literal-minded than the apophatic Anselm. Yet Francis’s literalism, like that of the pilgrims, was neither intellectual nor doctrinal but practical. He represented a strand of popular piety that saw the life of Christ as primarily a miqra to be imitated literally down to the last detail. Francis emulated the absolute poverty of Christ in his own life; he and the Franciscan friars who followed him begged for their food, went barefoot, owned no property, and slept rough. He even reproduced the wounds of Christ in his own body. And yet this gentle saint seems to have approved of the Crusades and accompanied the Fifth Crusade to Egypt, though he did not take part in the fighting but preached to the sultan.

  As I explained at the outset, my aim is not to give an exhaustive account of religion in any given period, but to highlight a particular trend—the apophatic—that speaks strongly to our current religious perplexity. This was, of course, not the only strand of medieval piety, but it was not a minor movement; it was promoted by some of the most influential thinkers and spiritual leaders of the time. In the Eastern Church, it had been crafted by Athanasius, the Cappadocians, and Maximus, who were revered as heroes of Orthodoxy. In the West, we see it in both Augustine and Anselm, as well as in the towering figure of Thomas Aquinas (1225–74).

  Nobody did more to absorb Aristotelian rationalism than Thomas. Destined for a monastic life, at the age of fourteen Thomas was attracted to the Dominican friars he encountered at the University of Naples, the only school in Christendom at that time to teach Aristotelian logic and philosophy. Like the Franciscans, the Dominicans were the men of the hour; these friars were not monks sequestered in a monastery but lived a life of evangelical poverty in the world, putting themselves at the service of the people. After a struggle with his family, Thomas threw in his lot with the Dominicans, studied in Paris under Albert the Great (1200–80), who was completing his magisterial commentary on Aristotle, and at the tender age of thirty-two, succeeded to his chair. Like the faylasufs, Thomas was wide open to change and new ideas. He quoted Arab and Jewish philosophers while most of his contemporaries were still committed to crusading, and his voluminous writings integrated the new sciences with traditional faith at a time when Aristotle was still a controversial figure.28

  It is difficult for us to read Thomas today. He wrote in the technical language of the new metaphysics, and his style is dry, understated, and dense. But it is also confident. Within a hundred years, the intellectual climate would change and theologians would become warier of the intellect, but Thomas had no qualms about making affirmative, positive statements about God. He thought Maimonides was wrong to insist that it was only appropriate to use negative terms that said what God was not. For Thomas—as for Denys, whom he greatly revered—affirmative speech and the silence of denial were both essential to God talk. As Being itself (ipsum Esse subsistens), God was the source of everything that existed, so all beings made in God’s image could tell us something about him. It was also permissible to exploit the exciting new techniques of logic and inference—but with one important proviso. Whenever he made a statement about God, the theologian must realize that it was inescapably inadequate. When we contemplate God, we are thinking of what is beyond thought; when we speak of God, we are talking of what cannot be contained in words. By revealing the inherent limitation of words and concepts, theology should reduce both the speaker and his audience to silent awe. When reason was applied to faith, it must show that what we call “God” was beyond the grasp of the human mind. If it failed to do this, its statements about the divine would be idolatrous.

  Even revelation could not tell us anything about God; indeed, its task was to make us realize that God was unknowable. “Man’s utmost knowledge is to know that we do not know him,” Thomas explained.

  For then alone do we know God truly, when we believe that he is far above all that man can possibly think of God … by the fact that certain things about God are proposed to man, which surpass his reason, he is strengthened in his opinion that God is far above what he is able to think.29

  Even Christ had transcended our conceptual grasp and become unknowable. At his ascension, he was hidden in the cloud that received him, and taken into a realm that is beyond the reach of our intellect. As Saint Paul said, he is “far above … any name that can be named.”30 The ascension, therefore, revealed the limits of our knowledge; when Christ left the world, the Word was concealed from us again and would always remain unknowable and unnameable.

  Thomas’s huge output can be seen as a campaign to counter the tendency to domesticate the divine transcendence. In this he is absolutely true to Denys. But where Denys’s theology was based on liturgy, Thomas’s apophaticism was rooted in the new metaphysical rationalism. His long and, to a modern sensibility, tortuous analyses should be seen as an intellectual ritual that leads the mind through a labyrinth of thought until it culminates in the final musterion. Thomas’s influence on Roman Catholic thought has been immense, but he has recently become a laughingstock to atheists (as well as an embarrassment to some theologians) because of the apparent inadequacy of his five “proofs” for the existence of God.

  These five “ways” (viae), as Thomas preferred to call them, are to be found at the very beginning of the Summa Theologiae, his most famous work. This was a teaching manual designed “to introduce beginners to what God taught us as concisely and clearly as the subject matter allows,”31 and it begins with the most fundamental question of all: Is there a God? This, Thomas believed, needs demonstration, because even though he thought that knowledge of God was innate, it was often vague and even crude. Thomas explicitly dissociated himself from Anselm’s “ontological proof”: the proposition that “God exists” was not at all self-evident but “needs to be made evident by means of things that are more evident to us, namely, God’s
effects.” Paul had argued that “ever since God created the world his everlasting power and deity—however invisible—have been there for the mind to see in the things that he has made.”32 It was, therefore, possible to argue “from visible effects to hidden causes,” because, as Aristotle had made clear, every effect must have a cause, so “God’s effects then are enough to prove that God exists.” But the doctrine of creation ex nihilo meant that the creatures “are not enough to help us comprehend what he is.”33 So before he sets out his “proofs,” Thomas tells his students that because of God’s absolute unknowability we cannot define what it is that we are trying to prove.

  When we know that something is, it remains to enquire in what way it is, so that we may know what it is. But since concerning God we cannot know what he is but only what he is not, we cannot consider in what way God is but only in what way he is not. So first we must ask in what way he is not, secondly how he may be known to us, and thirdly how we may speak of him.34

  We cannot speak about God itself; we can speak only about the contingency of his creatures, which came from nothing.

  Having made this crucial apophatic proviso, Thomas briefly— indeed, somewhat perfunctorily—sets forth his five “ways” of arguing from creatures to “what people call God.”35 These five arguments are not original. The first is based on Aristotle’s proof of the Prime Mover: all around us, we see things changing, and because every change is caused by something else, the chain of cause and effect must stop somewhere. We thus arrive at the First Cause, itself unchanged by anything. The second proof, closely allied to the first, is based on the nature of causation: we never observe anything causing itself, so there must be an initial Cause, “to which everyone gives the name God.” The third “way” is based on Ibn Sina’s argument for a Necessary Being, which must of itself exist, owes its being “to nothing outside itself,” and is “the cause that other things must be.” The fourth via is a moral argument derived from Aristotle: some things are better, truer, and more exalted than others, and this hierarchy of excellence presupposes an unseen perfection that is best of all. The fifth proof is drawn from Aristotle’s belief that everything in the universe has a “Final Cause” that is the “form” of its being. Everything obeys natural laws to attain its proper end and purpose, and the regularity of these laws cannot be accidental. They must be directed “by someone with awareness and understanding,” just as the flight of an arrow presupposes an archer—and that “someone is what we call God.”

  Thomas was not trying to convince a skeptic of God’s existence. He was simply trying to find a rational answer to the primordial question: Why does something exist rather than nothing? All the five “ways” argue in one way or another that nothing can come from nothing.36 At the conclusion of each proof, Thomas rounds the argument off with a variant on the phrase quod omnes dicunt Deum: the Prime Mover, the Efficient Cause, the Necessary Being, the Highest Excellence, and the Intelligent Overseer are “what all people call God.” It sounds as though everything is done and dusted, but no sooner has Thomas apparently settled the matter than he pulls the rug from under our feet.

  He immediately goes on to show that even though we can prove that “what we call God” (a reality that we cannot define) must “exist,” we have no idea what the word “exists” can signify in this context. We can talk about God as Necessary Being and so forth, but we do not know what this really means.37 The same goes for God’s attributes. God is Simplicity itself; that means that, unlike all the beings of our experience, “God is not made up of parts.” A man, for example, is a composite being: he has a body and soul, flesh, bones, and skin. He has qualities: he is good, kind, fat, and tall. But because God’s attributes are identical with his essence, he has no qualities. He is not “good,” he is goodness. We simply cannot imagine an “existence” like this, so “we cannot know the ‘existence’ of God any more than we can define him,” Thomas explains, because “God cannot be classified as this or that sort of thing.” We can get to know mere beings because we can categorize them into species—as stars, elephants, or mountains. God is not a substance, the “sort of thing that can exist independently” of an individual instance of it. We cannot ask whether there is a God, as if God were simply one example of a species. God is not and cannot be a “sort of thing.”38

  All the “proofs” have achieved is to show us that there is nothing in our experience that can tell us what “God” means. Because of something that we cannot define, there is a universe where there could have been nothing, but we do not know what we have proved the existence of. We have simply demonstrated the existence of a mystery.39 But that, for Thomas, is precisely what makes the “five ways” good theology. The question “Why something rather than nothing?” is a good one; human beings keep asking it, because it is in our nature to push our minds to an extreme in this way. But the answer—”what everybody calls ‘God’ “—is something that we do not, indeed cannot, know. Thomas shared Augustine’s view of intellectus. In these proofs, we see reason at the end of its tether, asking unanswerable questions and straining toward its “cutting edge,” its divine “spark.” Pushed to the limit, reason turns itself inside out, words no longer make sense, and we are reduced to silence. Even today, when they contemplate the universe, physicists pit their minds against the dark world of uncreated reality that we cannot fathom. This is the unknowable reality that Thomas is asking his readers to confront by pushing their intellects to a point beyond which they cannot go.

  Thomas would say that we know that we are speaking about “God” when our language stumbles and fails in this way. As a modern theologian has pointed out, “This reduction of talk to silence is what is called ‘theology.’ “40 Unknowing was not a source of frustration. As Thomas indicates, people can find joy in this subversion of their reasoning powers. Thomas did not expect his students to “believe” in God; he still uses credere to mean trust or commitment and defines faith as “the capacity of the intellect to recognize (assentire) the genuineness of the transcendent,”41 to look beneath the surface of life and apprehend a sacred dimension that is as real as—indeed more real than—anything else in our experience. This “assent” did not mean intellectual submission: the verb assentire also meant “to rejoice in” and was related to assensio (“applause”).42 Faith was the ability to appreciate and take delight in the nonempirical realities that we glimpse in the world.

  Like any good premodern theologian, Thomas made it clear that all our language about God can only be analogical, because our words refer to limited, finite categories. We can speak of a good dog, a good book, or a good person and have some idea of what we mean; but when we say that God is not only good but Goodness itself, we lose any purchase on the meaning of what we are saying. Thomas knew that our doctrines about God are simply human constructs.43 When we say that “God is good” or “God exists,” these are not factual statements. They are approximate, because they apply language that is appropriate in one field to something quite different.44 The statement that “God is the Creator of the world” is also analogical, because we are using the word “creator” outside its normal human context. It is impossible to prove either that the universe was created ex nihilo or that it was uncreated: “there is no proving that men and skies and rocks did not always exist,” Thomas insisted, so “it is well to remember this so that one does not try to prove what cannot be proved and give non-believers grounds for mockery, and for thinking the reasons we give are our reasons for believing (credens).”45

  By the thirteenth century, Denys’s apophatic method had become central to the Western understanding of God. Theologians and spiritual directors would express it differently, but the essential dynamic would remain the same. Bonaventure (1221–74), an Italian Franciscan who taught in Paris at the same time as Thomas before becoming superior general of his order, seems at first sight to have an entirely different theology.46 Instead of focusing on the new metaphysics, Franciscan spirituality was based on the life of Christ, with s
pecial emphasis on his passion. Its living embodiment was Francis of Assisi, who had tried to reproduce Christ’s poverty, humility, and suffering in every detail of his life. Bonaventure saw Francis as an epiphany of the divine, an incarnation of Anselm’s ontological proof. Francis had achieved such holiness that it was possible for his disciples, even in this life, “to see and understand that the ‘best’ is … that than which nothing better can be imagined.”47 Bonaventure’s theology would be firmly based on this religious experience.

  One might expect such an approach to be wholly affirmative. Like most of his contemporaries, Bonaventure saw the entire world as a living symbol of its creator. Like scripture, the “book of Nature” had a spiritual as well as a literal meaning, the latter pointing beyond itself to the former. In his greatest work, The Journey of the Mind to God, Bonaventure showed how the disciplines of the university curriculum—the natural sciences, the practical and aesthetic arts, logic, ethics, and natural philosophy—must all contribute to this ascent of mind and heart. But like Augustine, Bonaventure knew that we could not remain focused on the external world. Ultimately we had to “enter into our mind, the image of God—an image which is spiritual and everlasting within us.”48 In that way, we would discover a vision of the divine that shattered our preconceptions and overturned our usual ways of thinking and seeing.

  Thomas tended to make negation and affirmation consecutive stages in an argument. He would say something positive about God—and then move on to deny it. But for Bonaventure, negation and affirmation were simultaneous. In the last two chapters of the Journey, he invited his readers to meditate on the two highest attributes of God, his existence and his goodness, neither of which we could hope to comprehend. Like Denys and Thomas, Bonaventure made it absolutely clear that it was inaccurate to say that “God exists” because God does not “exist” in the same way as any mere being. But being itself is an attribute that can apply only to God.49 We have no idea what being is: it is not—indeed, it cannot be—an object of thought. We experience being merely as the medium through which we know individual beings, and this makes it very difficult for us to understand how God can be real: