in his immeasurable and inconceivable greatness; but rather to bring him near to us. It does not annul, but greatens and intensifies all those spiritual attributes of the divine Being, his wisdom, power, and love, which attract us to him as the object of our loving trust and service. We can define his absoluteness only by negation of all limitation, conditionality, and dependence; we cannot picture him in the boundlessness of his glory. But by that very greatness transcending all dependence and all measure of space, time, and degree, we see that he is ever near us, and that to every rational being in every world through all space and time he is equally and integrally present and accessible in all the grandeur of his being and the fulness of his perfections and glory. All the resources of his absolute Being are available for the help of every one who seeks him in loving trust. The biblical writers do not present his transcendent greatness as the absolute Being philosophically or metaphysically, but poetically, devotionally, and practically. "He is not far from every one of us; for in him we live and move and have our being" (Acts, xvii. 27, 28). "One God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all" (Eph. iv. 6). "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world" (Matth. xxviii. 20). "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matth. xviii. 20). "The heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee, yet have thou respect unto the prayer of thy servant and to his supplication" (1 Kings, viii. 27). "Thus saith the high and holy One who inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place; also with him who is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite ones" (Isa. lvii. 15). GOD is the one only absolute Spirit. We have considered what we can know of him in his absoluteness or unconditionedness. We proceed to ascertain what we can know of him in the other aspect of his being, as Spirit. Here the basis for classifying our knowledge of him must be the essential attributes of a spirit, Reason, Free Will, and Feeling responsive to his consciousness of his own perfections and his manifestation of them in action, and therefore to the evolution of the universe and to the character and action of finite rational beings in it. In all these aspects of his being and his revelation of them in action he is conscious of himself as one and the same absolute Spirit. In this chapter we are to consider God as Reason; God in the aspect of his being as intellect, as intelligent, and having knowledge. Here theological thought is usually restricted to God's omniscience, the universality of his knowledge. The real object of investigation is God himself as the absolute Reason. Therefore we must consider the fact that his knowledge is archetypal and perfect as well as universal, and his relation, as The Absolute Reason, to the constitution and evolution of the universe and to all human knowledge. verse in his own eternal ideal before it exists as a finite reality in time and space. His eternal thought is the archetype of the finite universe. 1. God's knowledge as archetypal is independent of any outward and independent environment. It does not necessarily presuppose any object revealing itself by acting on him. Man's knowledge is never self-originated, but first arises on occasion of the action on him of some outward object in his physical or spiritual environment, which thus reveals itself to him. It is only after he is thus from without waked to the consciousness of the outward, and therein to self-consciousness, that he can make himself and his own mental states the object of his attention, and can complete the circuit of knowledge within himself. But God is not waked to conscious mental action by the action on him of any object from without. He needs to receive no revelation. We stand on this side of the created universe. We know it only after it exists and ascertain what it is only by observation and investigation of it and by inference from the results of the same. But God's knowledge is eternal. He knows the universe in its archetype in his own reason before it exists in time and space. And this is the meaning of Augustine: "We see the things which thou hast made because they exist; but as to thee, they exist because thou seest them."1 2. God's knowledge as archetypal is the consciousness within himself of all the universal principles, laws, and ideals of reason, which determine what it is possible and right for power to effect, what are the rational laws according to which the universe is constituted and the rational ends for which it exists, and which make it susceptible of being known in science. So the inventor of a machine must know the principles and laws of mechanics, and the ends to be accomplished by it, before he can form a plan of it in his own mind. This is the primary and deepest significance of the fact that God's knowledge is archetypal. When I designate God as Reason, I do not use the word to denote the mere power of reasoning, but to denote the Mind or Spirit in whom are eternal and immutable the universal principles, laws, and ideals of reason, which render reasoning possible and are regulative of all thought and energy. This conception of God's knowledge as archetypal is presented poetically in the personification of Wisdom as being with God in his creation and development of the world as counsellor and master-workman (Prov. viii. 22-31). So Isaiah, after describing the minute mathematical exactness with which God had created and arranged the heavens and the earth, the sea and the land, the mountains and even the small dust of the earth, asks, "Who hath directed the Spirit of the Lord or being his counsellor hath taught him? With whom 1 Confessions, Lib. xiii. xxxviii. 53. VOL. I.-9 took he counsel, and who instructed him, and taught him in the path of judgment, and taught him knowledge, and showed him the way of understanding?" (Isa. xl. 12-14). 3. God's knowledge, as archetypal, is the ideal or plan of the universe and of all things in it, as by his creative action they are to exist in actuality in accordance with these rational principles, laws, and ends. An architect who plans a cotton-mill or a cathedral must not only know the principles, laws, and ends, regulating the construction, but must plan it to the minutest specifications. Thus the machinist or the architect knows the machine or building archetypally before he knows it in actuality. Others stand on the hither side of the structure and know it by observation and investigation. He who planned it stands on the thither side and knows it in its archetype before it is built. So the universe with all in it is seen by God as an archetype in his own reason which by his creative act is to have actuality. This gives a true meaning to the words of Mr. Hazard: "The material creation is but the imagery of the mind of God made palpable to us." "1 This conception of the universe as progressively realizing and expressing the archetype eternal in the mind of God has been set forth poetically by Edmund Spenser : — "What time the world's great Workmaster did cast To make all things such as we now behold, Boetius expresses a similar thought: 46 Tu cuncta superno Ducis ab exemplo, pulchrum pulcherrimus ipse 1 Freedom of Mind in Willing, p. 44. 2 A Hymn in Honor of Beauty, lines 29-42, Works, vol. v. p. 332. 1 Voigt says, "All created things are originally ideas in the divine Spirit, and ideas related to one another in the unity of a system or plan. By creation these ideas are realized in the forms of space and time, and are thus made finite and individual beings; but also through their reciprocal dependence in an order of nature, they are bound in unity in a universe." Here is the truth in Hegel's conception that the ultimate reality of the universe is thought. His error is that it is unconscious, impersonal thought abstracted from being. It is a very different conception that the ultimate reality of the universe is the thought of God, the absolute Spirit, the absolute Reason. Thomas Aquinas taught that "The ideas or types of things are God's thoughts; created beings are their realization. Man can become acquainted with these created beings through the senses; and by the light of reason he can attain more and more significant knowledge of the ideas which they express, as the mirrored images of the thoughts of God." 2 In fact, this conception of God as the absolute Reason and the contrary conception of him as sovereign. Will not subject to reason were under discussion in the middle ages throughout the scholastic period. The latter view reached its extreme development in the philosophy of Duns Scotus and Occam. They pushed the supremacy of God's sovereign will to the extent of declaring that God's moral law itself was but the enactment of God's arbitrary and sovereign will, and that if he had commanded just the contrary, all persons would have been under equal obligation to obey, and what had been wrong would be right and what had been right would be wrong. This is the logical issue of not teaching that the universal and necessary truths of reason, on which all science and philosophy and morals as well as all theology depend, are eternal and unchangeable in the absolute Reason of God. The conception of the naked sovereignty of arbitrary and resistless will has been a prolific source of pernicious theological errors which have continued even into the present century. The error can be corrected and its pernicious influence counteracted only by returning to the full recognition of God as the absolute Reason, in his free will eternally self-determining in the light of reason and acting always in strict accordance with its eternal principles and laws and for 1 Fundamental Dogmatik, p. 304. 2 Noiré, "Die Welt als Entwicklung des Geistes," pp. 388, 389. |