CHAPTER V

GOD IS A SPIRIT: WILL

All

THE will is the attribute of a personal being considered as having causal efficiency or power and capable of determining in the light of reason both the direction and exertion of his energy. power is not will, but all will is power. It is power self-directive and self-exertive in the light of reason, as distinguished from power acting in necessity as it is acted on. In our thinking we necessarily abstract will from reason. In reality they are different but inseparable aspects of one and the same personal being. Will is practical or energizing reason; reason is rational power or will. In the preceding chapter we have considered God as Reason; in this chapter we are to consider him as will. In discussing the two we simply contemplate God, the one personal Spirit, in the two aspects of his being, the rational and the efficient or energizing. His reason, whether in its intellectual aspect as the organ of truth or in its ethical aspect as the organ of law, is never separated from his power or will.

The attributes of God as Will are Almightiness, Freedom and Love.

I. ALMIGHTINESS OR OMNIPOTENCE.

God's power is unconditioned and unlimited by any reality independent of himself. 1. Power or causal efficiency is an attribute of God. It is the basis of the idea of will. Freedom can have no reality except as the attribute of a being endowed with causal efficiency and capable of causal energy. Therefore, in considering the attributes of God as will we must begin with his power, which is the basal reality of will. God is the first cause of the universe, and is ever energizing in it. Power, or causative efficiency, is an attribute recognized in every conception of a divinity, even in fetichism and the

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worship of the so-called nature-gods. It is essential in the idea of the absolute Being. All who believe that absolute Being exists, even though denying its personality, recognize it as the Power which manifests itself in all the phenomena of the uni

verse.

God's power is creative. This is involved in the fact that as the absolute Being he is unconditioned and all-conditioning. As such he is the origin and first cause of all that is. He alone is self-existent. Finite creatures derive their being and power from him and exist only as dependent on him. As the source and support of all beings and their powers, he is their creator.

God's creative power is primarily the efficiency of his will. It has no analogy to the exertion of muscular strength. It is rather analogous to man's moving his arm by a volition. The opening lines of the eighth book of the Iliad are often quoted as exemplifying the sublime. Jupiter forbids the gods under the direst penalties to aid either the Greeks or the Trojans. To remind them of his resistless might he challenges them to hang a golden chain from heaven, and all of them, both gods and goddesses, to lay hold of it; and he warns them that, striving to their utmost, they would be unable to drag him down. But he would grasp the chain and swing them all, with the earth and sea besides; and then would fasten the chain around the summit of Olympus and leave them all dangling in mid-air. Here is nothing but muscular strength, a sort of athletic contest. How immeasurably more sublime the scriptural representations: "Let light be, and light was." "He spake and it was done; he commanded and it stood fast." "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth." Longinus, in his treatise on "The Sublime," cites this verse in Genesis as a most remarkable example of the sublime.

2. God is almighty, or omnipotent. In all his attributes as personal Spirit, God remains always the absolute Being. This must always be borne in mind in defining the personal attributes. Accordingly God is absolute in power. As self-existent, unconditioned by any being or causal efficiency independent of himself, his power is underived and independent. As eternal and everywhere present, his power is not limited within any period of time or any locality in space. In the plenitude of his being his power

1 Gen. i. 3; Psalm xxxiii. 9, 6.

is not limited in quantity. Thus he is almighty; his power is not limited or conditioned by any being or power independent of himself.

It is objected that we do not know that God is absolutely almighty, but only that he has power adequate to cause what actually exists. This objection rests on the supposition that God is known to be the absolute Being only by inference from observed effects. If so, we could infer only a cause adequate to the effects. But the objection is of no force against the true position that the existence of the absolute Being is known through a fundamental principle of reason which is a necessary law of thought. God is not the first term in the chain of finite causes and effects; he is the absolute Being who transcends the whole chain and is the ultimate and necessary ground of all finite being and power.

It is also objected that it would be a limitation of God if he should cause finite effects in space and time. But the objection, if valid, would itself imply that God is limited. If he is shut out by the boundaries of time, space and quantity, he is limited as really as if, like finite beings, he were shut up within them. Further, his creation of a second absolute Being is absurd and impossible, and the objection denies that he can cause any finite effect. Therefore, if the objection is valid, his whole activity is shut within himself, he cannot reveal himself in the universe nor in any effect on finite creatures; the universe is not dependent on him, he never acts upon or in it, and to all finite minds he is a mere zero. His power to cause effects within the limits of time, space and quantity is essential to his absoluteness. According to the most strictly philosophical meaning of the absolute, he is not excluded from space and time, but is able to cause effects within their limits and thus to reveal himself to finite persons in a finite universe. That the absolute Being exists is a necessary principle of reason. What he is further than this is revealed to

us only through the universe in time and space. The attempt to picture the absolute Being, as he might exist in transcendence of the universe and not revealed in it, is in vain and is prolific of

error.

3. While God is not limited in the exercise of his power by any reality independent of himself, it is equally true that in its exercise his action is regulated by the rational principles and laws, the rational ideals of perfection and well-being, the rational

distinction of the absolute and the finite, eternal in himself, the absolute Reason. In other words, his power is inseparable from his reason; it is God, the absolute Reason, who himself is energizing.

This regulation, as shown in a preceding chapter, is twofold, constitutive and ethical. It is constitutive in the sense that the principles of reason, the contradictories of which are absurd, determine what it is possible for power to effect. Even almighty power cannot give reality to the absurd. So Lucretius reasons against the mythological creations of his time: It is impossible that there is a centaur, because a man is young when a horse dies of old age; or Scylla with the body of a fish girdled with aogs, because dogs cannot live under water nor fish out of it; or a chimæra, consisting of a lion, dragon and goat, breathing fire, because fire consumes flesh. The regulation is ethical in the sense that God's will by his eternal free choice is in harmony with his reason in perfect love. The first is his rational constitution, making it impossible for him to give reality to the absurd ; the second is his moral character, making it certain that he will do nothing wrong. These are the two bases on which the stability, uniformity and continuity of the universe rest, and which insure its progressive development in accordance with the truths and laws and toward the realization of the ideals and ends of perfect reason.

The former of these was considered in the discussion of omniscience. It remains only to exemplify it in some of its applications.

No power can annul the distinction between the absolute and the conditioned, the infinite and the finite. We have seen that whatever God creates must be finite, and must be constituted according to truths, laws, ideals, and worthy ends of reason. But the finite can never be equal to the infinite nor a completed manifestation or revelation of it. Necessarily, then, God's revelation of himself in the universe must be progressive and at every point of time unfinished and incomplete. At every point of time it must be prophetic of a greater revelation in the future.

We have seen that God in creating the universe has given it a reality in itself and has made it stable by constituting it according to the principles, laws, ideals, and ends of reason.

Therefore, after he has thus created and constituted it, the

effect of his action in it must be commensurate with the constitution and capacity of the being on which he acts. Having created a stone, he cannot instruct it in knowledge, nor convince it by argument, nor move it by an appeal to compassion. After creating man a free agent, he must act on him, if at all, as a free agent, by influences adapted to a rational free will. He cannot change his will by almightiness any more than he can move a stone by eloquence, or impart to a person virtue in pound-weight packages. So, in revealing himself to man, the revelation must be commensurate with the capacity of the man. God cannot reveal himself to an oyster at all. He cannot reveal himself to a child or a savage beyond his power to understand. At the wedding in Cana there were six waterpots filled to the brim with water, and it was all converted into wine. If they had been only half as large the divine miracle would have been the same, but there would have been only half as much wine. As men grow in capacity, knowledge, and culture they grow in capacity to receive and communicate the gracious revelations of God. So our Lord said to his disciples: "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now." "What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt understand hereafter."

The effect of God's action must be commensurate also with the constitution and capacity of the agent through which he acts. Effects caused through physical agencies must be commensurate with the constitution and powers of the agents, and accordant with the unchangeable laws of their action. The momentum of a moving body must be according to its mass and velocity. A plant can produce fruit only according to its constitution and the laws of its organic life. "Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?" God by miraculous power may produce effects in nature which nature left to itself would not have produced. But, so far as. he acts through physical agents, the effects must be commensurate with the powers and constitution of the agent and the unchanging laws of its action. Nature makes no leaps. It is inseparable from the idea of a physical system that it is constituted according to rational principles and goes on its course by the action of physical causes energizing according to the laws of the system.

The same principle is true of personal beings in the moral

1 John xvi. 12, and xiii. 7.