God and the World: A Survey of Thought

by Arthur William Robinson

[[12]] Gifford Lectures (1891), p. 196.

CHAPTER V

THE COUNTER-ARGUMENTS (continued)

But though Materialism had to go, there was a time when it seemed to many by no means unlikely that Agnosticism might have to be accepted as its substitute. And if that had been so the case would have been scarcely less desperate. We might have been left with a philosophy of a kind, but we should have been deprived of any object which could evoke within our hearts the trust and affection that are needed to sustain a religion. However, as it proved, there was no great cause for fear. Agnosticism was subjected in its turn to the ordeal of criticism, and the result proved that it had not in it the substance and force that could give it any permanent hold upon the best intelligence of the age.

If Agnosticism could have been content to confine itself to positive assertions, there might have been less cause to find fault with it. But its name stood for negation, and its temper was in accord with its name. The exponents of Agnosticism were not satisfied with affirming that the Power behind phenomena is beyond all thought mysterious. They insisted that it is unknowable, and that not merely in the sense that it is incomprehensible, not to be fully grasped, but unknowable in the sense that nothing at all can be known about it. And then, having laid down this as their fundamental principle, they proceeded at once, with a strange inconsistency, to assert that we can know what it is not. This above all else, they said, it is not: it is not personal. True, Herbert Spencer maintained that it is as far raised above personality as personality is raised above unconsciousness; but the stress was laid not upon the affirmation of super-personality, but upon the denial and rejection of anything like personality as we understand it.

The position was really untenable. Possibly, if we could detect no more in Nature than power, we might be content, intellectually, to stop at the affirmation of inscrutable force. But if there is also design, then we are bound to go a step further. Bishop Harvey Goodwin expressed this exactly when he said: "Purpose means person." No doubt personality in the Creator must be something far higher and fuller than personality in the creature. The German philosopher Lotze was speaking the truth when he declared that "to all finite minds there is allotted but a pale copy" of personality; "the finiteness of the finite," being "not a producing condition of personality," as has often been maintained, "but a limit and hindrance of its development." "Perfect personality," he said, "is in God alone."[[1]]

To most of us it may sound paradoxical to urge that the full Christian doctrine of the Three Persons in the Godhead is really less difficult intellectually than the doctrine that the Divine Being consists of an isolated unit.

This was the contention of the Greek Fathers of the Church, whose acute and subtle minds anticipated not a few of the objections which we have had to encounter in our days. We cannot elaborate the statement here,[[2]] but it is to the point to observe that the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity removes from the Christian believer that which to Spencer was one of the greatest obstacles in the way of the acceptance of the idea of a Divine Personality; for it relieves him from the necessity of imagining a subject without an object, since in the Christian view the highest life in the universe is a social life, in which thought is for ever communicated with unbroken harmony of feeling and will.