Metaph., xiv. 4.
But at this point the philosophical inquiry comes in contact with another line of thought, suggested by a different class of the facts of consciousness. As a religious and moral being, man is conscious of a relation of a personal character, distinct from any suggested by the phenomena of the material world,—a relation to a supreme Personal Being, the object of his religious worship, and the source and judge of his moral obligations and conduct. To adopt the name of God in an abstract speculation merely as a conventional denomination for the highest link in the chain of thought, and to believe in Him for the practical purposes of worship and obedience, are two very different things; and for the latter, though not for the former, the conception of God as a Person is indispensable. Were man a being of pure intellect, the problem of the Unconditioned would be divested of its chief difficulty; but he is also a being of religious and moral faculties, and these also have a claim to be satisfied by any valid solution of the problem. Hence the question assumes another and a more complex form. How is the one absolute existence, to which philosophy aspires, to be identified with the personal God demanded by our religious feelings?
Shall we boldly assume that the problem is already solved, and that the personal God is the very Unconditioned of which we were in search? This is to beg the question, not to answer it. Our conception of a personal being, derived as it is from the immediate consciousness of our own personality, seems, on examination, to involve conditions incompatible with the desired assumption. Personal agency, similar to our own, seems to point to something very different from an absolutely first link in a chain of phenomena. Our actions, if not determined, are at least influenced by motives; and the motive is a prior link in the chain, and a condition of the action. Our actions, moreover, take place in time; and time, as we conceive it, cannot be regarded as an absolute blank, but as a condition in which phenomena take place as past, present, and future. Every act taking place in time implies something antecedent to itself; and this something, be it what it may, hinders us from regarding the subsequent act as absolute and unconditioned. Nay, even time itself, apart from the phenomena which it implies, has the same character. If an act cannot take place except in time, time is the condition of its taking place. To conceive the unconditioned, as the first link in a chain of conditioned consequences, it seems necessary that we should conceive something out of time, yet followed by time; standing at the beginning of all duration and succession, having no antecedent, but followed by a series of consequents.
Philosophical theologians have been conscious of this difficulty, almost from the earliest date at which philosophy and Christian theology came in contact with each other. From a number of testimonies of similar import, we select one or two of the most striking. Of the Divine Nature, Gregory Nyssen says: “It is neither in place nor in time, but before these and above these in an unspeakable manner, contemplated itself by itself, through faith alone; neither measured by ages, nor moving along with times.”[B] “In the changes of things,” says Augustine, “you will find a past and a future; in God you will find a present where past and future cannot be.”[C] “Eternity,” says Aquinas, “has no succession, but exists all together.”[D] Among divines of the Church of England, we quote two names only, but those of the highest:—“The duration of eternity,” says Bishop Pearson, “is completely indivisible and all at once; so that it is ever present, and excludes the other differences of time, past and future.”[E] And Barrow enumerates among natural modes of being and operation far above our reach, “God’s eternity without succession,” coupling it with “His prescience without necessitation of events.”[F] But it is needless to multiply authorities for a doctrine so familiar to every student of theology.
C. Eunom., i., p. 98, Ed. Gretser.
In Joann. Evang., tract. xxxvii. 10.
Summa, pars. i., qu. x., art. 1.