In the few places in which Hamilton speaks directly as a theologian, his language is in agreement with the general voice of Catholic theology down to the end of the seventeenth century, some specimens of which have been given on a previous page. Thus he says (Discussions, p. 15): “True, therefore, are the declarations of a pious philosophy,—‘A God understood would be no God at all;’ ‘To think that God is, as we can think Him to be, is blasphemy.’ The Divinity, in a certain sense, is revealed; in a certain sense is concealed: He is at once known and unknown. But the last and highest consecration of all true religion must be an altar ’Αγνώστῳ Θεῷ—‘To the unknown and unknowable God.’” A little later (p. 20) he says: “We should not recoil to the opposite extreme; and though man be not identical with the Deity, still is he ‘created in the image of God.’ It is, indeed, only through an analogy of the human with the Divine nature, that we are percipient and recipient of Divinity.” In the first of these passages we have an echo of the language of Basil, the two Cyrils, and John Damascene, and of our own Hooker and Usher; while in the second we find the counter truth, intimated by Augustine and other Fathers,[M] and clearly stated by Aquinas, and which in the last century was elaborately expounded in the Divine Analogy of Bishop Browne,—namely, that though we know not God in His own nature, yet are we not wholly ignorant of Him, but may attain to an imperfect knowledge of Him through the analogy between human things and Divine.
As e.g., by Tertullian (Adv. Marc., l. ii., c. 16): “Et hæc ergo imago censenda est Dei in homine, quod eosdem motos et sensus habeat humanus animus quos et Deus, licet non tales quales Deus: pro substantia enim, et status eorum et exitus distant.” And by Gregory Nazianzen, Orat. xxxvii.: “Ὠνομάσαμεν γὰρ ὡς ἡμῖν ἐφικτὸν ἐκ τῶν ἡμετέρων τὰ τοῦ Θεοῦ” And by Hilary, De Trin., i. 19: “Comparatio enim terrenorum ad Deum nulla est; sed infirmitas nostræ intelligentiæ cogit species quasdam ex inferioribus, tanquam superiorum indices quærere; ut rerum familiarium consuetudine admovente, ex sensus nostri conscientia ad insoliti sensus opinionem educeremur.”
As regards theological results, therefore, there is nothing novel or peculiar in Hamilton’s teaching; nor was he one who would have regarded novelty in theology as a recommendation. The peculiarity of his system, by which his reputation as a philosopher must ultimately stand or fall, is the manner in which he endeavoured to connect these theological conclusions with psychological principles; and thus to vindicate on philosophical grounds the position which Catholic divines had been compelled to take in the interests of dogmatic truth. That the absolute nature of God, as a supertemporal and yet personal Being, must be believed in as a fact, though inaccessible to reason as regards the manner of its possibility, is a position admitted, almost without exception, by divines who acknowledge the mystery of a personal Absolute—still more by those who acknowledge the yet deeper mystery of a Trinity in Unity. “We believe and know,” says Bishop Sanderson of the mysteries of the Christian faith, “and that with fulness of assurance, that all these things are so as they are revealed in the Holy Scriptures, because the mouth of God, who is Truth itself, and cannot lie, hath spoken them; and our own reason upon this ground teacheth us to submit ourselves and it to the obedience of faith, for the τὸ ὅτι, that so it is. But then, for the τὸ πῶς, Nicodemus his question, How can these things be? it is no more possible for our weak understandings to comprehend that, than it is for the eyes of bats or owls to look steadfastly upon the body of the sun, when he shineth forth in his greatest strength.”[N] This distinction Hamilton endeavoured to extend from the domain of Christian theology to that of philosophical speculation in general; to show that the unconditioned, as it is suggested in philosophy, no less than as it connects itself with revealed religion, is an object of belief, not of positive conception; and, consequently, that men cannot escape from mystery by rejecting revelation. “Above all,” he says, “I am confirmed in my belief by the harmony between the doctrines of this philosophy, and those of revealed truth.... For this philosophy is professedly a scientific demonstration of the impossibility of that ’wisdom in high matters’ which the Apostle prohibits us even to attempt; and it proposes, from the limitation of the human powers, from our impotence to comprehend what, however, we must admit, to show articulately why the ‘secret things of God,’ cannot but be to man ‘past finding out.’”[O] Faith in the inconceivable must thus become the ultimate refuge, even of the pantheist and the atheist, no less than of the Christian; the difference being, that while the last takes his stand on a faith which is in agreement alike with the authority of Scripture and the needs of human nature, the two former are driven to one which is equally opposed to both, as well as to the pretensions of their own philosophy.
Works, vol. i., p, 233.
Discussions, p. 625.
Deny the Trinity; deny the Personality of God: there yet remains that which no man can deny as the law of his own consciousness—Time. Conditioned existence is existence in time: to attain to a philosophy of the unconditioned, we must rise to the conception of existence out of time. The attempt may be made in two ways, and in two only. Either we may endeavour to conceive an absolutely first moment of time, beyond which is an existence having no duration and no succession; or we may endeavour to conceive time as an unlimited duration, containing an infinite series of successive antecedents and consequents, each conditioned in itself, but forming altogether an unconditioned whole. In other words, we may endeavour, with the Eleatics, to conceive pure existence apart and distinct from all phenomenal change; or we may endeavour, with Heraclitus, to conceive the universe as a system of incessant changes, immutable only in the law of its own mutability; for these two systems may be regarded as the type of all subsequent attempts. Both, however, alike aim at an object which is beyond positive conception, and which can be accepted only as something to be believed in spite of its inconceivability. To conceive an existence beyond the first moment of time, and to connect that existence as cause with the subsequent temporal succession of effects, we must conceive time itself as non-existent and then commencing to exist. But when we make the effort to conceive time as non-existent, we find it impossible to do so. Time, as the universal condition of human consciousness, clings round the very conception which strives to destroy it, clings round the language in which we speak of an existence before time. Nor are we more successful when we attempt to conceive an infinite regress of time, and an infinite series of dependent existences in time. To say nothing of the direct contradiction involved in the notion of an unconditioned whole,—a something completed,—composed of infinite parts—of parts never completed,—even if we abandon the Whole, and with it the Unconditioned, and attempt merely to conceive an infinite succession of conditioned existences—conditioned, absurdly enough, by nothing beyond themselves,—we find, that in order to do so, we must add moment to moment for ever—a process which would require an eternity for its accomplishment.[P] Moreover, the chain of dependent existences in this infinite succession is not, like a mathematical series, composed of abstract and homogeneous units; it is made up of divers phenomena, of a regressive line of causes, each distinct from the other. Wherever, therefore, I stop in my addition, I do not positively conceive the terms which lie beyond. I apprehend them only as a series of unknown somethings, of which I may believe that they are, but am unable to say what they are.