[ORIGINAL.]
PROBLEMS OF THE AGE.
IV.
THE REVELATION OF GOD IN THE CREED DEMONSTRATED IN THE CONSTITUTIVE IDEA OF REASON.
As soon as we open the eye of reason we become spectators of the creation. The word creation in this proposition is to be understood not in a loose and popular sense, but in a strict and scientific one. We intend to say, not merely that we behold certain existing objects, but that we behold them in their relation to their first and supreme cause. We are witnesses of the creative act by which the Creator and his work are simultaneously disclosed to the mind. This is the original constitutive principle of reason, its primal light preceding all knowledge and thought, and being their condition. It is the idea which contains in itself, radically and in principle, all possible development of thought and knowledge, according to the law of growth connatural to the human intelligence. It includes--God with all his attributes: the work of God or the created universe; and the relation between the two, that is, the relation of God to the universe as first cause in the order of creation, and final cause in the order of the ultimate end and destination of things. The different portions of this idea are inseparable from each other. That is, our reason cannot affirm God separately from the affirmation of the creative act, or affirm the creative act separately from the affirmation of God. The being of God is disclosed to us only by the creation, and the creation is intelligible to us only in the light given by the idea of God. [Footnote 89] God reveals himself to our reason as creator, and by means of the creative act. This is the limit of our natural light, and beyond it we cannot see anything by a natural mode, either in God, or in the universe.
[Footnote 89: A careful attention to the succeeding argument will show that by the idea of God given to intuition, is not meant the evolved idea, but the idea capable of evolution, or the idea of infinite, necessary being, which is shown to be the Idea of God by demonstration.]
The idea of God must not be confounded with that distinct and explicit conception which a philosopher or well-instructed Christian possesses. If the human mind possessed this knowledge by an original intuition, every human being would have it, without instruction, from the very first moment of the complete use of reason, and could never lose it. The idea of God is the affirmation of himself as pure, eternal, necessary being, the original and first principle of all existence, which he makes to the reason in creating it, and which constitutes the rational light and life of the soul. This constitutive, ideal principle of the soul's intelligence exists at first in a kind of embryonic state. The soul is more in a state of potentiality to intelligence, than intelligence in act. The idea of God is obscurely enwrapped and enfolded in the substance of the soul, imperfectly evolved in its most primitive acts of rational consciousness, and implicitly contained but not actually explicated in every thought that it thinks, even the most simple and rudimental. The intelligence must be educated, in order to bring out this obscure and implicit idea of God into a distinct conception in the reflective consciousness. This education begins with the action of the material, sensible world on the soul through the body, and specifically through the brain. The human soul was not created to exist and act under the simple conditions of pure spirit; but as is incorporated in a material body. The body is not a temporary habitation, like the envelope of a larva, but an integral part of man. The [{519}] intelligence is awakened to activity through the senses, and all its perceptions of the intelligible are through the medium of the sensible. The sensible world is a grand system of outward and visible signs representing the spiritual and intelligible world. Language is the science and art of subsidiary signs, the equivalents of the phenomena of the sensible world and of all that we apprehend through them; and forming the medium for communicating thought among men. For this reason, all language so far as it represents the conceptions of men concerning the spiritual word is metaphorical; and even the word spirit is a figure taken from the sensible world.
When the obscure idea is completely evolved, and the soul educated, through these outward and sensible media, the reflective consciousness attains to the distinct conception of God. This education may be imperfect, and the reflective consciousness may have but an incomplete conception expressed in language by an inadequate formula; but the idea is indestructible, and the mental conception of it can never be totally corrupted. This would be equivalent to the cessation of all thought, the annihilation of all conception of being and truth, and the extinction of all rational life in the soul. It is a mere negation of thought, which cannot be thought at all, and a mere non-entity. There is no such thing as absolute scepticism. Partial scepticism is possible. Revelation may be denied as to its complete conception, but the idea expressed in revelation cannot be utterly denied. The being of God may be denied, as to its complete conception, but not completely as to the idea itself. No sceptic or atheist can make any statement of his doubt or disbelief, which does not contain an affirmation of that ultimate idea under the conception of real and necessary being and truth. Much less can he enunciate any scientific formulas respecting philosophy, history, or any positive object, without doing so. Vast numbers of men are ignorant of the true and formed conception of God, but every one of them affirms the idea in every distinct thought which he thinks; and every human language, however rude, embodies and perpetuates it under forms and conceptions which are remotely derived from the original and infallible speech of the primitive revelation. Although the mass of mankind cannot evolve the idea of God into a distinct conception, and even gentile philosophy failed to enunciate this conception in an adequate form, yet when this conception is clearly and perfectly enunciated by pure theistic and Christian philosophy, reason is able to recognize it as the expression of its own primitive and ultimate idea. It perceives that the object which it has always beheld by an obscure intuition, is God, as proposed in the first article of the Christian formula. The Christian church, in instructing the uninstructed or partially instructed mind in pure theism, interprets to it, and explicates for it, its own obscure intuition. Thus it is able to see the truth of the being of God; not as a new, hitherto unknown idea, received on pure authority, or by a long deduction from more ultimate truths, or as the result of a number of probabilities; but as a truth which constitutes the ultimate ground of its own rational existence, and is only unfolded and disclosed to it in its own consciousness by the word and teaching of the instructor, who gives distinct voice to its own inarticulate or defectively uttered affirmation of God. So it is, that God affirms himself to the reason originally by the creative act which is first apprehended by the reason through the medium of the sensible, and interpreted by the sensible signs of language to the uninstructed. Thus we know God by creation, and the creation comes into the most immediate contact with us on its sensible side.
It has been said above, that we cannot separate the creative act from God in the primitive idea of reason. It is not meant by this that reason has [{520}] an intuition of God as necessarily a creator. What is meant is, that the idea of God present to an intelligent mind distinct from God, presupposes the creative act affirming to it an object distinct from itself, and itself as distinct from the object. When the subject is conscious of this truth, "God affirms himself to me," there are two terms in the formula, "God," and "Me;" involving the third uniting term of the creative act. The perception of other existences is simultaneous with the perception of himself, but logically prior to it; and his first rational act apprehends the existence of contingent, created substances, as well as the being of the absolute, uncreated essence. The elements of God and creation are in the most ultimate and primitive act of reason, and therefore in its constitutive idea. The creation is the idea of finite essences in God externized by the Word who speaks them into existence. By the same Word, the intelligent, rational portion of creation is enlightened with the knowledge of this idea. It beholds God, as he expresses this idea in the creative act, and in no otherwise. It cannot see immediately, the necessity of his being, or, so to speak, the cause why God is and must be, but only the affirmation of this necessity in the creative act. But this affirmation is necessarily in conformity with the truth. It presents being as absolute, and creation as contingent, and therefore not necessary. False conceptions may not discriminate accurately between the two terms, being and existence; but when these false conceptions are corrected, and the idea brought fully into light, the very terms in which it is expressed clearly indicate God as alone necessary, creation as contingent, and the creative act as proceeding from the free will of the Creator.
God, and creation, are thus simultaneously affirmed in the creative act constituting the soul; although God is affirmed as first and creation second, in the logical order: God as cause and creation as effect; and although creation may be first distinctly perceived and reflected on, as being more connatural to the reflecting subject himself, and more directly in contact with his senses and reflecting faculties. The knowledge of God is limited to that which he expresses by the similitude of himself exhibited in the creation. Our positive conceptions of God in the reflective order are therefore derived from the imitations, or representations of the divine attributes in the world of created existences. An infinite, and, to natural powers, impassable abyss, separates us from the immediate intuition of the Divine Essence. The highest contemplative cannot cross this chasm; and the ultimatum of mystic theology is no more than the confession that the essence of God is unseen and invisible to any merely human intuition, unknown and unknowable by the natural power of any finite intelligence. We know ut Deus sit, sed non quid sit Deus--that God is, but not what he is. We know that God is, by the affirmation of his being to reason. [Footnote 90] We form conceptions that enable our reflective faculties to grasp this affirmation, by means of the created objects in which he manifests his attributes, and through which, as through signs and symbols, images and pictures, he represents his perfections.