Hans Jonas was a German-born American philosopher, and his classic is The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology. He lived at the time of the second world war, in which he fought in both Italy and Germany. He wrote on Gnosticism and what is called existentialism; in fact, I think he derived a Neoplatonic metaphysics for himself without appearing to realize it.
The early parts of the book are already concerned with theology as well as biology, disposing of the "god of the mathematicians" as inadequate because such a god would have no reason to favor life over death and indeed no capacity to recognize that something was alive instead of dead.* He is very much concerned with the problem James and AVI are concerned with, in other words: the ability of the divine and the mortal to encounter each other, to conceptualize each other, to interact.
This problem has a long history in philosophy. It also works both ways. It is proven by Aquinas and others that humanity cannot fully comprehend the nature of God; in fact, here as elsewhere, they were following Avicenna's arguments, who was following Aristotle's. The question of how a god that exists on Aristotelian lines could even know us is a real problem in any theology that starts with Aristotle's concept of actuality versus potentiality; it is likewise in theologies (like Nicholas of Cusa's) that try to reason about the relationship by analogy to the infinite and the finite. (Nor is it clear that this is the right way to speak about a divine creator, whose work provides the ground for both the finite and all the infinities, who governs their relationships and makes possible their interactions in defiance of Zeno's objections).
In his eleventh essay, Jonas -- who has come to view symbolic myth as 'the glass through which we see darkly' -- returns to the relationship between ourselves and the eternal, meaning God. Here he derives, apparently independently, both a Neoplatonic view of our relationship to the divine and of our "higher selves" that somehow exist in eternity but yet still in relationship with ourselves as finite and mortal creatures engaged in activity in time.
The bridge he comes up with is the now. Now doesn't seem to have finite boundaries: it isn't extended, with a beginning and an end. It just is, and it always is, but the now that was just now is not now any longer. When we decide and act, we do it in the now. This unextended time -- which is the only real time in the sense that it is the only time in which we can and do actually exist -- is like eternity in its neverending existence, and unlike the past and future that are extended and measurable. This is the ground where, he argues, mortal and divine meet.
From this he goes on to derive a positive ethics, by which I mean that his work is not existential after all: our essence comes first, and is derivable from what it means to be a living, conscious organism with freedom of action and this relationship with the divine. What we do in the now is written in eternity, perfects or mars our noetic selves -- the image of us in the eternal -- and this gives us a real ethical duty to do right and not wrong.
Jonas' thinking will not fully satisfy anyone here. He believes he has disproven any sort of immortality for mortals beyond this capacity to write on eternity, or to exist as an idea in the mind of God. As a way of getting at the problem of how mortals and God can conceive of each other and interact, however, it is a thoughtful and novel approach.
* In this same essay Jonas explains something critical about the organism, that is about life, and why life is different and special. I have cited this before as a fundamental proposition in philosophical objections to abortion, discussions of agency, as well as in my commentary on Plato's Laws. It is one of the more important philosophical ideas I have encountered, and yet it emerges almost as an afterthought because what he is really interested in here is the right conception of God.
12 comments:
Thanks for bringing up James's post. I've commented there on that topic.
On the topic here, I feel like many philosophical and theological systems ignore the fact that God is a person. That seems to be far more important than how the infinite and finite can connect or any other such abstractions. These arguments about the how of it all seem like getting stuck on Zeno's paradox of distance -- logic seems to dictate that you cannot walk from A to B. Yes, it's logical, and it's fun, but in reality we do walk from A to B multiple times every day, so does it tell us anything about reality? Or is it just a language game? If I use my own terms to describe the situation, it makes what is impossible for Zeno trivial for me. It is only when you get stuck in Zeno's language that the walk seems like a real paradox. Logic is very valuable, but it can only take us so far in understanding many things and in other things it misleads us in possibly dangerous ways. Start with a plausible but false premise or two and who knows where you'll end up.
Getting back to God as a person, what's the best way to know a person? Read books and theorize about him for years, or go spend years living with him? In a very real sense, getting to know someone means building a relationship with him, not just knowing about him.
On the other hand, I'm an Eastern Orthodox Christian, and so while the East never lost Aristotle, he isn't that big a deal to our theology on the whole. Neither are Avicenna nor Aquinas. Now, I'm sure there are Orthodox theologians who have taken each of these people seriously; I've just never run across them.
Maybe our focus on theosis just makes us bad philosophers, but then, maybe the only way to really know about God is to get to know Him. If that's true, then any philosophy or theology that does not come out of that daily walk with God is going to be wrong, at least in part.
For Christians, of course. I don't pretend to really understand what anyone else is even talking about when they say "God." From the perspective of the person of God, talking about some other deity is not talking about my God, just like talking about Grim is not the same as talking about my uncle Ed.
I'm not, by the way, saying Zeno or Aristotle or Jonas aren't worth studying or their ideas worth working with, far from it. It's that I don't actually see their relevance to Christianity. I am very interested in Jonas's thoughts on life, as you've described them, and his idea of the now is interesting, but I can't imagine I'd learn much about the experience of God from him because his God doesn't seem related to mine. That's all.
I’m traveling today, so I will not be able to give this the response it deserves until I’m home again. However, I’ll begin by noting that saying “God is a person” is subject to the same difficulty as claims like “God is good.” To whit, you wouldn’t mean that God is good like a human being is good, ie imperfectly and occasionally. You’d be talking about a kind of goodness that is so different from human goodness— indeed, the very ground of what goodness means— that the two words don’t refer to the same concept. The divine goodness is ineffable, indeed inconceivable.
Likewise “person” — God isn’t a person like you, but a different sort of entity entirely. We are said to be made in his image, but it’s only an image. The ground of what it means to be a person is in God, and what we are is not more than analogous to that. What the differences are again turns out to be inconceivable.
This is the problem of univocal versus equivocal language when approaching the divine.
See here:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analogy-medieval/
Yes, I think this is one reason the East favors apophatic theology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophatic_theology
It is a bit easier to say what God is not rather than what He is.
It is probably another reason we favor experiencing God over reasoning about God, but you can't avoid reasoning about Him if you want to talk with other people, and talking with other people can be important as well as fun.
I'll have to look at the SEP article later in the week. Too busy this evening.
Also, later I realized I should have made clear I was thinking of "person" in a particular way that made sense to me as a kind of analogy, but of course that phrasing is heretical in terms of the Trinity (speaking of things that are hard to explain) and it's boring trying to explain what led me to that usage. In any case, let me reassure one and all that I am a Trinitarian; if I end up in Hell it will be for other reasons.
It is possibly the greatest proof of my faith that I don’t fear being sent to Hell in spite of my merits.
There’s plenty of time to get this right. It’s one of the harder things humanity has ever tried to discuss.
Okay, so, I've read sections of it and skimmed the rest. I can go back and review or read more in depth if needed.
So, where would you like to go with this?
I'm sure Grim is aware of this, but for anyone else following this discussion, I found the SEP article on Neoplatonism to be quite informative. In particular, the Neoplatonic rejection of the first principle ("the First," "the One," "the Good" -- their conception of God) as creator.
Early Christian theologians like Origen, Basil & Gregory of Nazianzus, & Augustine were all familiar with Neoplatonism, and according to the article: "The cut-throat debates about transubstantiation (in the Eucharist), the hypostases of the Trinity, or the divine/human nature of Christ, could not even be followed without a thorough training in current Greek philosophical discourse."
By the same token, the concept you describe— theosis—looks like a Neoplatonic adaptation as well. It’s similar particularly to Iamblichus‘ theory on return to the divine ground.
Let’s discuss it next week, after the long weekend. People have more time for blogs in the office.
Sounds good.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. It would seem that knowing God in Himself is impossible to us except insofar as God initiates the relationship--and shapes it.
While I wait for interlibrary loan, I looked up the work online and found the eighth essay online. It was interesting.
I have a few comments/questions on the essay. I'm not disagreeing, necessarily, but I would have concentrated on different points.
You have studied Aristotle--when he writes of contemplation of the good, does that include human response (e.g. praise, sharing)? The vision of heaven in Revelation doesn't seem to be limited to people/angels merely contemplating God, but responding to God and speaking to others as well. I wonder if this is a point of difference with Aristotle, or if he had a more expansive notion of contemplation.
We overload the use of the word "knowledge". Famously, other languages sometimes distinguish knowledge as "personal acquaintance" and knowledge as "information about something". Do other theorists distinguish further subdivisions? I have knowledge about my wife that comes from knowledge of her--for example, she loves me. This is knowledge of something not measurable, and not intrinsically tangible. Using the blanket term invites confusion, unless we're clearly talking about some quality characteristic of them all, expressed in different ways.
Even in mathematics we almost always are studying not things in themselves, but things in operation or comparison. Studying operations is a hugely powerful tool--it lets simple abstractions apply to many different classes of things. But it means that in a rather silly sense we don't know the "what" we're talking about.
Physics studies the measurable and motion--the claim that this is all there is is not itself either a motion or measurable, and so is unsupportable from within physics. Descartes should have known better.
The sciences study rules that govern and produce actions. But human actions are not driven by a finite set of mechanistic rules (says personal experience, and those who are so driven we call slaves), so a "scientific" study of people must leave things out (he says man-qua-lower-than-man), and those precisely the things that make humans individual and (to me) interesting.
As I said, not disagreeing, but looking at it from a different pov, and without the same kind of detailed breakdown.
You have studied Aristotle--when he writes of contemplation of the good, does that include human response (e.g. praise, sharing)? The vision of heaven in Revelation doesn't seem to be limited to people/angels merely contemplating God, but responding to God and speaking to others as well. I wonder if this is a point of difference with Aristotle, or if he had a more expansive notion of contemplation.
Yes, explicitly in the Rhetoric. Aristotle speaks of honor in the sense of praise as a sort of gift that men give to the gods, and also to other men who behave in what we think are the worthiest ways. This occurs across several works.
In the Rhetoric, Aristotle expounds on how honor in this sense turns out to be a way of measuring the comparative value of unlike things. People like to say that you can't compare apples and oranges, but you can do so if you have an independent standard of value -- like a currency -- that you can trade for either. Then I might learn that you will spend $3 for an orange, but only $1 for an apple; I might, however, also learn that you only want one orange but ten apples. Which do you value more? Well, in a sense both of them are correct answers -- the orange is more valuable to you than an apple, so you must value it more than you do any of the apples; but also, clearly you are willing to spend more in total on apples than on oranges so therefore you must value apples more as a part of your diet.
Honor can serve a similar function, he says, in determining what is most worthy for a community to do with its resources. The goods involved are disparate -- should we build a new well, or a navy? -- but by talking it through and seeing what people honor more, we can judge what they value more. That gives us a method of making decisions collectively, when we have to make a judgment about things that at first seem incomparable.
Likewise this ends up informing ethics as well as politics. By reflecting on what is most 'godlike' (honor is the gift we give to gods, because of their merits) in men, we can say what is best in men. The praise also gives them a reward for doing those things. Thus, it ends up being a method for identifying the best kinds of men, tying them to divine qualities, and encouraging them to achieve those qualities in fact.
Do other theorists distinguish further subdivisions? I have knowledge about my wife that comes from knowledge of her--for example, she loves me. This is knowledge of something not measurable, and not intrinsically tangible... Even in mathematics we almost always are studying not things in themselves, but things in operation or comparison...
In Greek they distinguish between techne, episteme and gnosis. The first is technical knowledge, like knowledge of how to build a shoe or a ship; Socrates thinks it's the most solid because it's demonstrable by a craftsman that you really do know how to do this.
The second is what they considered 'scientific' knowledge, although they use the term 'science' very differently than we do. For them, a science is a unified field of study, organized around a particular issue. E.g. physicis is the science of movement; optics is the study of how light can be bent to improve vision; harmonics, how sounds interact. When Aristotle gets to metaphysics, he spends the first part of the book worrying about whether or not a study of everything could be a science, because the idea is that there's meant to be a specific thing that you are studying and organizing knowledge about in the science. He decides that it can be, because he's studying the thing that is the same in everything -- 'being qua being,' or what it means for something to exist, what existing entails.
We might say, then, that in these first two categories the Greeks distinguish engineering from pure science.
Gnosis you probably know perfectly well from religious studies. It's closest to how you know your wife's love. It's knowledge, but neither technical nor scientific.
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