The logical, rational God, the _ens summum_, the _primum movens_, the
Supreme Being of theological philosophy, the God who is reached by the
three famous ways of negation, eminence and causality, _viae negationis,
eminentiae, causalitatis_, is nothing but an idea of God, a dead thing.
The traditional and much debated proofs of his existence are, at bottom,
merely a vain attempt to determine his essence; for as Vinet has very
well observed, existence is deduced from essence; and to say that God
exists, without saying what God is and how he is, is equivalent to
saying nothing at all.
And this God, arrived at by the methods of eminence and negation or
abstraction of finite qualities, ends by becoming an unthinkable God, a
pure idea, a God of whom, by the very fact of his ideal excellence, we
can say that he is nothing, as indeed he has been defined by Scotus
Erigena: _Deus propter excellentiam non inmerito nihil vocatur_. Or in
the words of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, in his fifth Epistle,
"The divine darkness is the inaccessible light in which God is said to
dwell." The anthropomorphic God, the God who is felt, in being purified
of human, and as such finite, relative and temporal, attributes,
evaporates into the God of deism or of pantheism.
The traditional so-called proofs of the existence of God all refer to
this God-Idea, to this logical God, the God by abstraction, and hence
they really prove nothing, or rather, they prove nothing more than the
existence of this idea of God.
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