It is not that God has the characteristic of being good, like I have the characteristic of being good. God is the Good. The two terms are redundant. This is an “is”-of-identity, not an “is”-of-predication. In God, the Good=Mercy=Being=Beauty=True=God, etc., etc. There are no real distinctions in God (in some ways we have to keep this discussion concrete, but Thomas is always a good benchmark in Catholic philosophy; Ps-Dionysius would say the same; Augustine, Anselm (and therefore I suspect Bonaventure since he is very Augustinian)).
The things we say about God we say because language is terribly flawed and limited. We cannot help speaking and thinking of God’s Love and God’s Unity separately. We speak imperfectly and human ratio is imperfect in its operations.
Moreover, one should not import the Cartesian ego into God and the Cartesian ego is certainly NOT the same as hypostasis. God is not made up of 3 centers of self-consciousness.
Bottom line for Islamic and Jewish thought: if you can make some sort of real distinction (this is what it means to talk about dividing or multiplying God) in God, you aren’t talking about God anymore; you have fallen into contradiction. For instance if a Christian says that the doctrine of the Trinity is a way of talking about the unity of God’s Being and God’s Act (unpacking the Aristotlean notion of God as “Actus Purus” which one finds in Thomas and Bonaventure, etc.), the Muslim philosophy (e.g., Ibn’Rushd, who also thinks God is Actus Purus) is simply going to say, we already knew that God is God’s Act, just as God is God’s Being and we didn’t have to do anything silly like make a “real” distinction in God to say it, thank you very much.
salaam.
I’ll outright ask you: do you think that we can make a distinction between God’s intellect and God’s will? At some point, you have to make
some distinctions in God. If you don’t seperate God’s will from God’s intellect, you take away God’s freedom and make yourself into a Spinozan.
If God’s intellect and will are the same, then it follows (at least it sure looks like it) that God creates all that He knows, or God knows only what He creates. Clearly, this is false. In God’s intellect there are an infinite number of possible worlds. Of the ones He considered only a (presumably still infinite) set of those possible worlds, namely the
best compossible worlds. Of these, He created only
one.
Therefore, either you are a Spinozan, or you admit that since God is free, then God’s intellect must be distinct from God’s will.
Does this contradict God’s unity? If it does, then so much worse off is God’s free will. If it doesn’t, then I am forced to ask why it does not. Why can the object of God’s intellect be different from the object of God’s will (insofar as the objects of God’s will are simply fewer in number than the objects of God’s intellect), if it is the same “thing” which has both sets of objects? Does the same “thing,” so to speak both have and not have the same set of objects?
This is clearly ludicrous!
No, I reiterate, repeat, and insist: God’s will and intellect are obviously seperate and distinct. God’s will is not God’s intellect. God’s intellect is not God’s will. This should be obvious to you, a Jew, and to the other guy, a Muslim. But I am quite certain that even though you must freely admit this point, you will not answer that God’s unity is compromised. The same God both knows and wills.
Yet, I press on: if there is absolutely no distinction in God, and God is nothing but His nature, so to speak, then I must ask
how it is these things can be different, even though the unity of God remains completely intact.
The
only answer is that there is a single God who both wills and knows. This is to say, there is a single God to Whom willing and knowing are ascribed. IE, there is a substance, and “things” which are assigned to this substance.
Clearly, I agree with you: there are no real distinctions in God. That said, I have to ask what a real distinction is, and Bl. John Duns Scotus answers it very well: I have a water bottle. The wrapping is distinct from the plastic. The plastic at the top is not the same plastic as at the bottom. I can seperate the two.
Yet, there are formal distinctions in the bottle. The bottle is clear. The clearness is not the plastic. Yet, I cannot seperate (strictly speaking) the plastic from the bottle.
Likewise,
you have to admit that there is a Scotist distinction in God. The will and the intellect are NOT the same thing, strictly speaking, even by the Jewish/Muslim standard. Yet, it’s not as if the will is this “part” of God, and the intellect is that “part” of God, just as it’s not the case that my fair-skinnedness isn’t this “part” of my skin whereas “fleshy” is that “part” of my skin. My skin is both fleshy and fair skinned, just as God is both willing and knowing.
So I suppose this is what it comes down to for me, and this is where things become very clear, I think:
We have to admit the idea of substance when talking about God, precisely because of these Scotist distinctions which I think even *you *will admit. God’s anger is clearly not the same as God’s mercy. God’s anger demands punishment whereas God’s mercy offsets it. It’s absurd to say that God’s demanding of punishment offsets that same punishment. No, God’s anger is not God’s mercy, but it is one God who is both angry and merciful.
Yet, the moment we admit these Scotist distinctions is the moment that we realize that a Trinitarian God is at the very least
coherent by your standards (and therefore possible). But lo…the moment you admit that the Trinitarian God is possible is the same moment that you realize that the Trinitarian God is
necessary, and then you realize that your own worldview (whether be Jewish or Muslim or Mormon, for that matter) is completely absurd.
