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Can Pascal Forgive Descartes? Godâs Ambiguous Infinity
I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy, he would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further need for God.
Pascal
Pensées
I have never written about the infinite except to submit myself to it, and not to determine what it is or is not.
Descartes
Letter to Mersenne
âGod is not a name but a concept.â Thus writes Kierkegaard, speaking through the persona of Johannes Climacus.1 Presumably he means, at least in part, that God is not a thing, an ostensible referent toward which one can gesture and to which a name can consequently be applied. Instead, the use of the word âGodâ involves not direct reference but an effort of thought, a conceptual synthesis of ideas and experiences. There are many such concepts inhabiting our speech (one usually does not say, âThatâs Truth, right over there next to the windowâ); they require a certain amount of learning and practice of those who would use them properly. The striking, in fact the crucial, thing about the concept âGodâ is that the list of situations or contexts that guide its use is potentially without limit. There is no idea or experience to which God is not in some way relevant, at least if we grasp what we mean by the concept. As Charles Wood has pointed out, âAn understanding of âGodâ relates to and affects oneâs understanding of everything else, oneâs own self in particular.â2
The concept âGodâ is (potentially) infinitely relevant because God is (actually) infinitely relevant. Ironically, this unlimited divine relatedness is why Kierkegaard, speaking through yet another persona (Anti-Climacus), can also say that God âhas no concept.â3 That is, God knows or relates to all particulars directly without needing the mediation of a cognitive abstract, a universal. As infinitely relevant God needs no concept. But we do, if we are to speak of or think about God at all. Are not the special problems associated with our use of the concept âGodâ a direct reflection of the fact that God relates with such unfathomable immediacy (and hence âhas no conceptâ)? In fact, it could be argued that these problems are such that we cannot even limit ourselves to a concept of God. To think God is not to arrive at an adequate single concept, the quintessence of divinity; it is to master a shifting ensemble of concepts that implicate and check each other in various ways. This pattern of concepts must be constantly renegotiated, drawing on and responding to particular historical contexts of thought, speech, and action.
The dynamics of this process, and the criteria by which it can be judged, are dependent on the goal toward which a particular âthinkingâ of God aims, and the communities or traditions to which it is responsible. Thus, even where the definition of a concept is agreed upon, its âfreight,â its meaning and implications for reflection on God, can be judged in sharply divergent ways. A most instructive example of this is provided by the differing readings offered by two contemporary thinkers of one concept (infinity) as used in reference to God by one great philosopher (Descartes). Of course, much has been written of late about the âCartesian subjectâ and the salutary results for theology and philosophy that occur when it is abandoned.4 But what of the Cartesian idea of God? I turn to the âinfiniteâ Cartesian deity as read through the eyes of the German Lutheran theologian Eberhard JĂŒngel and the French Roman Catholic philosopher Jean-Luc Marion.
I. God in the Epistemological Revolution: Two Readings
The juxtaposition of two quotations with intriguing similarities will provide a point of entry into this discussion. The first, from JĂŒngel, comes from his great work, Gott als Geheimnis der Welt, written in 1977:
The second quotation comes from Marionâs book, published in 1981, Sur la thĂ©ologie blanche de Descartes:
Both JĂŒngel and Marion see a curious tension in the way Descartes tries to conceive of God, the human mind, and the interrelation of the two. Their accounts are not identical but they evidently overlap in an intriguing way. To see more clearly the similarities and differences, I will deal with each in a bit more detail. This will unavoidably involve considerable haste and oversimplification in summarizing two very complex readings of Descartes, but it is necessary to lay the groundwork for what follows.
To begin with JĂŒngel, the âaporiaâ he describes (not, strictly speaking, a contradiction but a baffling difficulty blocking a consistent course of thought) must be understood against the background of a traditional presupposition about conceiving God. God is metaphysically unique as one whose essence is logically inseparable from existence (somewhat crudely stated, what God is, Godâs identity, and that God is, Godâs mode of actuality or âesse,â to use Thomist language, mutually imply and define each other). In this unique case, to exist as God is Godâs identity; existence is not a contingent fact separable in principle from essence, as it is with creatures. This insistence had been a commonplace of philosophical and theological thinking about God long before Descartes, and he accepted it without question. If God is to be conceived, it must be as one in whom essence and existence are thought together.7
But Descartesâs discussion of God, itself traditional in so many ways, is part of a larger argument, one of revolutionary import for the self-conception of human reason. It is well known that Descartes located the foundation for cognition and rationality in the human âegoâ or self, which âclearly and distinctlyâ apprehends its own presence as well as its own defining activity, thinking.8 Heidegger, whom JĂŒngel closely follows in this discussion, argued that one result of this new foundation of thought is that the existence of things outside the self is strictly a function of their perception by the self, their âbeing presentâ to thought. This is neither a logical inference nor a stipulative definition, along the lines of Berkeleyâs âTo be is to be perceived.â Rather, Heidegger claims that the meaning of any assertion of existence is now implicitly determined as a mode of being present (âre-presentedâ) with the cognizing self making the assertion; to say âX existsâ henceforth means or implies that X is within the horizon of the selfâs presence to itself.9
In the passage cited, JĂŒngel is pointing out the difficulty of maintaining the traditional assertion of the identity of Godâs essence and existence, once the import of this new understanding of existence is absorbed. Divine essence and divine existence can no longer be brought into a single movement of thought, so to speak; the mind assigns them to separate locations. Godâs essence is defined as absolutely superior and transcendent to human reason, indeed as the creator of that reason. But if there is to be knowledge of Godâs existence, if that existence is to be meaningfully asserted, then the divine essence must be somehow re-presented, it must be given in some idea to that human reason and thus constructed by the human subject as an object, similar to any other existent. This is because in this new Cartesian epistemological scheme, âto existâ becomes virtually identical with âto be present in the form of some attribute which affects the knowing human subject.â10
Now Descartes is certainly aware that God cannot be present in the manner of ordinary objects. To be sure, God and created things (minds and material objects) have this in common: both are characterized by a degree of ontic independence, that is, they are substances. But Godâs independence is absolute, that of created substances only relative, since they depend on God holding them in being.11 Another way of putting this is to say that God is infinite substance. Thus, the word âsubstanceâ is not used in the same sense of God and created things; we can know substances, and hence God, but the qualification âinfiniteâ signals that the concept âsubstanceâ is not used univocally of the divine. Descartes in this way tries to salvage God for his own epistemology, bringing the divine into the representational scheme while at the same time allowing enough ambiguity in this unique case to conceal the fault line that JĂŒngel claims to uncover.
The fault line is still present despite this concealment; I will indicate later what happens, according to JĂŒngel, when this fault line began to widen. But initially the nature of the âaporiaâ described in the quote with which we began must be grasped as carefully as possible. Godâs essence is defined by Descartes (following venerable traditions) in such a way as to problematize its relation to the new role of the human subject in constituting knowledge. Existence now means objectifiable presence within the human cognitive horizon.12 But how can the absolutely transcendent creator appear within this horizon? Descartesâs denial of the univocity of substance suggests that Godâs appearance in this horizon is possible but problematic, a quasi-availability qualified by infinite unavailability. To kn...