​Chapter 1. Images of God

The question is what God is. Whether he exists is a separate matter, and the proofs and disproofs fill libraries without touching the question; grant that something answers to the word, and the harder task is to say what it is — a who, a what, or something the two categories fail to reach. Philosophical theology has returned two answers, and the field has divided between them ever since.

The first makes God a person. He is a will: he elected the good, loves and judges the world he made, and could have chosen otherwise. Creation proceeds from a decision that implies someone who decided and might have decided differently. Voluntarism drives the image to its limit. Scotus opened the space by making much of the moral order depend on a free divine decision, while holding the precepts that bear on God himself beyond dispensation. Ockham carried the license to its edge: what God wills is right by the willing, and had he willed the opposite, the opposite would bind. Pared to this conclusion, the person-God is sheer will answerable to nothing before it, the ground of law and governed by none.

The second makes God a principle. No one stands behind the world; what lies there is order and necessity. The One of the Neoplatonists overflows without choosing; Brahman underlies appearance without intending it; Spinoza's substance unfolds by the necessity of its nature, the way a triangle's angles follow from its form, with love and wrath read back into it as human shadows; the laws of nature govern with no legislator; Being is, and grounds beings, and wills nothing. Pantheism and monism differ over how the principle relates to the world and agree that it is not a subject. A single stake organizes the quarrel between the two images: whether the ultimate can be addressed. A person can be petitioned, angered, or turned toward; a principle can only be understood.

Both images share a prior assumption. Each speaks of the center — a single final point at which all willing and all order converge, whether that point is addressed as a person or understood as a law. This is the center at issue, claimed to be the whole, toward which all paths are meant to bend. Where gods remain genuinely plural, pantheons parcel the world among powers with distinct provinces and prices, bargained with in turn, none demanding that a life converge on it alone or claiming a single summit from which all others are graded. The relevant traditions are those that raise a single center and stake everything on it.

Setting existence aside costs less than it seems. Ask of the person-God whether he exists and the question has teeth: someone behind the world either exists or does not. Ask it of the principle and the question changes form: it becomes the problem of whether the order named as God is an independent ground or a description of regularity. Some forms of naturalism occupy the limiting case of the second image, with the honorific withdrawn. Here the dispute concerns the status of the order.

A third image seems to break the pair. German theosophy set beneath God a dark ground — Böhme's Ungrund, a churning abyss craving being; Schelling's lightless depth that the divine must master to become a person at all; Berdyaev's uncreated freedom, older than the Creator and answerable to nothing; Hartmann's Unconscious, pressing toward ends with no mind to hold them. None is a person, since no one is home in the abyss; and none is a law, because the depth precedes all order.

This third option fails under description. The ground out of which God is born, in which personhood is a later victory of light over dark, is pre-divine by definition: the fertile potentiality that precedes every cut, which the earlier volumes named Tiamat. The word doing the work is "craving." Grant undifferentiated potentiality a hunger, a blind press toward being, and a seed of will has been slipped into it under cover of a metaphor — after which acting "without willing" is no wonder, only the seed unfolding. Take the figure away and count what remains. On the ontology already established, no distinction arises without a cut and no cut without a will. Either the depth draws no distinction and presses toward nothing: potentiality, Tiamat, fertile because no selection has yet cut it, or it draws distinctions — and that is a will. Hartmann's aim without a center has crossed to the second horn: an end is a distinction held in advance, and a force appointing ends with no conscious source is a will that has forgotten that it posits them. Beneath the blind ground lies a confusion of potentiality with willing, and prying the two apart empties the category.

Another escape runs the other way, upward past predicates instead of downward beneath them. The apophatic God is beyond being and will and so seems to answer to neither person nor principle, since both are predicates and he has none. Yet a God who is to create and sustain a world must manifest, and manifestation is a cut that determines. The apophatic Absolute is unmanifest, in which case it makes and holds nothing and is Tiamat once more, potentiality before the first line and no God at all; or it manifests and carries determinations like anything that has crossed into act. Dividing the unmanifest essence from its manifestations does not open a third category: whatever creates and sustains the world belongs to the determinate side, while the inaccessible remainder performs no work in the account. Negative theology is then a veil thrown over a determinate God to lend him the dignity of the unsayable, or another name for the potentiality below all saying.

The dichotomy holds: person or principle, the addressable or the intelligible. Deciding between them by comparing the portraits will not work, as each is painted to persuade and neither compels. A loving sovereign and an impersonal order are both coherent, both anciently defended, and set side by side they do no more than restate the choice they were meant to settle. The way through is to stop comparing pictures and examine what both are pictures of. The first image presents God as a will. The second can now be tested as the trace a will leaves once it has hardened into law. The issue therefore turns on the will: what a will does in acting, and what it leaves behind.