![]() Jean-Paul Sartre, in the twentieth century, captured the exasperation with the competitive God in a syllogism: “If God exists, I cannot be free but I am free therefore, God does not exist.” And Christopher Hitchens has restated the Feuerbach view, observing that believing in God is like accepting permanent citizenship in a cosmic version of North Korea. Thus, Feuerbach can say, “Das Nein zu Gott ist das Ja zum Menschen,” and every atheist since has followed him. In time, the God of late medieval nominalism is ushered off the stage by an impatient atheism that sees him (quite correctly) as a menace to human flourishing. The threatening God must be explained away (as in Spinoza), fundamentally identified with human consciousness (as in Hegel), internalized as the ground of the will (as in Kant), or shunted off to the sidelines (as in most forms of Deism). When this notion of God became widespread in Europe after the Reformation, it provoked a powerful counter-reaction, which one can see in almost all of the major philosophical figures of early modernity. If God is to get all of the glory, the world has to be emptied of glory if grace is to be fully honored, nature has to be denigrated if salvation is all God’s work, cooperation with grace has to be denied. The Reformers were massively shaped by the nominalist view that came up from Occam, and they therefore inherited this competitive understanding of God’s relationship to the world, which is evident in so much of their speculation concerning justification, grace, and providence. But on the univocal reading, God and creation are competitive, and a zero-sum game does obtain. On the analogical reading, all of finite reality participates in the fullness of the actus essendi of God, and hence God and creation cannot be construed as rivals, since they don’t compete for space, as it were, on the same ontological grid. I realize that this might seem the very definition of medieval hairsplitting, but a great deal hinges on this point. Occam would state the principle with admirable economy of expression: Praeter illas partes absolutas nulla res est (“Outside of these absolute parts, there is nothing real”). This means, in consequence, that God, though he might be described as infinite, is one being among many, an individual alongside other individuals. But if, as Scotus and Occam would have it, being is a univocal term, then God and creatures can be considered under the same ontological rubric, and they do indeed belong to an identical genus. God is not so much ens summum (highest being) as ipsum esse subsistens. Indeed, Thomas insists that God is not an individual and is not to be categorized in any genus, even that most generic of genera, the genus of being. On Aquinas’s analogical interpretation, God is not one item, however impressive, in the genus of existing things. ![]() ![]() The roots of this misconception are deep and tangled, stretching back to antiquity, but I would put a good deal of the blame for the present form of the problem on the transition from an analogical to a univocal conception of being, on display in Duns Scotus and especially William of Occam. ![]() And what all the atheists, new and old, have in common is a mistaken notion of God, for to a person they construe God as one being among many, an item within the nexus of conditioned things. They are borrowed from Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and Sartre. There is nothing new in the arguments of the New Atheists. His lecture is here on the First Things website. I add it here simply as documentation of the contemporary attitude towards Scotus. It is not really about Scotus at all, but about evangelization. Some comments, follow, though I have discussed Barron's views elsewhere (see the tags). As the Scotus Police, I bring to your attention the latest from Robert Barron, Auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles. ![]()
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