THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR METAPHYSICS

STUDIES IN METAPHYSICS, VOLUME III

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF AMERICA

INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR METAPHYSICS

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Prof. Richard M. Martin whose life of work in the field of logic showed the highest genius and creativity. As can be seen from his chapter in this volume, "On Some Theological Languages," the broader concern of his work was life itself, up to its highest realization in life divine. Like Descartes, he felt that logic can now make possible significant advances in Metaphysics and even theology.

The presentation of this paper in Jerusalem, which Prof. Martin considered in some ways the culmination of his service in philosophy, occasioned intensive debate with Prof. John Findlay. That interchange was reflected by Richard Martin in his "On Philosophical Ecumenism: A Dialogue," which has been added as a fitting appendix to the present volume.

Prof. Martin has pointed the way. He presents an inviting challenge to a younger generation of philosophers to develop the similar combination of professional perfection and personal peace required to follow the pathways he pioneered.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to The State University of New York Press at Albany for permission to reprint R.M. Martin, "On Philosophical Ecumenism: A Dialogue," Chap. VIII of Primordiality, Science, and Value (Albany, New York: State Univ. of New York Press, l980), pp. 120-136.

Introduction

PART I. METAPHYSICS AND GOD

1. God and the Problem of Being

by Ivor Leclerc 3-13

Comment: Salvino Biolo 15-21

2. Religious Experience

by H.D. Lewis 23-38

3. Critique and Hermeneutic in Philosophy of

religion

by Benoit Garceau 39-51

4. On Some Theological Languages

by Richard M. Martin 53-77

Comment: Jan Van der Veken 79-81

PART II. METAPHYSICAL TRADITIONS AND THE DIVINE

5. The Hindu Metaphysical Tradition on the

Meaning of the Absolute

by Jehangir N. Chubb 85-103

Comment: Margaret Chatterjee 105-110

6. Metaphysical Traditions and the Meaning of

the Absolute: The Locus of the Divine in

Chinese Thought

by Ellen M. Chen 111-131

7. God - To What, If Anything, Does the Term

Refer? An Eastern Christian Perspective

by Metropolitan Paulos Gregorios 133-143

8. God, Philosophy and Halakhah in Maimonides'

Approach to Judaism

by David Hartman and Elliott Yagod 145-180

Comment: Isaac Frank 181-189

9. Philosophy, Man and the Absolute God:

an Islamic Perspective

by Bahram Jamalpur 191-202

Comment: Francis Kennedy 203-205

PART III ORIGIN AND THEOPHANY

10. Origin: Creation and Emanation

by Richard V. DeSmet, S.J. 209-220

Comment: Hugo Meynell 221-225

11. Harmony in Nature and Man

by Ewert Cousins 227-238

Comment: Jan Plat 239-241

12. The World as Theophany

by Jean Ladriere 243-259

13. On the Reduction of Temporal Categories

Within the Process of Divine Intervention

by Evanghelos A. Moutsopoulos 261-263

Comment: F. P. Hager 265-271

PART IV. FREEDOM, THEOLOGY AND ETERNITY

14. Evolution and Teleology

by Evandro Agazzi 275-286

Comment: Susanne Mansion 287-291

15. Absolute Being and Freedom

by R.J. Njoroge 293-305

16. Freedom and Omnipotence: Love and Freedom

by Frederick Sontag 307-315

Comment: Thomas A. Fay 317-321

17. Philosophy, Religion and the Coming World

Civilization

by Leroy S. Rouner 323-331

Comment: Joseph Nyasani 333-335

18. Time and Eternity

by J.N. Findlay 337 -347

Comment: Kenneth L. Schmitz 349-353

APPENDIX

On Philosophical Ecumenism: a Dialogue

by Richard M. Martin 355-371

INDEX 373-377

Classically, human understanding of oneself and of one's relation to nature has been founded upon an awareness of one's relation to the divine. Though diversely understood, this has constituted the source, the goal and the deepest meaning of Being. As such, it has provided the basis of personal dignity and the inspiration to strive for a life of harmony with others in justice and peace.

Many developments, in philosophy and beyond, have opened new possibilities for understanding the implications of this for all facets of human life. Often, however, they have implied an emphasis upon either the immanence or the transcendence of the divine in a manner difficult to conciliate one with the other. Further, issues implied in the resultant notion of progress have raised anew questions concerning the nature of God. In turn, in the West this has implied a renewed concern for the meaning found in earlier Eastern and Western religious philosophies. In developing, as will as technologically advanced, societies this has raised the question of the presence of God in all dimensions of human life.

The present volume presents a study of these issues by The International Society for Metaphysics (ISM), hosted by Dr. Nathan Rotenstreich at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem. It begins by situating the study of God in relation to metaphysics, religious experience and logic. This is followed by a search of the great religious and metaphysical traditions for their sense of the divine. In this light God is studied as the source and goal of all, and consequently as the context for human freedom in time and eternity.

This is the last volume in the ISM series on the person. It follows other works on Person and Nature,¹ and Person and God². Upon completion of these studies the ISM undertook an intensive series of investigations regarding society, and its issues of unity, truth and justice, and the good. It extended these two series on person and society to the field of culture and cultural heritage understood as personal creativity in community and in history. Together, they constitute an effort to promote the development of metaphysics as a living discipline in our day.

1. George F. McLean, ed. (Washington: University Press of America and The International Society for Metaphysics, 1988).

2. George F. McLean and Hugo Meynell, eds. (Washington: University Press of America and The International Society for Metaphysics, 1988).

GOD AND THE PROBLEM OF BEING

IVOR LECLERC

We today have arrived at a juncture of thought at which both the question of God and the question of being require basic reconsideration. Contemporary scientific development has necessitated the latter, and this has inevitable implications for the question of God.

Besides that, in our time it has become easier to see that in respect of God the ontological issue runs up against peculiar features and also singular aporiae. For example, the question can significantly be raised, whether God exists--by contrast with other areas of inquiry, in which it would not be significant to ask whether man, or nature, or society exists. In these areas the pertinent questions would be, what is man? what is nature? what is society?; that is, the issue is concerning the ontological status of man, etc., the kind of being which is to be accorded to man, etc. Earlier ages raised the question of the proof of the existence of God, but not whether God exists. That the later question has become common in our time makes it more readily appreciable not only that there is a singular significance about the question, namely that it can significantly be raised, but that the question itself is singularly problematical.

What exactly does the question entail? What does "exist" mean respecting God? Historically the verb "exist" and the abstract noun "existence" arose from a need terminologically to distinguish "that it is" in contrast to "what it is." So to ask whether it is or exists entailed that the "it" in question be something able to stand out or forth, appears manifest itself. This implied, primarily, that the "it" be a "being" which is the "subject" of "what," i.e., of properties or attributes--the latter "existing" only in a derivative sense of the properties of the being as subject. The question facing us is whether the terms "exist" and "being" can consistently and coherently be used in the same sense with respect to God as to natural beings. This is an old issue in the history of philosophy, but it is facing us today with renewed urgency and puzzlement.

This issue has a twofold aspect: one is ontological and the other is categoreal. These are, however, closely interconnected, and neither can be tackled in disjunction from the other, nor can one be taken as unquestionably prior to the other; on the contrary, they intrinsically involve each other. The recognition of this is especially crucial in regard to the question of God. This point needs special emphasis, for not only is there a long and powerful tradition that the fundamental category is "being" --that is, what is ontologically primary is "being," and that it is this which is categorially the subject in thought, so that whatever is the subject is categoreally "a being"--but with regard to God this tradition has in this century received an interesting and emphatic reaffirmation by Whitehead in his Process and Reality with his proclamation that: "God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplication."¹ Accordingly Whitehead explicitly maintained that God is to be conceived as an "actual entity" or res vera, categoreally no different from any other actual entity or being.² This tradition, however, cannot today be simply accepted as a presupposition; it has to be critically examined and justified. For to accept it as an unexamined presupposition constitutes begging the issue which we have seen to be crucial today.

The question now is how we are to proceed with regard to this ontological and categoreal issue. It is evident that fundamental in this is "being," and accordingly that the prime requisite is clarification with respect to "being." The requisite clarification is not simply one of the meanings of the word, for as we are concerned with it the word occurs only as a term in philosophical thought; so what we are up against is "being" as a philosophical problem, and one of singular profundity, difficulty, and complexity. In tackling this problem it will not suffice to take, or to seek to clarify, the conception of being in any contemporary philosophical theory of system. For, in the first place, it is precisely every such conception which it is necessary to subject to critical scrutiny. Secondly, every such conception stands in the inheritance of some two millennia of ontological thought, involving different theories and thus divergent meanings of "being," much of which has come in the course of time to acquire the status of tacit presuppositions; consequently the adequate clarification of contemporary conceptions of being necessitates that these presuppositions be brought fully to light and scrutinized. In this we have one of the greatest difficulties involved in the inquiry into the problem of being.

In view of this difficulty it seems to me that the best, most satisfactory, and perhaps the only effective way to tackle the problem of being is by an historical inquiry. For, by examining theories of being in their origin and development we can most readily become clear as to what is included in them and thus what has come to be inherited in subsequent generations of thought. The historical procedure is, however, fraught with a crucial difficulty. It is all too easy, as the history of philosophy amply testifies, to interpret earlier thought in terms of current conceptions and presuppositions, and to do so involves completely frustrating a main purpose in adopting the historical approach, viz., to bring to light current presuppositions. It is accordingly highly important for the inquirer to be specially on guard against such insidious anachronisms. Of course the difficulty will not thereby necessarily be eliminated; but it can be significantly diminished and, in the course of critical scholarship, overcome.

The historical inquiry into being is unquestionably a considerable and complicated task, to be fittingly undertaken in a lengthy monograph and not in a brief paper. All that is possible here is the presentation of some conclusions which are the outcome of such an inquiry.³

For the origin of the concept of "being" we have to go back to Parmenides. It is true that to on and ta onta, as Jaeger has said, were used from the very beginning of Greek natural philosophy in the sense of things immediately and tangibly present.⁴ But it was Parmenides who for the first time became aware of the philosophical import and implications of the words. The question of how and why he was brought to that awareness, highly relevant as it is, cannot be entered into here. For us now the point is that he discovered the singular significance of saying: esti, "it is"--not, "it is something-or-other," i.e., using the verb in its usual copulative function, but in a distinctly new sense; and that he went on to bring out the implications entailed in that new sense. These implications, Parmenides saw, were entailed in the Greek verb "be" per se.

This becomes clear by an examination of the verb. Fundamentally relevant here is that the Greek verb einai, "to be," stands in contrast to, and excludes, "becoming"--which is expressed in Greek by an entirely different and unrelated verb gignomai, having the primary meaning of "to be born." In a recent highly important and detailed study of The Verb `Be' in Ancient Greek,⁵ Charles H. Kahn has shown that in this is exemplified a basic feature of the Indo-European verb *es-, namely, that it functions to express "the stative aspect, by which it contrasts with verbs meaning to become, arrive at, get, and the like."⁶ This stative value is especially strong in Greek, for in this, as Kahn points out,⁷ "almost alone among European languages, the stem *es- has remained rigorously durative, admitting no aorist or perfect forms like fui and been in the conjugation of eimi." His investigation reveals "that the typical or primordial use of the verb is for a living creature or more especially a person as subject (as is always the case in the first- and second-person forms); and that the verb itself indicates a station or position of that person's body at a given moment or over a certain stretch of time."⁸ Thus the verb "indicates the extrinsic position or presence of the person in a given place. If no place is specified, the verb alone may indicate simply that the person is present somewhere or other, i.e., is alive (at a given time)."⁹ From this analysis it becomes clear why the Greek verb "be," in addition to its primarily copulative function, also has locative, vital, and veridical uses,¹⁰ and that it has the fundamental sense of "presence."¹¹

This fundamental sense is what Parmenides clearly saw: what is, is now present. Therefore what is not there, present (e.g., the Pythagorean void) simply "is not" at all. Further, since the verb "be" excludes "becoming," what is must be all complete, what it is, now in the present. Parmenides having brought to philosophical consciousness what basically is entailed in the Greek verb "be"--viz., that what is, to eon, "a being," implies its immediate presence and its exclusion of all becoming--this determined subsequent ontological thought till Plato, and beyond.

Advancing from the new philosophical approach of Socrates, Plato concluded that it was necessary to admit duo eide ton onton, "two kinds of things,"¹² but he was then faced with the problem of what was entailed in saying that both are "onta." Evidently they both were onta in the sense of "things present"; but when account was taken of what is entailed in the verb "be" as established by Parmenides, it became clear that only that kind which is eidos, "form," since it alone was without becoming, could be regarded as on alethes, "true being," as to ontos on, "beingly being."

Plato was responsible for a further, most important advance in respect of the concept of being. For this he adopted and adapted the word ousia to a new philosophical meaning. The ordinary meaning of ousia was that of "property, possession, what is one's own."¹³ The argument in the early Dialogues establishing the eide (forms) sometimes required Socrates to make the point that things have each their individual form, whereby they are distinguished as each that particular thing, and that this meant that the individual form is idios, "its own," pertaining to that individual itself, and he began using the word ousia to express this, thereby generalizing the meaning of property, possession, as what is "one's own," "proper to," "exclusively individual to," beyond what is ordinarily considered "property."¹⁴ In this context ousia is usually, but not quite adequately, translated as "essence" - essentia was a coinage from the Latin infinitive, esse, to render the Greek term ousia in its later, fully developed sense.

In these early Dialogues it is quickly argued that each "form-itself" also has its ousia, in the sense of what is its own, of what properly belongs to it.¹⁵ Then from the Republic onward it is evident that Plato had become increasingly aware of the implications of the fact of the word ousia having derived from the verb "be," more particularly that it entailed a fundamental connection between what in a thing is "its own" and the "to be" (to einai) or "being" (to on) of the thing. In the Republic, ousia mostly continues primarily to express "what is its own" (essence), but at 479 c and in most instances of its use in the Theaetetus, ousia has the meaning of "being," but in a new sense. In this the word ousia is not merely an alternative to the participial action noun to on, "the being" (analogously to "the thinking," "the running"), but expands that meaning of "being" to include the sense of "what is its own."

This new compound sense of ousia is that which is prevalent throughout the later Dialogues. Moreover in these, this compound meaning comes to be extended also to to on, so that in these late works to on is, in the crucial instances, not adequately rendered by esse, "das Sein," "l'etre," or "Being" (the gerund in English replacing the infinitive), or by "existence," for these catch only part of the new sense.

It is this new fully developed sense of ousia and to on which is taken over by Aristotle, as is clear from his analysis in Book VII of the Metaphysics. The appreciation of this, however, tends to be blocked by the traditional translation of ousia in Aristotle by "substance," a word which most inadequately renders the meaning of the Greek term. In Ch. 1 Aristotle makes clear that the question, ti to on ("what is being"), is the question tis he ousia ("what is ousia").¹⁶ That is, he was acknowledging the full connotation of to on ("being") as developed by Plato and expressed by the term ousia. Starting the chapter with the reminder that to on has many senses, Aristotle points out that first it indicates to ti esti ("what it is") or tode ti (a "this" or "individuality"), which means that which is primarily (touton proton on) is the "what" (to ti estin), and that this is the very thing which is indicated by ousia (hoper semainei ten ousian).¹⁷ In other words, the "what" is that which Plato had argued is "its own," which is "individual to it" and to indicate which he had used the word ousia. The fundamental connection of the "what" which is "its own" (entailed in the word ousia) with "being" Aristotle brings out more fully in a phrase (which became for him a technical term) viz., to ti en einai, "the what it is to be." That is, this phrase denotes the "what" which is peculiar to it, its "own," whereby it is.

But Aristotle was aware of an important incongruity in Plato's doctrine of ousia, in which ousia, what is "its own," is ascribed to both physical things and the forms. Aristotle argued that while a physical on is manifestly a singular individual, its to ti en einai or ousia thus appropriately indicating it as tode ti (a "this"), a "form-itself" (eidos auto kath auto) is not thus singular, for it is that which is "participated in," which entails that it is fundamentally universal. But a universal indicates "a such" (to toionde) and not "a this" (tode ti), and therefore a universal could not be ousia.¹⁸

Aristotle was thereby brought to a most important conclusion in respect of "being." Plato's theory of the forms per se as "being" had to be rejected; on the contrary, it was the other kind of onta, which Plato had denied the status of to ontos on, that had to be regarded as to proton on, "being" in the primary sense, for ousia properly pertained to it alone. This meant that for Aristotle it was the physei on, the physical or natural being, that which is in "becoming," which strictly is to on and ousia. That is, Aristotle found it necessary to reject the conception of "being" deriving from Parmenides and which was grounded in the verb "be" as excluding "becoming." He had arrived at a new conception of that which is a "being" in the primary sense as essentially "in becoming," and which had therefore to be conceived as in a process of change (kinesis) from dynamis (potentiality) to energeia (actuality).

What did this entail in respect of the status of form? He agreed with Plato that in a physical being eidos (form) is to be identified with to ti en einai (essence), and thus the ousia, of the being. Categoreally considered, this meant that form constituted the predicates of the being as subject. That is, a form "is" only as a quality, quantity, etc., of "the being" which is its subject.

But Aristotle saw that the categoreal issue was quite crucially raised in another respect. Since a physical being is in becoming, in kinesis, this entails a substratum, not only as the recipient of the forms, but as underlying the supersession of forms, without which one could not think or speak of "it" as changing. This meant that a physical being had necessarily to be "composite" (synolos) of hyle (matter) as the substratum and eidos (form). Now hyle and eidos could not be "constituents" or "parts" in the sense in which elements are constituents of a compound whole, for the "elements" (by the very meaning of the word)¹⁹ of a natural being would themselves have to be natural beings.²⁰ Therefore hyle cannot have the status of "a being" (to on); it is "that which in itself is neither a particular thing nor of a certain quantity nor assigned to any of the categories by which being (to on) is determined."²¹ As itself not "a being" it is therefore not known as beings are known, viz., in terms of the categories; it can be "known" only analogically and relatively.²² The other component of natural being, viz., eidos, likewise has to be accorded the status of an arche (source) of being--that eidos cannot have the status of "a being" is amply evident from his critique of Plato. Further, analogously to hyle, there is also a peculiarity in regard to the "knowledge" of eidos; since the forms are that in terms of which there is knowledge, they themselves cannot be known in the way the physical things are: eidos is the arche (source) of knowledge as well as of to on (being). In thus distinguishing between to on (being) and the archai (sources) of being, Aristotle had attained a formulation of a categoreal insight of the utmost importance, which Plato had been able to state only in terms of mythos or simile.²³

This insight was inherited by Plotinus. In common with the new movement of thought of that era he had accepted a single, divine, arche (source) of all things, in place of the three archai of Plato and Aristotle, and maintained that this One, as the arche (source) of being and of the forms (in terms of which there is knowledge) accordingly cannot itself be known and transcends being (ou me logos, mede episteme, o de kai epekeina legetai einai ousias).²⁴ For Plotinus "being" (to on, to einai, and ousia) is identified with the first emanation, nous,₂⁵ the enaction (energeia) of whose ousia is the second emanation, psyche, which is to ontos on.²⁶

Augustine took an importantly different position on this, one which has been determinative of most subsequent thought. Plato had identified form as to ontos on, because only form was in itself changeless, immutable; Augustine held that only God was supremely immutable and perfect, so that only God deserved the title of Vere Esse.²⁷ For Augustine God is "the being" which most completely "is," whose essentia signifies perfection.

This Augustinian ontological position, which became the accepted doctrine of most Christian theology, namely that the source of being is "a being," was found to involve many aporiae with which thinkers struggled for a millennium. Central and basic to these is the issue of "being." Augustine had followed in the ontological tradition of Parmenides and Plato. In this the approach is from the meaning of to on ("being") to the identification of that which accords with that meaning. Plato, following Parmenides in holding that the fundamental connotation of "being" is immutability (since the Greek verb "be" excludes "becoming"), identified the forms as "beings" in the basic sense. This connotation of "being" as immutability was inherited by Neoplatonism and accepted by Augustine, who identified God as "being" in that sense. The Augustinian position therefore maintains "a being" as the single source of all other "beings."

Important difficulties in this position soon emerged. If "being" fundamentally connotes immutability, how can physical things, which are manifestly in "becoming," be regarded as "beings" at all? God could not then be the source of being, since God alone is "being"; God could only be the source of "becoming." But if "being" and "becoming" stand in mutually exclusive contrast, this entails the absolute transcendence of God, with no relation to "becoming." The Neoplatonic solution to this difficulty was to identify "to be" (to einai, esse, "das Sein," "l'etre") with form as ousia, essentia. Then a natural thing in becoming "is" by virtue of its form, its "essence." But this involved further difficulties. First the Arab and then Western thinkers saw that this deprived "being" of the feature of its meaning which had been basic in Greek philosophy, namely "presence." In other words, a separation of "existence" from "essence" had occurred. Accordingly, if "being" means "essence," there is no way to account for "existence," and for the "individuality" (tode ti) which "to be there, present," "to exist," primarily entails, as Aristotle had correctly insisted. Aquinas sought to remedy this by emphasizing the features of act" (which Neoplatonism had originally identified with "form," but which had, analogously to "existence," became lost to "essence") and identified "act" with "esse," "to be." But with this new conception of "being" the original difficulty still remains, for "being" still retains the fundamental connotation of immutability, standing in exclusive contrast to "becoming," and thus the problem is not resolved of how "being" can be the source of "becoming."

Another most important aspect of these difficulties emerges in the categoreal issue. With the conception of God as "a being," the source of all other "beings," it was entailed that, categoreally considered, the same mode of thinking pertained in respect of God and the other beings: each is "a being" of which attributes are predicated. Early however it became evident that attributes could not be univocally predicated of God and creatures, and from the Pseudo-Dionysius, with his "superlative theology," to Thomas Aquinas, with his doctrine of analogy, a way out of this categoreal problem was sought. Though both were thought of as "beings," a fundamental difference between them as "beings" had to be acknowledged, and to meet this situation Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Occam developed the theory of transcendentals as predicates pertaining solely to God.

But in this we are up against a singularly difficult issue, namely, whether the "source" of being can at all validly be thought in terms of the categories, which manifestly pertain to physical things, i.e., in terms of "a being" of which attributes are predicated. Aristotle was more profoundly aware of this issue than was anyone, not only before but also since. He saw that the fallacy basic to the thought of the physical philosophers was that they had conceived the arche (source) of physical things as itself a physical thing (e.g., water, etc.). He saw that the same error vitiated the Platonic doctrine, which maintained eidos (form) as the arche of the changing physical onta, beings, but conceived form as itself to on, "a being." Plato himself was indeed aware of the fallacy of the "third man" involved in this and, it seems to me, made an important attempt to overcome this difficulty in the Timaeus through depicting the forms, along with the demiourgos and the receptacle, as the archai of the physical world. Aristotle was clear that not only hyle, but also eidos was not to be understood in terms of the categories, for eidos is the arche of the categories; for him the gnosis of the forms could only be meta noeseos,²⁸ by direct intuition.

It seems to me necessary today to face the question whether the aporiae involved in the dominant doctrine of God as "a being" which is the source of all other beings, are not grounded in the same basic mistake which Aristotle saw in Platonism. I would suggest that this is the case.

The alternative is that we conceive God as "source of being." In our conception of God we have therefore to proceed from "being," and thus how "being" is conceived is crucial. The "being" in question is evidently that of the entities validly understood in terms of the categories. It is to be noted that the word "being" here is the participial action noun; I shall distinguish²⁹ it typographically as "being." This "being" entails "presence"; but it entails more than simply "presence" ("existence," Dasein). Primarily, the "being" must be that of "a being." This means that "being" entails "individuality," in the double sense of an individual and of what is individual to it, i.e., "essence" in the sense of its own peculiar definiteness. It is to be emphasized that "being" does not connote only "essence," and that essence does not constitute "being," for "being" entails "acting." Also, this "being" cannot exclude "becoming," but rather includes it.

Now this "being" necessarily entails "source," in a threefold respect. There is required a source of its "definiteness," and equally so of its "acting." Further, since "acting" entails "end," also required is a teleological source. The question then is whether these three "sources" can validly and coherently be combined into one. It seems to me that this cannot be done without falling back into the error to be avoided. Also involved in this is that while "source" of being entails transcendence of being, "transcendence" here cannot validly entail temporal precedence, for this would imply "a being" as precedent. "Source" has to be transcendent and immanent. The Divine, I would say, is more particularly to be identified with the teleological source, but we should not fall into the error of completely separating the three sources from each other.

Emory University

Atlanta, Georgia

1. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 521.

2. Ibid., p. 28.

3. Ivor Leclerc, The Theory of Being, An Inquiry into Ontology. (In preparation).

4. Werner Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 197, note 2.

5. Charles H. Kahn, The Verb `Be' in Ancient Greek, Part 6 of The Verb `Be' and its Synonyms, ed. W. M. Verhaar (Dordrecht/Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1973).

6. Ibid., p. 217.

7. Ibid., p. 219.

8. Ibid., p. 224.

9. Ibid., p. 224.

10. Ibid., pp. 156ff; 233-35; 330-70.

11. Cf. Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 197, note 2: "Homer and Hesiod speak of ta eonta as that which exists at present and contrast it with ta essomena and ta proeonta, things as they will be in the future and as they were in the past. This very opposition proves that the word originally pointed to the immediate and tangible presence of things."

12. Plato, Phaedo, 79 A.

13. Cf. R. Hirzel, "Ousia," Philologus 72, 1913, pp. 42-52.

14. Especially interesting as illustrative of this is Gorgias 471 B, in which Socrates says: ekballein me ek tes ousias kai tou alethous (to drive me out of my property, the truth).

15. Cf. Protagoras 349 B; Euthyphro 11 A; Cratylus 423 A, 424 B; Phaedo 65 C., 76 D - 77 A.

16. Aristotle, Metaphysics, VII, 1028 b 4.

17. Ibid., 1028 a 14-15.

18. Ibid., 1038 b 34 - 1039 a 2.

19. Aristotle, De Caelo 302 a 16-18.

20. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1028 b 8-13.

21. Ibid., 1029 a 20-21 (Ross tr.).

22. Aristotle, Physics 191 a 8-12, 194 b 9.

23. Plato, Timaeus 29 D; Republic 308.

24. Plotinus, Ennead, V, 4, 1.

25. Cf. Ennead, III, 8, 8: all ousia kai to tauton to einai kai to noein einai.

26. Cf. Plotinus, Ennead, IV, 7, 85.

27. Cf. Augustine, Confesiones, Bk. VII, ch. 11: "For it is only that which remains in being without change that truly is."

28. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1036 a 5-6.

29. It is important to distinguish "being" as a nominalized participle from "being" as a gerund substituting for the nominalized infinitive, and thus from des Sein and l'etre.

COMMENT

SALVINO BIOLO

The thought-provoking report of Professor Leclerc about the fundamental problem of being, that invited us to a "basic reconsideration," convincingly emphasizes from the start the close relationship of the two metaphysical aspects of the central topic: the ontological aspect that considers being as such, and the theological aspect with its consideration of God.

1. In regard to his introductory remarks, it seems essential to propose some preliminary questions closely connected with the fundamental problem of the existence of God.

Prof. Leclerc points out that contemporary scientific development gives a rather negative meaning to the question: "whether God exists." This seems to be the predominant attitude also of most modern philosophy. Is possible to see in the traditional distinction proposed by Leclerc between "that it is" and "what it is," the implicit transcendental opposition between, and mutual relationship of, essence and existence?

I feel rather perplexed in observing how Leclerc, who seems strongly influenced by the thought of Whitehead, states the basic question as follows: "whether the term `exists' and `being' can consistently and coherently be used in the same sense with respect to God as to the natural beings." The term same means "identical" rather than "similar but different," and could insinuate at the beginning an attitude suggesting a univocal knowledge of being that would lead in turn to a pantheistic conception of God.

Another crucial point is the twofold aspect of being: ontological and categorial. Why are these two terms so closely interconnected, when the term "categorial" seems to imply a deviation from the correct transcendental and analogical notion of being? I doubt that it is philosophically justified to use the term "categorial" in referring to being, particularly in the usage of Whitehead quoted by Leclerc. In this quotation referring to God he says: ". . . res vera categorically not different from any other entity or being." I would like to specify my difficulty in this way: being as such transcends everything, that is, it penetrates and supercedes all reality since it involves and is involved in all being, in every aspect and mode of being. Thus it embraces and overflows every category. Being is immanent in all its determinations and may not be confused with any determination whatever: "it is neither a thing nor an idea, it constitutes the profundity of things and the objectivity of ideas."¹

2. Concerning his interpretation of Greek philosophy,

Prof. Leclerc quite correctly emphasizes the enduring stability of being as found in Parmenides, but neglects the differences found in later thinkers.

Considering the explicit ontological and theological nature of the topic, it would have been helpful to consider more deeply the metaphysical aspects of God as supreme Beauty found within the Symposium of Plato. This work reaches heights of sublime transcendence in the field of Greek philosophy, which embraces not only aspects of absoluteness and uniqueness but also multiplicity and becoming, as in Heraclitus. Both aspects are reconsidered by Plato and explicitly developed by Aristotle. Although Leclerc gave the two great masters special consideration, he might have more clearly focused their thought to allow an interpretation closer to the traditional one.

Referring to Plato he provides an initial orientation to the analogy of being when he reveals his fundamental distinction between the identical and the different in both things and ideas. Does Plato exclude completely the real and true nature of being in the things of this world, even if they appear like shadows in comparison with the reality of ideas? If so, what do the typical Platonic insights of mimesis (imitation) and of metexis (participation) imply, considering the terms of their operations? These basic insights, because they imply a doctrine of analogy, should not be neglected; they include both a certain similarity and a greater dissimilarity in regard to the respective reality of things and ideas. This holds to a much greater extent when we consider the supreme ideas of the Good and of the Beautiful?

I agree with Prof. Leclerc's acknowledgement of Aristotle's fundamental contribution to our central problems. As one who is in agreement with the "perennial philosophy," I would like to suggest that the metaphysical principles of Aristotle should be developed in a different and more coherent direction. For example, his solution of the classic dilemma of Parmenides (being either is or is not) rests upon the basic distinction of potency and act, that suggests an ontological difference between beings as they are this or that, but an ontological similarity between beings as they simply are. This opens a pathway to the future development of the logical and ontological aspects of intrinsic analogy.² It is true that every material thing in this world is a "composite" sunodos of matter and form. But "matter and form" are the principles of intrinsic causes within the natural constitution of material being. The "composite" also demands, as Aristotle explains, the extrinsic "efficient and final" causes of that composition.

Considering further Aristotle's interpretation of the knowledge of being, Prof. Leclerc makes a fundamental point: "eidos is the arche (source) of knowledge as well as of to on" (p. 9). Certainly in answer to the question: what is being? Aristotle replies that the cause of being is its immanent form (Met. Z, 17). But allowing that such an interpretation is possible and coherent, I would like to suggest a development in the line of Thomas Aquinas' thought and founded upon an Aristotelian insight. Let me explain further: the eidos is a proximate formal principle of the knowledge of being and not an agent. It is of being as known, but not of being as made to be.

3. Regarding his brief consideration of both St. Thomas and St. Augustine, his brief mention of St. Augustine is correct but is too partial, both for what it says and what it does not say. Augustine has not only provoked struggles among thinkers, but both as a theologian and a philosopher he suggested a radical solution to the problem of the origin of being from God.

The passage from the Confessions quoted partially by Leclerc, in its completeness certainly affirms the absolute being of God, but also attributes being, that is relative by participation, to other things:

The relationship of beings to God is one of dependency in their common reality, but opposition in their similar yet different being. Some lines earlier Augustine, in one of his most brilliant insights, had explained this very similar idea about the dependency of created things, including the mind itself:

Augustine accepts the transcendence of God from Platonic philosophy but develops it differently in order to accommodate God as Creator according to the Jewish-Christian revelation. It is metaphysically important for our common problem to emphasize that this Doctor of the Church also uses the term `source' (fons) about God to explain that he is the Principle of all: . . . these knowing God, found that in Him was both the cause of the whole creation, the light of all true learning, and the source of all felicity."⁵ "Source" is here clearly used in a metaphorical way to express the metaphysical category of first cause, that is the Creator.

Considering Prof. Leclerc's treatment of St. Thomas, whose conception of analogy is very different from that of Duns Scotus and Ockam, I would like to stress that he further explains the doctrine of creation systematically with an explicit distinction betweem--but not by separating--essence and existence. Therefore being is not only identified with "to be" but also implies "it." Thus Thomas both sought and found a mode of expression that would resolve the supposedly rigorous contrast between the being and becoming of creatures. He could say that the Creator is "a being," but such a singular being that He is the Pure Act of being, who freely makes beings that are capable of, and contain the reality of becoming. In a similar way there is no reason to be frightened of the "same mode of thinking" being used in regard to God and other beings. The correct way of thinking about, and predicating value of, God and creatures is analogous not univocal. Nor is it equivocal but similar and different, although the difference is a major one because He is the cause propria of all things.

Therefore, strictly speaking, God is not "Wholly other" but "simply different." Total difference is repugnant because it would create an abyss between God and creatures who are related to Him.

4. Regarding the principal conclusions to be reached and the final problems that need to be resolved, it seems that when Prof. Leclerc affirms that: "there are aporiae involved in the dominant doctrine of God as `a being' which is the source of other things," he multiplies rather than resolves the problems. It is not clear to what dominant doctrine he is referring. He formulates the question by focusing on the problem of the origin of beings from God, beginning from a conception of being.

In order to clarify my interpretation and to discover some solution for the main problem, I would like to propose two questions and two possible solutions.

My first question in the form of dilemma regards the origin of beings from God: Is it by emanation or creation? My dilemma is proposed both in reference to the missing solution in Aristotle, whose fundamental principles I can accept, and also in order to seek a further clarification from Prof. Leclerc about the term "source" in reference to God. "Source" more strongly suggests a metaphor than a technical philosophical category. Only if that word means "active cause," and in this context creative cause, is it acceptable. Otherwise I cannot see any way of overcoming almost impossible difficulties. It is precisely here that we have need of the doctrine of analogy where we try to use the fundamental and universal category of "cause."

Leclerc finally asks about individual being which includes becoming: "Now this `being' necessarily entails `source' in a threefold respect."

The first aspect: "there is required a source of its definiteness." The word "source" here is overburdened with too much meaning, considering the delicacy and importance of the fundamental question of the origin of being. I therefore think that in this context "source" may be (a) the substantial form which is the intrinsic principle determining and specifying being as this or that substance or essence; (b) an accidental form which is a further actual determination of the substance; or (c) the extrinsic efficient Principle, which is the first Cause of singular beings.

It is essential that we do not confuse the constitutive intrinsic principles with the extrinsic transcendent first Principle who is God. Here is the crucial aspect of the entire question. If by "source" Leclerc means the creative Cause of being, then I am in agreement with him. However, if by "source" he means something less as immanent in this world, then I cannot agree with his vague use of the word. This is not to deny that the transcendent first Principle is also immanent, but actively and creatively immanent. Such a first Principle is not to be identified with beings who are relative in their dependence.

The second aspect: "and equally so of its acting." Because "to act is the consequence of to be" (operari sequitur esse) it is necessary to make some further distinctions that are a logical application of those we have already made.

First of all: If "source" means the first Cause that makes every being exist and consequently act, then the expression is acceptable. However, if by "source" he means an intrinsic principle like substance or accident, then the logical consequence must be a type of pantheism.

The third aspect: "Further since `acting' entails `end', (there is) also required a teleological source." Because "every agent works for an end" (Omne agens agit propter finem) in a determined manner, and this indicates the ultimate existence of an intellect, we must still distinguish: (a) if "teleological source" means final, extrinsic Cause as an ultimate end to which all is oriented and ordered, it is acceptable. In this instance this final cause must therefore be identified with the first Principle from which every thing originates. This first Cause or Principle makes the teleological order residing in every contingent being, and must be both the first Intelligence and Will that thinks and wills the existence of beings. However this does not appear to be what Leclerc means. (b) On the contrary, if "teleological source" means some principle internal to beings as a constitutive element of their very natures, then it must simply be denied, because it inevitably leads to pantheism.

Finally it seems to me that the crucial point we must always emphasize is that God is both transcendent and immanent. He is transcendent because, insofar as He gives being to all creatures, He is superior to all relative beings. But by this very same fact of creation He is also immanent, in that He is intimately present causing what is most intimate in beings to be: "Yet you were deeper (intimior) than my deepest self and higher (superior) than the topmost height that I could reach."⁷

In regard to his final statement: "The Divine is more particularly to be identified with the teleological source," I prefer finally to explicitly call that "source" God, insofar as He is the creative "source" which makes the teleological order of the universe including man. But let us not call God "source" if by this we mean an internal principle that is identified with the nature of created things. This seems to be the error that should be avoided at all costs because of the danger of pantheism.

As far as the second question is concerned I would like to refer briefly to the general conception of God and being and to the presuppositions related to these questions. What fundamental conception do we have of man as far as he conceives and knows being, and finally God? Only if we are grounded in a sound epistemology and methodology of the knowing and conscious subject can we be capable of both certainty and truth. Unless we are intellectually open to the notion of being and consequently to self-transcendence, and to the absolute transcendence of the Ipsum Esse, we cannot have any answer to the problem of being and the mystery of God.

Gregorian University

Rome, Italy

1. "L'etre apparait comme le sens des phenomenes, ce qui le pose et permet de les affirmer. Il n'est ni chose ni idee; il fait la profondeur des choses et l'objectivite des idees." Joseph De Finance. La connaissance de l'etre. (Paris: Desclee de Brower, 1966), p. 36.

2. "The notion of being penetrates all other contents, and so it is present in the formulation of every concept. It cannot result from an insight into being, for such an insight would be an understanding we have not attained. It is, as has been said, the orientation of intelligent and rational consciousness towards an unrestricted objective." Bernard J.F. Lonergan, S.J., Insight (London: Longemans, Green and Co., 1957), p. 360.

3. Confessions, VII, x, 17.

4. Ibid. VII, x, 16. It is very significant: " . . . sed superior quia ipsa (=lux) fecit me, et ego inferior quia factus ab ea."

5. The City of God, VIII, 10.

6. St. Thomas, III C.G., 66, 6.

7. St. Augustine, Confessions, III, vi, 11. "Tu autem eras intimior intimo meo et superior summo meo." It belongs to the brilliant genius of Augustine to have recognized the intimate relationship existing between the immanence and transcendence of God.

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

H.D. LEWIS

The notion of religious experience appears to me central to all discussions of major religious issues today. It is however a notion about which there appears to be a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding. There are terms like `Nature', and `Freedom', which admit of such a wide variety of interpretation (some of them sharply contradictory) that their use tends to become almost pointless. `Religious experience' is apt to fall into this class. It is sometimes used to refer to any religious activity or practice whatsoever, and thus to become quite otiose. This is the use that some have in mind when they say that they have never had a religious experience; they just mean that they are agnostics. For others `religious experience' means some very peculiar type of experience, like having visions or hearing voices, or having a distinctively mystical experience. For some the term is associated, with some but only very limited justification, with an excessively emotional religious indulgence. In its main use, and in the profound importance ascribed to it by devout persons in all ages, the term stands for none of these things. It is important therefore to indicate just what we should normally understand by `religious experience'. I shall attempt to do this as fairly as I can within a limited space, and I shall also try to give a brief indication of how this relates to other major concerns.

I shall waste no time over those who think of religious experience primarily, and perhaps exclusively, in terms of paranormal phenomena. Such occurrences need not in fact be properly religious at all. To what extent they may be I have discussed in Chapters XIV and XV of my Our Experience of God.¹ Those who have had paranormal experiences in the context of their religious life, ascribe importance to them only in relation to other aspects of their faith; usually they minimize their importance and treat them as quite peripheral to their essential commitment. This is why it seemed to me so unreasonable for a critic of the standing of Alasdair MacIntyre, in a well known book² some years ago, to make such heavy weather over claims to have had visions of the Virgin Mary, etc. Did she `speak Aramaic', did she `remember Galilee'? Questions of this kind seem to me to show a total, indeed obtuse, insensitivity to what religion is essentially like, even in the contexts where visions and voices and other forms of `the marvelous' are in fact invoked.

But we must be equally careful not to think of religious experience merely in terms of some features of human experience as a whole or some generalizations or deductions from what our situation as human beings is like. Religious experience, in essentials, is not incipient metaphysics, however important it may be for metaphysical reflection. Its peculiar significance derives from its being a distinctive experience which people undergo, as they may have a moral or an aesthetic experience. This does not mean that it is always easy to recognize or delimit, as in the case for example, of some forms of pain. But it would be quite wrong to identify it with features of experience which all can recognize, or with natural occurrences to which some further religious significance may be ascribed. Religious experience is essentially religious, a distinct ingredient, to my mind a vital one, in an essentially religious awareness, and identifiable as such.

I go out of my way to stress this because of a prevailing tendency, in current philosophy of religion, to think that so much of religion is initially neutral, even the sense of the numinous according to some. In my view, we cannot produce any proper form of religion out of non-religious elements. There is indeed a place for the interpretation of experience; perception for example looks very different as the philosopher considers some of its extraordinary features. The last thing I wish to do is to discourage reflection on religious awareness, or to present it as a raw datum which some may accept, others not, and no more. We need in fact to think more carefully about it than anything else in religious commitment at present. But we must not, in the process, so dilute it that it is nothing recognizable in and for itself.

The same goes for some fashionable views which equate religious experience with an alleged contentless relation with God sometimes known as an `I-Thou relation'. I have a very great regard for Martin Buber, and I wish more heed were paid by those who refer to him to my fairly close discussion, in Chapter XIII of The Elusive Mind, of what emerges in a positive way from all that he had to say on this theme. But I make no sense whatsoever, in human or in divine relationships, of a mere relation to which no kind of a distinctive precise significance can be attached. The nearest we get to this is the insight or intuition into the inevitability of there being God, and of this I shall say more shortly. But an encounter which is no particular kind of encounter, a `meeting' which cannot be characterized in any way, appears to me to be just nothing. To make the invocation of it a way of by-passing all the hard epistemological problems is just an escape from our intellectual responsibility, it plays into the hands of contemptuous agnostics.

For related reasons I dismiss all accounts of religious experience in exclusively emotional terms. Emotion plays its part, but the core of religious experience, I submit, is essentially cognitive. How then should we understand it?

At the centre, it seems to me, is the enlivened sense of the being of God or, if that at this stage is too theistic a term, of some supreme transcendent reality - as involved in the being of anything at all. This is what lies behind the traditional arguments. We all know their inadequacy as arguments, notwithstanding all the refinements attempted in recent times. But they still haunt us, and this seems to me to be because they reflect in different ways the conviction that there can be no ultimate fortuitousness in the being of things. We seek explanations of the way things are, not as a mere psychological compulsion but as rational beings. We do not give up when no sort of explanation is possible, we insist that it must be available somewhere; but no finite explanation is fully adequate, each proceeds in terms of the way we actually find that things cohere, but there remains the question why they should be this way at all, or why anything at all should exist. We can, at least without sheer inconsistency, say that it all just happened, that somehow things began to be out of a total void and took the remarkable course which enables us to manipulate and understand our environment, in terms of perfect concomitant variation even to the astonishing vastness and complexities of macroscopic and microscopic science of today. We may not contradict ourselves if we say that all this just came into being out of nothing, but is it credible? Why should anything start up at all, much less take the remarkable intelligible shape they have out of just nothing? On the other hand it is equally unintelligible to suppose that the world has always been, that in no sense has there been any sort of origination. `Always' in this sense becomes meaningless. Aeons beyond all computation, and certainly beyond imaginative realization, we can at least comprehend, but a strictly infinite past is just not intelligible.

It is these radical antinomies that compel us to recognize some more ultimate reality in which all that we can, in principle, comprehend is rooted, but which is not itself comprehensible beyond the recognition of its inevitability, a mystery, not partial but total, in which everything there is is invested, but not the mystery of mere bewilderment, the mystery of real transcendent being.

Philosophers put this in fairly sophisticated terms. But the sense of it, however imperfectly expressed, does not require great sophistication. It is elicited in various ways, not least by what Jaspers has called `limit situations', and I have ventured myself elsewhere to indicate in more detail how the sense of the transcendent is awakened in the minds of the most naive as well as of sophisticated persons and societies. It can be traced back as far as recorded history goes. Art and practice as well as intellectual reflection involve it. But granted some intimation in this way of a supreme or transcendent reality, how do we go from there?

It is at this point that I would wish to invoke the idea of religious experience. I wish to stress very much that I do not appeal to the notion of religious experience as such to establish the existence of God, least of all in the naive form of insisting that there must be God because we experience him. That would clearly not do without indication of the sort of experience this is and how it is warranted. It could be a gigantic begging of the question. Religious experience properly comes in at the point where we ask, how we go further than the sense of some ultimate all-encompassing mystery involved in all that we are or find.

There are of course some who do not seek to go further. They stay at the sense of profound wonderment at the essentially incomprehensible source of all there is, sometimes almost to the point of the repudiation of finite being. In practice actual religion has rarely been able to remain at this rarefied level. Present existence claims its rights and our attention. Finite existence cannot be denied any more than the infinite, even if it finds no better place than some mode or articulation of the infinite. At some level there appear, from the remotest times to our own, particular practices, attitudes, obligations, varied and suggestive symbolism, all intimating that the sacred which, in one sense, we cannot approach and whose essential mystery we cannot fathom, is nonetheless peculiarly present, `in thy mouth and in thy heart', as one scripture puts it, that it involves a way of life for us, a purpose, a formative influence in personal and social history, a meaning and a presence articulating itself in all manner of ways and leading, in some instances, to highly refined formulations of belief, even to the curiously presumptuous intimacy of petitionary prayer. Men speak of meeting God, of `walking' with him, of hearing his voice, of turning away from him, of encountering his wrath and, in the same awareness almost, finding him a seeking, reconciling God who draws all men to their ultimate fulfilment `in him'. They even speak of God incarnate as a living, limited finite creature who died in a scandalously shameful way. How is any of this to be warranted, affirmed or rejected? What meaning can it have?

It is here, in my view, that religious experience is the seminal and vital consideration. I do not, of course, wish to deny, that the `insight' into there having to be God, along the lines indicated, is itself an experience. But it is so in the sense that all cognition is experience. To apprehend that twice two is four, or that the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees, is experience. But no one would claim, in these cases, that we know from experience, on the basis of what we find or observe, that these things are so, as we know that grass is green and fire is hot. `The appeal to religious experience', as it is sometimes called, is not a strictly empirical one, in the sense of empiricism which confines it to presentations of sense, but it has more in common with it than strictly a priori knowledge.' Certain things are claimed on the basis of certain things that have happened.

The one qualification of this, and it is a vital one, is the point already noted, namely that at the core of religious experience, is the enlivened insight into the being of God. We do not know this because things happen in any particular way, but, essentially, because they happen at all. The insight involved is peculiar but certainly not quasi-empirical. On the other hand, the enlivening of this insight in peculiar conditions, and the repercussions of it on other crucial aspects of particular experiences, seem to me to be the raw material out of which all other genuine religious awareness is built - and by which it is tested.

At this point there is a very close analogy between the way we know one another and the way we know God. We do not know the existence of other persons generally in any a priori or in any intuitive way, though some philosophers do make that strange claim. We know all we know about other persons, I submit, in some mediated way, however close and intimate this may be. Without some evidence we would not know the existence of anyone. But the being of God we know quite differently, as indicated. It is in no sense a matter of evidence as this usually goes. But all the rest is, and it is along these lines that I, at least, react to the familiar challenge of empiricist critics - what would count for or against your belief? For the existence of God I answer `nothing'. It is not that kind of awareness, it is a quite peculiar insight about which nonetheless much may be said, again along the lines indicated. But for all other affirmations, the live particularization of profound devotion, we turn to specific evidence, to what counts for or against, to what can, in some respects at least, be analyzed and set forth, though by no means in exclusively sensible terms.

I make a special point of stressing this, as so many who are concerned about religion, at highpowered professional levels or more simply, fall back before the fashionable challenge on either blind appeals to authority or some vague noncognitive attitude or commitment for which there is no rational justification. Interest in religion may be revived today, in fleeting and transitory ways, by simple-minded appeals to emotion or hysteria or palliatives to those who hunger for spiritual sustenance - or we may make do for a while with attenuations which but thinly disguise the essential secularity of our attitudes. But this will not last. Religion needs justification, most of all in a sophisticated age like out own. No great religion can survive without it.

It is this justification of what is distinctive in the claims of the great religions, and the means of assessment and the basis of dialogue, that is to be found essentially, in my view, in religious experience, rightly understood. The points of convergence as well as the differences can be much better understood in these terms and a means made possible of maintaining our distinctive stances while entering with genuine empathy and appreciation into the religious devotion of others. It will also be a very great gain indeed, in all religions, to show that we are fully equipped to confront the demand for justification and fully take the point of empiricist critics, though by no means entirely on their own terms.

Let us return, then, now to the question what a religious experience involves besides the enlivened sense of the being and mystery of God. I want first to add here that, if the transcendent is to function adequately as the ultimate answer to our `why questions', or as explanation in the very special elusive sense indicated, it must be deemed to be complete and adequate in all respects in itself, in other words perfect in the evaluational sense as well as self-sustaining. I do not see how anything less than supreme perfection could meet the case, and in this context I would like to refer you to a quite admirable, but not I suspect sufficiently regarded, book by Professor Sontag entitled Divine Perfection (Student Movement Press). The sense of the holy is essentially evaluational, and does not become so, as is implied in some readings of Otto, by further schematization. This point I must leave as it is for our purpose.

The main point to be stressed now is that the sense of ultimate being, mysterious beyond any fathoming in what it must be in itself other than ultimate perfection, has a distinctive impact on other formative features of the total experience in which it occurs. It corrects the perspective in which we view the world around us, it highlights what is of greatest import for us, it makes us see the familiar anew, as in art and poetry; and it does this under the insistent sense of transcendent being unavoidably having its place in our thought. The transcendent claims what it stimulates for its own; and God, whom no man hath seen, the impenetrably Holy, removed and remote as infinite being from finite, becomes a closely intimate articulate presence in the very core of our own essentially finite awareness.

The substance of what we come to learn about God in this way is finite. It may present difficulties but no difficulties beyond our understanding and resolving in the normal exercise of finite intelligence. What we learn is finite and has no irresolvable mystery in it, much is indeed very simple, however astonishing on occasion. The peculiarly divine factor comes in when these exceptional insights into our own situation and its requirements are seen to be induced in a very sharp way, deepened and refined, under the impact of the movingly enlivened sense of the Holy and the transcendent. As I have put it elsewhere, God puts his own imprimatur on certain insights and sensitivities, he underlines, as it were, certain things in our experience and writes his own mind into them. They come to carry his authority additional to their own. They are what he specifically wants us to note. The devout acquire the art of listening and heeding what is communicated thus within our own sensitivity and concentration.

One feature of exceptional importance in this process whereby our understanding is extended in the enlivened sense of the involvement of our lives in a supreme and transcendent reality is the refinement and deepening of moral awareness. The view has often been advanced that we cannot ascribe genuine objectivity to ethical principles unless they are considered to be expressly dependent on some religious reality. This seems to me to be dangerous doctrine. It is plain that persons with no religious awareness or commitment can have profound appreciation of moral ideals and splendid devotion to them. There is no inconsistency or logical impropriety in their being so. The objectivity of morals is autonomous, as I have stressed myself on many occasions, and some of the most notable and persuasive defenders of moral objectivity have been prominent agnostic philosophers such as G. E. Moore and C. D. Broad. Their case, a very convincing one to me, does not rest at all on religion. Ethics has no more direct dependence on religion than mathematics or science. But this does not preclude morality from being, as most persons would take it to be, at the very heart of reliion.

It is so not just because the ultimate is also supreme perfection, and commitment to it is also therefore commitment to what is surpassingly good, but also because it is in the refinement of ethical understanding, in the sharpening of conscience as it may more popularly be put, that the peculiar disclosure of divine intention for us takes place. It is in the voice of our own conscience that the voice of God is most distinctly and significantly heard. This does not make conscience an essentially religious faculty, but it does make it the pre-eminent medium within which the articulation of the mind of God to us takes place. It is here above all that we find our exceptional clue to what God is like and what is our own involvement and special relation to him.

None of this means that devout people are morally infallible or have a monopoly of all good sense and advance in ethical understanding. There are perversions of religion and profound misunderstandings about its nature that have been very gravely detrimental to ethical good sense and which have from time to time brought religion itself into serious discredit. The refinement of moral understanding involves moreover a great deal besides the sharpening of ethical insight as such; it requires sound appreciation of the facts and circumstances in various situations and the over-all consequences of various policies. On these matters the devout may not always be the best authorities, and religion certainly confers no immunity from error on matters of fact. Nor does it always carry with it the guarantee of the finest ethical insight as such. The agnostic may sometimes excel in both regards.

What we can say however is that, other things being equal, the enlivened sense of the transcendent carries with it essentially a refinement of moral sensitivity and that it is moreover to this source that the most impressive advances in ethical principles over the years have been due. This is not the place to justify the latter submission in detail. My concern at the moment is more with the general contention that, while it is inherently impossible for us to rise beyond our finite nature and comprehend the being and mind of God as it is for him, we find the incursion of the divine into specific human experience, and thereby a preeminent clue into what our relation to it should be, in the peculiarly religious toning and refining of moral experience.

This is not the only example, far from it. We may speak in similar terms of our appreciation of the world around us and its significance, and of the impetus this has given, among other things, to the advance of science. The artistic attitude is in the same way close to religion here, and each has immensely fructified the other for that reason. But it is not primarily a matter of general affinity as of moments of profound religious awareness in which the deepening of religious insight as such takes its course in the blending of itself with perceptions and sensitivity in other secular regards which thereby afford distinctive matter, apprehensible in the normal secular way by us, out of which the fullness and the richness and the intimacy of genuine religious existence is shaped, and by which it is also corrected and criticized.

Correction and criticism are indeed of very great importance here. For the distinctively religious factor, in a total religious experience, operates upon and within the other secular features of our situation. These often have faults of their own, and this is how it comes about that we sometimes sincerely ascribe to the voice of God items which are only too grievously marked by our own limitations and failings. It would be fine in some ways if the mind of God were disclosed to us in some indelible and wholly unmistakable way, written in the sky or on tablets of stone or of gold in some inscription which is indisputably divine. Dispute, and presumably doubt, would be at an end. But it does not happen that way. Short of being God ourselves what sanction could we invoke, what are the credentials of a message so conveyed? There is indeed no such way for the voice of God to be heard by finite beings. He speaks in the ways we can understand in his peculiar obtrusion into the normal exercise of the faculties with which he has endowed us. But it is not the mere exercise of finite powers that is involved. There is the peculiar transformation of them which we have the reasons indicated for ascribing to divine intervention in the enlivened sense of the transcendent already described.

A genuine prophet can, for these reasons, be sincerely mistaken, and devout persons have always to be searching out their own minds and hearts to be as sure as they can that what they take to be the voice of god is not the voice of their own errors and failings, or at least tinged by these. That does not preclude firmness of conviction and deliverance. The prophet may speak with authority, but he must be mindful also that he is but a medium, a vessel that is often cracked and broken.

One particular feature of the fallibility of genuine prophetic awareness is the involvement of all of us in the particular circumstances of our age and society. When, as in societies at a relatively low level of moral development, the sense of the divine impinges upon their attitudes, the progress they make will be correspondingly limited and sometimes distorted. If the ethical understanding of a community has not advanced beyond the level of crude retribution and collective guilt, there may well be a genuinely religious ingredient in the perpetuation of ideas which a more enlightened age would find morally abhorrent. What we have to be constantly heeding is the intertwining of genuine religious disclosure and insight with other all too fallible aptitudes and interests of finite creatures. Much in the sacred scriptures of various religions will become more intelligible to us and can be viewed judiciously in their proper setting if we think, as indicated, of divine disclosure as a leaven in the totality of our own aptitudes and aspirations. At the same time the distinctiveness of the transcendent influence must not be lost or wholly merged in the finite media on which it operates.

The precise moment of genuine religious awareness, operating within the functions it claims for its own operation, may not always be easily delimited. It may be sharp as in sudden conversion, but even in these cases there is often a period of subtle maturing in which truly religious elements come to their open and more explicit formulation. More commonly, although religious awareness and sensitivity may be clear and explicit, it has its own ebb and flow, it merges itself in other concentrations of attention, it may be gentle and unobtrusive, in acts of worship or meditation, much as aesthetic awareness is not always easily delimited and isolated from the observations and attentiveness which it takes up into itself. It is for these reasons that some may even fail to detect the moment of live religious awareness or allow it in retrospection to be lost in the media which it embraces. This, in particular is where very careful thought is needed in our times to detect and uphold the element of genuine religious awareness against crude and bogus travesties of it.

This is all the more the case because the live religious awareness lives on in other experiences and practices and also perpetuates itself dispositionally in our way of living as a whole. Its occurrence may be known obliquely and indirectly, and this in notable cases is no mean assurance of its presence. It may well become apparent by its fruits. But we can never rely on that alone. The enlivened individual awareness is the indispensable religious factor, and it is out of it preeminently that the distinctively religious shape of any faith is formed.

In my fuller discussion of these matters, in my book Our Experience of God, I also ascribed particular importance to what I described as the patterning of religious experience. There are significant recurrences and variations which I sought to describe. It has often been found, for example, that the enlivened awareness of transcendent being often comes about in situations where we have least justification for expecting it, for example in states of an overwhelming sense of guilt. The latter, especially a sense of grievous wrong-doing, comes between us and one another and between us and God, it drives us on our own inner resources which dry up without the sustaining sense of the world around us and of other persons. It is in this debility that we find the real penalty of sin. But, surprisingly, it is often in just this situation of despair and desperation that men have found the onset of the renewed awareness, sometimes gentle, sometimes disturbing, of infinite being as the end and sustainer of their own existence; and life as a whole becomes renewed again and transformed. The recurrence of this, its variations and the extension of it into the religious consciousness of various societies, builds itself up over the ages into the sense of God, not as mere remote sustainer or `Unmoved Mover', but as a seeking reconciling God peculiarly involved in what we are and in our relationship with him. This is, to my mind, a very important aspect of the emergence of the more theistic forms of religion.

The same may be said of other situations of desperation, whether we bring them on ourselves or not. It does not follow that distressing circumstances and evil are straightaway resolved. Appalling evil is still with us and presents the severest tension and strain for religious commitment. It is not a problem I can lightly deviate into now. But in these situations also men have found the sustaining and recurring sense of God invading their attitudes as a whole and giving them renewal of strength. God comes to be known as `an ever present help in trouble'.

My submission, without pursuing any of these illustrations in further detail here, is that it is in the substance and the patterning, which I would also much stress, of the moulding and refining of otherwise neutral sensitivities and attitudes by the insistent impact of the transcendent rather than in a priori and essentially empty attempts to determine abstract properties of God, that we find the vindication and shaping, as well as the appropriate critique, of the more particular affirmations and practices of actual living religions. The parallel with `other minds' is here very close. We do not, as I have persistently maintained elsewhere, know the minds of other persons as we know our own; however close our relationships may be, however intimate, there is an essential element of mediation. The relation we have with God is no less intimate and close because it comes in the mediation of the peculiar modification of our own experience, it is as close as finite-infinite relationships can be, and to those who experience it profoundly there is no barrier that matters.

For many who persist in an agnostic or skeptical view of religion I suspect that a major determinant of their attitude is the expectation that religion must vindicate itself for them, if at all, in some form of supernatural experience of which finite beings are not capable at all. This is the sophisticated version of the expectation that the astronauts may discover God for us. What we need is to know better where and how to look, and to persevere more in the demanding discipline of looking in the right way. Far too often we take it all to be a matter of a few formal considerations one way or the other when in fact it is a matter of living committed lives in the closest association with the witness of profound experience over the ages.

Closely related to the same mistake is the supposition that religious experience is essentially and wholly a private matter. It has to be initially and in itself private, but what matters most is not the intimations of God that we may chance to have in our more exclusively private existence, but rather the absorption into our individual awareness of the wealth and significance of the sustained and developing religious awareness of men down the ages. It is not in a void that we encounter God but in all the rich diversities of our cultures and the formative part of religion within them. This is what must come alive for us in our individual experience.

This is what is sustained for us in various ritual and symbolic practices. How these function, and where they are genuine and healthy, is a subject in itself. There can clearly be perversions and parasitic imitations, just as there can be over-intellectualized treatments of practices where the true significance is closely bound up with the figurative and symbolic expression. Symbolism is not a thing apart, a decorative superimposition, it is a major, and often indispensable way of articulating what is profoundly perceived and felt and finds its appropriate depth in the fertilization and sustaining of one another's experience within a continuing social unit. At the same time the symbol is not final, and the ritual must not become an end in itself, much less be exploited for purposes extrinsic to its proper motivation, indeed as has sometimes happened evil purposes.

All the same, in the last resort, the symbol is not final and it does not exist for itself. It derives its proper power from the continuity of the experience it expresses. The same is true in art. Poetry, or other forms of art, which depend entirely on lively image or emotional overtones, is not the finest. It palls unless it high-lights or exhibits something distinctive and notable, however impossible it may be to distil the meaning from its figurative expression. The symbol must not, in religion, take wing on its own, it must be anchored in experience.

The same is true of the more formally credal expressions of religious truth. There is a place for sophisticated formulation, acutely difficult though it is and full of pitfalls, but it is not, alas as has too often been assumed, an a priori intellectual exercise. It proceeds on the basis of what is taken to be conveyed in the medium of live experiences enriching and extending one another in a variety of social contexts. This means that the theologian has a peculiarly difficult task and requires a greater variety of skills and aptitudes than is usually realized, least of all by the practitioners themselves--a point which I much stressed elsewhere.³ It is particularly hard because one has to be responsive to the symbolism, and the appropriate artistry, and also to the critical assessment of all which these convey.

A very serious pitfall, most of all for Western theologians and religious thinkers, is to take some striking religious symbol or story out of its context in the total themes of the scriptures in which it appears. This has happened, for example, when juristic metaphors in the New Testament have been made the basis of doctrines of retributive punishment and vicarious suffering in ways appalling to any moral or intellectual sensitivity. Creda1 affirmations do have their important place, most of all in religions in which the historical factor is important. They help to concentrate attention in the right way. But they must proceed on the basis of what is initially made evident in the formative disclosures in experience.

In Semitic religion there is usually accorded an exceptionally important place to a distinctive form which divine disclosure in human experience is alleged to have taken in a particular stretch of history. This is not the place to assess that claim or the even more astounding claim that the one transcendent reality was able, in some way which baffles all comprehension, to so limit itself as to enter into a fully human limited form in the culmination of the process which had been taking shape in Hebrew history. This remains the central Christian affirmation and I myself make very little sense of recent attempts to retain the formulae and ritual practices of the Christian faith if these central themes, as they seem to me, of the New Testament and traditional Christian understanding are so eroded as to bear little relation to the sources from which they came and the meaning they would normally be given. Far better, it would seem to me to abandon them altogether, though that is far from what I myself commend.

At the moment the question is not the soundness of the distinctive claims of the Christian faith or any other. But there is one point I do want to stress, namely that the assessment of these and like affirmations must, in the last analysis, go back to the profoundest appreciation of the subtle interlacing of normal sensitivity with divine intimation. If this adds up, in the available evidence about Jesus and his background, to the central affirmations of the New Testament and traditional Christian thought, so be it - it is what I myself think. But if the central claims are not to be sustained along those lines I know of no way in which they can be so sustained that can stand in the light of open reflection and criticism today.

It remains most important, however, to recognize that, which ever way the evidence points in respect to the distinctive stances of various religious, this is no bar to the profound recognition of one another's insights and achievements. We have learnt much better today how much of mutual enrichment of one another's experience and insight is possible in this way. The differences, where they remain, must not be blurred, any more than they must be hardened by misunderstanding. We can reach across to one another's practices and histories to the great deepening and enlivening of our own experience, and the gain in this way to the West today is much too evident for me to need to underline it now. We have learnt enormously from varieties of experience that were new to us, and the range of our sensitivity has been much extended. Meditation has acquired a new depth for us, and flights of religious imagination opened up that were little known before. My contention is that the major clue for understanding and assessment, when expertise and scholarship has done its work, is the religious toning and directing of religious experience along the lines indicated.

There is one point of considerable substance which I would like to add. It refers to what I was saying at the beginning about the initial awareness of the transcendent. In my understanding, the transcendent is altogether beyond and other than finite being. Creaturely existence, though wholly dependent, is not any part or mode of ultimate being. This is however much in dispute, not only in extensive features of Eastern thought but in Western philosophies from Plotinus to Hegel and contemporary mystical philosophers like W. T. Stace. This again is a vast issue in itself and the opposition of view varies a great deal in its sharpness. I maintain, however, that this is the crucial issue for today in religious thought. It is not an easy one, and we all have our attachments to entrenched positions which we find hard to surrender. My own allegiance has been made plain in one publication after another. I strongly insist on the distinct reality of finite existences and especially on the peculiar distinctness of persons. On the line we take on this issue will turn, more than on anything else at present, the ultimate understanding we have, and even the sensitivity to genuine religious reality as such. It is an issue we must firmly face, though the last thing we must fall into is the temptation to settle the question lightly out of hand to ensure easy accommodation and good will. The right sort of good will does not call for that sort of price, and is contaminated by it. But we must have this central issue steadily before us, and it is on our success in coping with it, I maintain, that the best eventual progress will be made with all our other major problems and our power to share the wealth of one another's insights and experience.

I have spoken mainly of communication and assessment of truth. No space is left to consider the part which our own responsiveness plays in the process as a whole. The wind may blow `where it listeth' but `prayer and fasting' has its place too. An age committed to exclusively secular pursuits, and those not always the most elevated, can hardly expect to be well appraised of things that have to be `spiritually discerned'. What Simone Weil and others have brought to mind for us about heeding and `waiting on God' is immensely relevant, and this means more than being religiously attentive in a general way, it means also the continual response, in practice as in thought, of individuals in the ebb and flow of the illumination they have in their own religious experience and what they assimilate from the religious life of their community. It is in these terms, in the exchanges of genuine response, in the part we play ourselves in the formulation of our own religious awareness, that we come again, if I may further reflect my personal allegiance, to our understanding of the more theistic approach to religion and our proper participation in it.

Religious experience, so conceived, is not passive, and it does not under-rate the essential mutuality of living, personal relationship as involved centrally in it. The language of prayer and devotion, of struggle and surrender, as well as the essential serenity, bring us to the vitally personal character of religious existence which we are also apt to overlook, even though some like myself may be inclined to over-stress it. The `God of the living', even of the wayward and rebellious, the relentlessly seeking God, is the God I have encountered in my own experience.

I hope such an element of personal testimony is not out of place. What matters for us here is that, in discussion and amity, we should enter into one another's views and sensitivity with as much imaginative insight and empathy as we can. Where the gaps can be closed let us hasten to do so, but our main concern is with the truth and `the wind of the argument withersoever it takes us'. We must understand as much as we can across the boundaries, with humility as much as with firmness. There is no place in true religion for confrontation or rancour, there is all the place in the world for empathy and humility.

King's College

University of London

NOTES

1. See also Chap. 3 of my Persons and Life After Death (London: Macmillan, l978).

2. New Essays in Philosophical Theology, Chap. XI.

3. "What is Theology?" Freedom and History, Chap. XVII.

CRITIQUE AND HERMENEUTIC

IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

BENOIT GARCEAU

When called to reflect on religion, as on other works of man, the philosopher seeks to understand it. But there are many ways to understand a phenomenon, firstly, to grasp its meaning and to express it in clear and distinct concepts; secondly, to explain it or to sort out the conditions which make it possible; finally, to judge its value. Any search to understand a phenomenon must attempt to answer three questions: What is it; Why is it thus; and Is it as it ought to be? These three questions call upon three different yet indissociable functions of the intellect: its hermeneutic, explanatory, and critical functions.

The philosopher who has decided to try to understand religion soon discovers that he is entering a domain dominated by a separation of the methods of understanding and a fragmentation of religious language. This discretely respected division of labor reserves for the theologian the hermeneutic of religion, for the psychologist and the sociologist its explanation, and for the philosopher its critique. This fragmentation of language arises not only from the fact that each of these disciplines employs a particular mode of understanding, but also from the fact that within each of these languages there are numerous and varied concepts of religion.

It is necessary for philosophers to confront this situation with courage and lucidity, recognizing that their principal task by which they have something valid to contribute to the understanding of religion is to seek to overcome this fragmentation in the human understanding of religion. Guided by this fundamental intent, the only way open is to redo on one's own each of the three questions which religion raises for the intellect--to carry out a repetition of the three, hermeneutic, explanatory and critical functions of the understanding in relation to the religious fact. This implies that the philosopher of religion begins to listen to the theologies, the religious sciences, and the critiques of religion in order to be sure how religion is understood. Above all one must examine closely the presuppositions and consequences of each of these groups of disciplines and thus prepare the elaboration of a theory of religious practice.

What is thus sketched out is nothing less than a new type of philosophy of religion which has become necessary by reason of a break-up of religious language. It is new in contrast to the two principal ways in which, in the western tradition, philosophers have studied religion by using either hermeneutic or critique. Whereas the former was a reflection from within the faith and aimed at understanding its content, the latter dealt with religion as a given which did not escape the rule of reason. It submitted religion to a model of rationality with the more or less explicit goal of guaranteeing the autonomy and freedom of reason in relation to religion. This is not the occasion to write at length on the difficulties raised by each of these approaches to a philosophical study of religion. It is sufficient to note that each employs a particular function of the intellect--either hermeneutic or critical. The hermeneutic of religion only partially answers the questions asked of the intellect by the religious fact. The critique of religion, when separated from a hermeneutic, risks being satisfied with generalities which reduce the religious given to a pre-established rational framework. Both lead to a very impoverished language--a kind of Logos without Praxis.

In this initial sketch of a "repetition" of one mode of discourse on religion, I propose to reflect on a particular type of critique of religion in order to show how it is impossible for the critique to isolate itself from the hermeneutic: how it is necessary at a certain stage for a critique to appeal to a hermeneutic. I have chosen the critique developed in these times especially in the Anglo-Saxon context of empirical philosophy. In order to situate this, I shall begin by comparing it to other existing types; then I will show the manner in which this critique, which is entirely taken up with judging the value of religion, finds itself driven, despite itself, to restate a presupposed question regarding the nature of religious faith.

The empiricist critique of religion took the form of a critique of the validity of religious language, that is to say, it disputed the right of such language to be a candidate for truth or falsity. That questioning was carried out in two different manners; first, in the name of a theory of meaning which stipulates the criteria to which all language must conform in order to be considered as a possible candidate for truth, and second in the name of a theory of knowledge or of a general epistemology. The critique of the meaning of the expressions of faith is a relatively recent enterprise developed by analytic philosophy of religion. It questions something prior to the truth of the expressions of faith, namely, their aptitude for being held to be sensed--the only type of expressions concerning which one can ask if they be true or false. The skepticism that inspires this is not a theological one, questioning in the name of historical data or of a philosophical worldview the truth of religious faith. Rather, it is a "meta-theological" skepticism which questions the validity of the language of faith uniquely in the name of a logical analysis of language. Only with difficulty can this critique of meaning, though it depends ultimately upon a theory of meaning, be isolated from a general theory of knowledge, in particular from a model of knowledge borrowed from the practice of science and rationally justified only on the basis of the fruitfulness of science.

In contrast, the critique of the validity of theological language or discourse based upon a theory of knowledge manifests greater sincerity and clarity regarding its presuppositions, and is practiced today by some followers of the critical rationalism of K. Popper. It does not stop at the language of faith, nor is it preoccupied with judging whether or not it has meaning. Rather it sees in religious faith a transgression of the essential function of reason, namely, to submit to criticism all hypotheses, to try to refute all conjectures without ever pretending to have ethical certitude and without any other manner of approaching truth than through its passing the test of falsification.

I would like to attend to the first form of the critique of the validity of the language of faith, that which is based upon a theory of meaning. According to this theory, which has been reformulated several times since the heydey of logical positivism, a statement can be held as declarative or having a referential value--and therefore being a candidate for truth--only if in principle it is able to be controlled, or subject to verification or falsification, on the basis of empirical evidence. The critique itself consists in judging that statements made by a believer regarding God have only the appearance of declarative statements, since the believer is incapable of showing the manner in which these statements could be verified or falsified. Hence they should be eliminated from all language which claims truth.

One could think that this critique of the validity of language regarding faith presents the believer with a much less serious challenge than the critique of the genesis of religion¹ introduced in our culture by the three masters of suspicion, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, which seem to create a much more profound crisis for religious faith. This consists in holding the language of faith to be that of a consciousness which is false or not really as it appears; that it is language which has been elaborated with the aim of concealing and justifying the unrecognized interests of one's consciousness. The Marxist theory of ideology, the Freudian analysis of illusion, the Nietzschean genealogy of morals do not consist in questioning that its statements are true or that they are possible candidates for the truth. More radically, they consider them to be residues of the unconscious, whose origin must be reconstructed, even in its material conditions, in order to explain them and to allow consciousness to become independent of them. The radical character of this critique is clear for, as S. Breton has shown, it is the critique not only of a principle, but of all principles. Any discussion on the truth or falsity of a theological statement is prohibited when from the outset it is held to be ideological or illusory, and explicable by illogical individual or social factors.

What gives the critique of the validity of religion its importance is that without it the critique of its origin is not justified, for it is the critique of validity as a necessary presupposition for the critique of origin. When the critic of ideology or of illusion undertakes to retrace the origin of a thought in order to explain it, he is convinced that this research has interest and promises useful results. But this research can be of interest only if he is convinced that religious thought, which he wants to explain by the material conditions of its possibility, does not have the right to be held as true and that despite this it nonetheless persists in being cultivated by many. From the beginning among critics of ideology or of illusion there is always an implicit value judgment on that which one attempts to explain as being an anomaly or a symptom of a sickness which must be explained by him in order to free the patient. This value judgment, unless it be only a prejudice, rests upon a critique of the validity of the language of religious faith.

In Marx, one finds one of the most significant examples of this necessary dependence of the critique of the origin of religion upon a critique of its validity. He is convinced that religion is both a false substitute for true happiness and a form of protest against human misery, and hence that it will disappear when man takes into his own hands the direction of his existence. But this conviction depends upon another which is less explicit in Marx's work, but constantly necessary to justify the first. This is the conviction common to all rational atheists that religion has its source in ignorance of the powers of nature and of society, and that it would disappear with the progress of science, just as did alchemy and astrology with the progress of chemistry and astronomy.² Only this rationalist postulate--which, it is necessary to insist, deals with the validity of a language of faith--explains that among the products of consciousness enumerated in the German Ideology--religion, morality, art, philosophy--only religion must completely disappear. Morals, philosophy and art can be transformed and become moments of human praxis; only religion cannot be retained, precisely because it is presupposed to be irreconcilable with scientific progress. This means that the Marxist critique of the origin of religion is based upon a prior critique which the Enlightenment proposed as its program and which the meta-theological skeptic of our era takes up once again in order to assure its success, namely, the critique of the validity of the language of faith.³

Therefore, let us examine more closely this critique of the validity of religion which is carried out in the name of a theory of meaning. This is not the place to present a history of the debates provoked by this critique since it first was formulated in a precise manner by A. Flew.⁴ Nor is it the place to examine all the strategies employed to demonstrate, either against this critique the validity of the language of faith, or in agreement with this critique that its result has been to purify religious faith from unsuitable language. I prefer to focus instead on an answer to this critique which I consider most satisfactory because it comes from analytic philosophy itself in which the critique is rooted, and because it submits each of its two principle theses to scrupulously careful examination. This is R.S. Heimbeck's reply in his work Theology and Meaning.⁵ For reasons I do not understand this has received little attention by analytic philosophers of religion, though it offers the most convincing criticism of the empiricist critique of the validity of the language of faith.

The first thesis of meta-theological skepticism, according to Heimbeck, cannot withstand criticism. It is not true that an expression must be verifiable or falsifiable in order for it to have a referential value or to be used to express a proposition. To believe so is to fail to note the difference between the criterion of meaning of a statement and evidence of the senses. The criterion of meaning designates the conditions which must be fulfilled in order that a statement may serve to express a true or false proposition, while evidence of the senses designates the sensible conditions which must be satisfied in order that we might know or have the right to believe that this proposition is true or false.⁶ Now, the sufficient and necessary condition in order that a statement might express a true or false proposition is not that it be controlled by verification or falsification: its verifiability and its falsifiability only constitute sufficient, but not necessary conditions for its referential value. The fact that a statement is verifiable or falsifiable, that is, controllable, suffices for one to suppose that it says something about what is real, but it is not necessary that it be controllable in order for it to have such meaning. The sufficient and necessary condition of its referential value consists rather in the fact that it has with other propositions relations of implication or incompatibility.⁷ Applied to theological language, this criterion allows one to recognize among the statements used by the believer those which are declarative propositions and hence candidates for truth or falsity. The statement "God is love," for example, has referential value if it is used by the believer in such a way that it entails relations of implication or incompatibility with other propositions. That is to say, if the believer, in making this statement, implies that "God knows all men, wants their well-being and in order to realize it is prepared to give himself," and if it excludes that "God wants the eternal misery of all men."⁸

Having shown that the requirements of verifiability or falsifiability imposed on theological expressions so that they may have meaning result from an unfortunate confusion between verification and semantic entailment, between falsification and semantic incompatibility, between sensible evidence and criterion of meaning, Heimbeck attempts to prove that the second thesis of meta-theological skepticism is equally untenable, and that theological statements are as a matter of fact verifiable and falsifiable in a decisive manner on the basis of empirical givens. Let us note immediately that this task is not strictly necessary in order to refute the empiricist critique of the validity of theological statements; this refutation was already accomplished when it was shown that these expressions do not have to be controllable by verification or falsification in order to be held as valid. If they maintain relations of implication or incompatibility with other propositions these statements have a referential value; they serve to express propositions and are candidates for truth. But Heimbeck wants to do more.

For the skeptic who is steadfast in claiming that a statement has cognitive value only if there exists in principle a way of controlling it empirically, he takes up the task of showing that in theological language there are propositions (and precisely those which provide the foundation of this language) which are not withdrawn from the requirements of falsifiability and verifiability. If his argument succeeds in convincing the reader, then one can see what it promises: to justify one's recognizing objective value for statements of faith which serve as principles for all theological discourse. In this sense, such discourse, far from being reduced to what Wisdom and Flew called a "picture preference,"⁹ would have the value of propositions susceptible to being empirically controlled.

A theological system, according to Heimbeck, is formed from two different kinds of propositions: those which admit of no relation of implication or incompatibility with empirically verifiable or falsifiable propositions (for example, "God exists," "God is triune," "God is omnipotent"), and those which maintain such a bond (for example, "God raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, near Jerusalem, at time₂" which implies the truth of the following two propositions: "Jesus of Nazareth died near Jerusalem, at time₁," and "Jesus of Nazareth was alive in the vicinity of Jerusalem, at time₃").¹⁰ In traditional Christian theism, propositions of the second kind, grounded on empirical data, serve as the foundation for the first. Heimbeck finds it strange that in recent meta-theological debate one is exclusively occupied with the first.¹¹ An abstraction has been performed upon the language of faith, retaining for submission to logical analysis only the propositions not having any relation of implication or of incompatibility with empirically controllable propositions. However, when he asserts "God loves all men"--a proposition without empirical incidence--the believer bases the assertion on this other: "God sent His own Son in order to offer his life for the sins of the world," and this on still another: "The Word was made flesh in the person of Jesus Christ," and this finally on this other which implies empirically verifiable propositions and excludes others: "God raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, near Jerusalem, at time_.2"¹² It is necessary therefore, holds Heimbeck, to reverse the flow and apply logical analysis on those propositions anchored in statements of observable facts which serve as principles procuring for all others their positive legitimation.

Heimbeck has no trouble showing the falsifiability of these empirical theological propositions. If a theological proposition has a purely empirical consequence and if this consequence is falsifiable in a conclusive way on the sole basis of empirical data, then the antecedent proposition (by analogy with modus tollens) is ipso facto falsifiable in a conclusive manner on the sole basis of empirical data. If there is some purely empirical factor which is incompatible with a theological proposition and if this incompatible is verifiable in a conclusive manner solely on the basis of empirical data, then the antecedent proposition (by analogy to modus pomendo ponens) is ipso facto falsifiable in a decisive way on the sole basis of empirical data.¹³ For example, the proposition "God raised Jesus of Nazareth near Jerusalem, at time₂" is falsifiable in a decisive way on the basis of empirical data from the fact that it implies "Jesus of Nazareth died, in the vicinity of Jerusalem, at time₁", and "Jesus of Nazareth was living, in the vicinity of Jerusalem, at time₃". These are falsifiable propositions on the basis of empirical givens, or on the basis that they exclude that "Jesus of Nazareth was dead at moment₃", which is itself verifiable in a conclusive manner on the basis of empirical data.

Are such theological propositions having consequents or empirical incompatibles equally verifiable in a conclusive manner? Are they controllable to the extent of being able to be verified by empirical evidence? Yes, maintains Heimbeck, on condition that one acknowledge the originality of the reasoning employed by the believer in order to adhere to this kind of proposition. It is no longer a question of a reasoning by implication or incompatibility, but by inference proceeding from an agglomeration of the signs of that which is found signified therein.¹⁴ To exclude this type of reasoning, under the pretext that it is never conclusive, is, in his opinion, to hold a monolithic conception of reason, to acknowledge only one method, and to be obliged not to recognize the validity of a process which is used not only by clinical psychology and history, but also by the physical sciences.¹⁵ Certainly, this reasoning from signs to the thing signified implies an a priori. The choice of empirical data serving as signs signifying the truth of a theological proposition is itself determined by the context to which belongs the theological proposition which empirical data are able to verify. But this circle in which reasoning by signs moves is not unique to the believer; even the scholar cannot avoid selecting empirical data on the basis of a theoretical proposition which the same date serve to control or justify.

The effort made by Heimbeck to show that theological language is empirically controllable led him to defend three closely related theses: 1. In theological language, everything depends upon an aggregation of empirical propositions joined to propositions which are conclusively controllable on the basis of empirical evidence; 2. These propositions, which give all the others their positive justification, are falsifiable and then empirical incompatibles are verifiable; 3. Finally, these propositions are verifiable to the degree that they are the result of an inference from signs to what is signified. Of these three theses, the second is unassailable if the two others are true. In effect, if there are empirical propositions at the source of theological language, which are obtained by inference from an agglomeration of signs and which are verifiable by those signs, there is no difficulty in allowing that in this language there are propositions which are falsifiable in a conclusive manner on the basis of the evidence of the senses.

But does theological language truly rest upon an aggregate of empirical propositions, and are these obtained by inferences based upon an agglomeration of signs? This question is raised by Heimbeck's reply to the critique of the validity of the language of faith. Evidently, this is a question to be resolved by research on the nature of theology and faith, which is a matter for theology. This means that at this stage in its development, the critique of the validity of theological language calls upon an hermeneutic of religious faith, and that the philosopher must therefore suspend his critique and question the theologian in order to learn how religious faith understands itself and how it judges its own language.

M.L. Diamond's¹⁶ recent reaction gives important evidence that the question raised by Heimbeck's work concerns the nature of theology. One of the rare representatives of analytical philosophy of religion to take Theology and Meaning into account, Diamond's brief commentaries help to understand the silence which surrounds this book. In Diamond's view, Heimbeck's position rests on an extremely naive conception of theology, that of the "fundamentalist" who presupposes that everything in Scripture is to be taken according to the letter and that Scripture has unquestionable authority. With such a conception of theology, Heimbeck excludes himself from the debate on the verification of statements of faith and condemns himself to not being heard by the participants involved in this debate. Though they recognize that "fundamentalists" have no difficulty in verifying the statements of their faith, fundamentalists remain of no interest because their criteria of credibility are irrevocably outdated by the development of science and have been abandoned by more enlightened theologians.¹⁷

This reaction is very significant. Heimbeck's answer to the critique of the validity of theological language is criticized and rejected in the name of what theology ought to be. Because it employs a conception of theology which one judges no longer to be in agreement with the criteria of rationality developed by scientific thought, Heimbeck's thesis does not have the right to be heard in discussions on the validity of theology. This reaction reveals a more or less conscious decision at all costs to keep the debate on grounds of validity. This concerns no longer, however, the validity of the expressions of faith, but that of a conception of theology which is to be kept or done away with according as it is or is not in conformity with the criteria imposed by scientific reason.

However, Heimbeck's thesis raises a question of truth--more precisely, a double question of truth: (a) Is it true that theological language depends upon an aggregate of empirical propositions obtained by inference from an agglomeration of signs? and (b) Is this language itself true? The first question calls, as we have underlined, for a hermeneutic of theology and of faith; the second calls for a critique of the language of faith, no longer as to its origin or validity, but as regards its truth.

What does a philosopher engaged in the debate on theology and verification learn from a hermeneutic of religious faith? One learns two elementary truths without which this debate will be poorly oriented from the outset. One learns, in the first place, that religious faith cannot be reduced to the inevitable outcome of a challenge which would be imposed from without, as would be the case of just any fact. If the Jewish faith is never separable from the experience of the Exodus, if the Christian faith always refers to witnessing the resurrection of Christ, they are, for all that, not understood by those who live them as inferences proceeding from empirical data, similar to the adherence of an historian or psychoanalyst to an hypothesis suggested by reading documents. To liken it to the attitude of a scholar who concerns himself with a theory which can be abandoned and replaced as soon as it no longer succeeds in giving an account of all the facts would be to misunderstand faith. To acknowledge in theological language, as Heimbeck does with good reason, the utilization of the criteria of falsifiability and of verifiability in a manner which is not very different from that which one finds in scientific language, does not necessarily imply that faith itself is inferred from empirical data and is able to be certified or controlled by such date.

Though its certitude is always without evidence, faith never does without signs. This is the second elementary truth which a hermeneutic of faith would bring to light. The presence of signs