Shades of Divinity
On the God of the Christians (and on one or two others) by Rémi Brague
St. Augustine's Press, 2013
(160 pages, $26.00, hardcover)
reviewed by S. M. Hutchens
The advent of our Lord, the apostolic account of the cosmic significance of his divine Sonship, and the teaching of the Church on the character of his unity with the Father and Holy Spirit require that all valid utterance about God be subject to the doctrine of Christ, who said, "He who has seen me has seen the Father." This does not disqualify all understandings of or approaches to God not consciously within the sphere of orthodox Christology, but orients them toward a telos in light of which they must be judged and their meaning as truth must be found.
Grace creates a pro-evangelical suspension in which unbaptized conceptions of God may live until they meet Christ, but with critical insistence that they, with every thought, become captive to obey him, or be regarded as the "proud obstacle" to which Pascal is referring when he rejects the god of the philosophers. Translators of the Bible encounter these conceptualizations when confronting the dilemma of whether the name of a tribal deity can be transferred to the Christian God, ignorantly worshiped, and are disturbed at the power that lies within their hands to make that determination for speakers of the receptor language.
A Form of Husbandry
It is upon this supremely difficult field that Christian philosophers like Rémi Brague must make a multitude of judgments when they attempt to distinguish between the Christian God and the deities of other faiths, particularly of the other "Abrahamic faiths" of Judaism and Islam. This reviewer did not find it encouraging when in his introduction he said he writes as a philosopher who casts a respectful eye on theology because that science begins by interrogating itself on what other forms of knowledge assume: the very existence of the object it studies, and "does not advance except by constantly seeking an ever purer meaning of the substantive 'God' and the verb 'to exist'" (xv).
The existence of God as a question, however, I cannot regard as "theology," a science which finds itself without meaning unless it is that very form of knowledge that assumes the existence of its object, and which is based, in the "Abrahamic faiths" at least, not upon a theoretical vision in which the existence of God may take the form of a question, but upon belief in his self-revelation—even if it is, as in Milton, the devils who are doing the theologizing.
The Bible is a book of theology, and regards all creation as founded in and with the knowledge of God, with each discrete existence reflecting this relation in a way proper to itself. It does not begin from outside the question of God's existence to ask utrum Deus sit and offer proofs in his favor, but with the declarative statement that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth—with a known God about whom there is more to be said. Theology, fides quaerens intellectum, is called into the depths of understanding by faithful and ever more submissive knowledge of what God has said, and is saying, about himself.
What is called natural theology does not move from ignorance of God to belief in him through the witness of nature, but is an explication by means of nature's witness of the knowledge of him given to all men. Like biblical revelation, natural theology begins with a known God about whom there is more to be said, and in whom ignorance of his existence is, in all men, a product of a vermiculated will rather than innocent nescience to be remedied by thought. The thinker cannot pull himself up by his own bootstraps in the matter of the knowledge of God, man, or anything else. His office is a form of husbandry, to take what he is given in the prayer which is both gift and intellectual labor and deliver it uncorrupted to others.
The Superior Orbit of Faith
The question of whether God exists is asked by those who, to address it, have made themselves, often with the intent of serving its advantage, free of theology, that is, by the philosopher who does not, by definition, in the first order of his life as such, believe himself dependent upon revelation, but thinks he may consider God under a general rubric of being in which the theorist is free to postulate, affirm, prove, disprove, reject, or suspend God's existence as the end of metaphysical and existential inquiry. Theology, at least among Christians, Jews, and Muslims, is a science pursued within the superior, but not exclusive, orbit of faith and revelation, open to philosophers at (but not as) the end of philosophy, when the question about the existence of God has been, or is at least assumed to have been, answered from outside philosophy.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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