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.
The difference between philosophy and theology does not necessarily put them at odds, but does, because each claims the Whole as its proper study, require for coexistence the final submission of the categories of one to those of the other. The great battle over the analogia entis, for example, may not be resolved among Christians until it is understood that the relationship between one kind of "being" and another (that is, between God on one hand and creation on the other) is Christ himself—this resolution not "solving" or eradicating the question, but translating the philosophical difficulty or conundrum into the mystery of our faith and the theology that speaks of him in the sphere of revelation.
Liable to Misstep
This invites the question of what effect, on any subject whatever, the exposition of one who is speaking as a philosopher will have upon what are principally theological questions—whether philosophy and theology resonate or interfere with each other. It is in the places where they appear to interfere that I have difficulty with Brague's book. Let us consider his summary of human love.
In a word, human love is limited, which allows it to be sinful, that is, to change into its opposite. It is this way, because what connects us to the beloved does not exhaust what we are. The relation that ties us to the other is not the same thing as our nature. In other words, love is something we experience, that we live, that we possess—however one would like to put it. But it is never by itself what we are. (63)
The view that human love is limited simply by being human should seem immediately discordant to instructed Christians. In fact, it is challenged by the application of a Christology that should be intuitive by the humanness of the Son of Man in whom the love of God is perfectly expressed. The Scriptures connect all true human love at the root of this love: "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us and sent his Son. . . ." "In this is the love of God made manifest, that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." The love of Christ is the love of the godhead for creation—"for God so loved the cosmos"—a flawless, eternal love that is both human and divine, and communicates the person of God to men, a love those who follow and obey him, sinners though they are, are given for their own, so that it simply cannot be said as a global proposal, "human love is limited." If it is, the reasoning that follows from that proposition must also be questioned.
Human love of this kind does not and cannot "change into its opposite" if Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Here "love" as a free, philosophical abstraction, unencumbered by theology which the author admires, but to which he does not submit, does not so much destroy all the propositions he may put forward on the character of love, but fragments the exposition and makes it ambiguous wherever a misstep is made, not because the misstep is philosophical, but because philosophy is liable to make missteps when it does not keep its eye on the theology it is bound to serve.
Not Negated but Engulfed
Another example of the mixture of worthy aid to contemplation with divergence from the theological path is Brague's treatment of sexuality and the image of God (69f.). The difficulties are more subtle here. He begins with the acknowledgement that "Christians, like the Jews before them, have said about sexuality something that derives directly from their way of seeing God," going forward to an enlightening discourse about pagan conceptions of the sexuality of God or the gods. He quickly runs into trouble, however, when he moves to the proposition that in the God of Israel masculinity is severed from virility—"virility" defined as the "the capacity of a [human] male to impregnate a female."
This conceptualization becomes ambiguous when subjected to the biblical narrative concerning Christ, where the question arises of how the severance can be absolute, the sexual relation "not being found in the world of the divine" (72), when the action of the One in whose image man was created as a sexual being with a virgin produced a virile (but celibate) male. While the Christian faith does indeed insist on an absolute division between "the world of the divine" and that of its creation, it also insists upon an equally absolute, perfect, incarnational, personal relation between these worlds in Christ, in whom human sexuality is not negated, but, in the apt term of C. S. Lewis, "engulfed."
If this is not given proper notice in any consideration of the relationship of the Creator and his creation, the Incarnation must be explained in terms of demiurgic activity rather than the direct application of the Life of God to the Virgin Mary. Here at the center of things we have an imponderable mystery, but believe that the result of this was the perfect and sexually whole theanthropos who is in himself the fundamental mystery of the faith to whom his own begottenness refers in every respect.
Diverted from Considering Order
An achristological exposition of the "uncoupling of paternity and virility" logically leads to,
All things being equal, the image of paternity for creation is preferable to that of maternity. But God's paternity is not virility, as we have seen. As a consequence, the superiority of paternity does not entail the primacy of virility over femininity. God is father rather than mother. But he is not more male than female. And the fact that God is a father does not confer any privilege upon those, among human beings, whose masculine sex makes them capable of being fathers. . . . [The idea of creation] entails a neutralization of the difference between the sexes, "neutralization," I say, not suppression, it is rendered not relevant. In particular, it entails that virility has no privilege over femininity, neither in itself nor as an analogy of the divine. (76–78)
Brague acknowledges that St. Paul says the paternity of God is that "from which all paternity of heaven and on earth is named," but for him this is "an appeal to rethink human paternity in the light of divine paternity. This entails purifying [!] human paternity as much as possible from every element of 'virility'" (76).
The result here is a free, theoretical complex of ideas (that is, a philosophy), driven by a logic that diverts the reader from the consideration of order, particularly in hierarchies of equals,
in which biblical narrative would involve him: the image of paternity in creation as preferable to that of maternity, but not indicative of any deep significance beyond that, the severance, using the concepts of virility as opposed to divine paternity and alleged privilege of virility over femininity, of the ordered connection between man and woman and Christ and God, and a secular concept of "privilege" to gather the elements and render them ambiguous in light of a biblical theology of headship, submission, spousal love, obedience, apostolic order in the Church, and their connections with one another.
This book has many sage observations by a complex and learned author who is not afraid to sacrifice sacred cows, particularly those who, in the name of ecumenical amity, seek to nose out friendly connections between religions where their existence may reasonably be questioned. A book on the God of the Christians, however, would better have been written by a theologian, and by this I mean a person in whose theoretical vision divine self-revelation is treated as primary and definitive. •
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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