Medieval Christian Theology: God
"O LORD my God, how excellent is your greatness! you are clothed with majesty and splendor. You wrap yourself with light as with a cloak and spread out the heavens like a curtain." — Psalms 104:1-2
"Thou art mighty, O Lord, and thy truth is round about thee." — Psalms 88:9
"God is able to do all things more abundantly than we desire or understand."— Ephesians 3:20
"You alone, Lord, are what You are and You are who You are." — Anselm, Proslogion 22
"Thow thiself art bygynnynge, berere, ledere, path, and terme; to look on thee, that is oure ende." — Chaucer, Boece, III.9
God creating the universe: the light emanating from his head indicates the primordial power of the divine, the eyes on his robe indicate his omniscience, the compass in his hands indicates the order with which he infuses the world. From the French Bible historiale, illuminated by Guyart des Moulins, 1411.
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In common with the other theisms among world religions (Judaism, Islam, Vedantic Hinduism, etc.), Christians understood—and understand—God to be a single, unified, transcendentally powerful divine Entity: not one great god among a host of lesser gods, like Zeus among the venal Olympians or the Norse Odin presiding over the unruly Æsir; nor a old paternal supergod with a white beard, like El, the chairman of the Canaanite divine council. Nor did Christians think of God as an all-seeing “Thought Thinking Itself,” as Aristotle would have it, nor as a merely abstract and transcendental “Form of the Good,” as the Platonists conjectured; nor simply, as the ancient Zoroastrians or Manichaeans insisted, the most powerful force for Good in the universe, against whom operated a nearly as powerful, or perhaps equally powerful, force for Evil.
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God, as medieval Christians understood and worshiped him, was preeminently the creator of the entire cosmos. This was not a God who, like Plato's Demiurge, merely imprinted his organizing ideas upon a shapeless and chaotic primordial matter, but was instead the creator of matter itself, and not only of matter, but of everything. Eternally existing beyond what we think of as time and space, God brought the universe out of existence literally ex nihilo, out of nothing. He is the maker, as the fourth-century Nicene Creed puts it, of “all things seen and unseen,” thus not only of angels and insects, of humans, wild beasts, fish and fowl, of mountains and trees, seas and winds, the four elements, the seven planets, and the fixed stars, but also of the natural order (we might now say “laws”) that governs them all, and of both time and space. He was the creator both of something as eminently visible and beautiful as light itself and as invisible, and yet as real, as each individual human, angelic, and animal soul.
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"From [God] derives every mode of being, every species, every order, all measure, number, and weight. He is the source of all that exists in nature, whatever its kind, whatsoever its value, and of the seeds of forms, and the forms of seeds, and the motions of seeds and forms. He has given to flesh its origin, beauty, health, fertility in propagation, the arrangement of the bodily organs, and the health that comes from their harmony. He has endowed even the soul of irrational creatures with memory, sense, and appetite, but above all this, he has given the rational soul thought, intelligence, and will. He has not abandoned even the inner parts of the smallest and lowliest creature, or the bird’s feather (to say nothing of the heavens and the earth, the angels and mankind)—he has not left them without a harmony of their constituent parts, a kind of peace.” — Augustine of Hippo, City of God, V.11, trans. Henry Bettenson |
Early and medieval Christians, along with their Jewish forebears, had developed the religious intuition that God, far beyond being merely the creator of the universe, was in fact the very ground of Being itself. In the theophany experienced by Moses in the Book of Exodus, God reveals to the prophet what later thinkers (Thomas Aquinas, for example) regarded as his true name: "I am that I am" (or, alternately translated, "I will be what I will be" or even "He is who He is") (Exodus 3:14). This name resonates with one of God's other important names in the Hebrew Bible, YHWH, which seems to derive from a root meaning "to be" and may have meant something like "He who is" or even "the Be-er." The first-century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, reconciling the truths of Jewish scripture with Platonic metaphysics, saw God as the plenitude of Being itself, prior even to such transcendental ideas as Goodness and Truth. For early Christian thinkers, God was likewise the ground of Being: Augustine speaks of God as interior intimo meo et superior summo meo ("higher than my highest and more inward than my innermost self"--Confessions III.6.11). Anselm of Canterbury, in a more strictly logical approach, famously defines God as id quod nihil maius cogitari possit ("that than which nothing greater can be thought"). And in the terms of the Aristotelian philosophy current from the thirteenth century on, the equation of God with Being itself also implied that God's essence and existence were identical. While we mortals, who experience a disjunct between our essence (our being, what we are, at our core) and our existence (how we are, as we constantly move through time, space, and a host of other conditions), God's essence and existence are perfectly unified: he always is exactly and entirely what he is.
The God who was understood in this way in the Bible and by early Christian theologians was thus, perhaps necessarily, omnipotent, and therefore also omniscient: there was nothing he didn't know and nothing he couldn't do, though some late medieval philosophers kept themselves busy speculating on such logical problems as whether God could choose to commit an evil act, or whether he could change the past. (The orthodox answer to both these problems, by the way, is "no." On a similar note, when an over-clever student once asked St Augustine what God was doing before he created the world, Augustine quipped, "Devising hells for those who ask too many questions!") Less obviously, patristic and medieval theologians also believed that God was, in the final analysis, simple. What they meant by that was that God was a complete unity unto himself: he had no parts, and therefore no potential for deficiency or lack: God needs nothing, which in turn means that the creation of the entire universe, including humankind, was completely gratuitous on God's part, a Gift, a generous outpouring and expression of his love.
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God's simplicity also meant that he was impassible, that is, that he was incapable of suffering change. In order to change, medieval theologians reasoned, God would have to be moved (either physically or "emotionally"), and the ability to be moved implies either a lack within God (which they saw as impossible) or a force greater than God capable of moving him (also impossible). The appearance of change in God, then, was entirely a matter of the viewer's perspective. If God appeared suddenly angry, for example, or merciful, these were only perceptions arising from distorted mortal viewpoints. As John Saward helpfully writes, "God's wrath is the form his love takes when it encounters sin's resistance to love": God is constant, but humans experience him in a variety of ways according to the disposition of their own souls. In this vein, the gates of Dante's Hell (Inferno III) identify God as L'alta giustizia ("exalted justice"): Dante exhorts his readers to comprehend the eternal punishment of the damned as an expression of perfect justice and not of some divine inclination to vengeance, as if God needed to get back at people!
Given God's simplicity and impassibiity and his other modes of transcendence, it might go without saying, that the God of classic Christian theology also has no physical body. Although the Bible speaks not infrequently of God as a sort of corporeal entity—Adam hears God's footsteps in the Garden of Eden, Moses beholds God's back, the Psalms speak of God's mouth, hands, arm, and fingers—medieval thinkers generally understood that these moments have to be read as imagery, as analogical ways of speaking of the manifestation of God's power or wisdom, as aids to the limited imagination of human beings. God's bodilessness also means that God is, strictly speaking, transcendent of the categories of male and female. The biblical account of the creation of humans already hints at this idea:
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"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" — Genesis 1:27
In the New Testament, St Paul perhaps gestures toward the same concept when he tells the Galatians,
"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" — Galatians 4:28
Of course, typical medieval believers, as well as less rigourously-trained clergy, were apt to seize on this more physical imagery and simply think of God, and pray to God, as male—maybe even specifically an older man with a white beard (an image probably ultimately inherited from Canaanite mythology).
The Bible, after all, along with all the creeds and documents of the Church, unwaveringly refers to God using masculine pronouns. Most of the clergy (being male themselves) were content with this arrangement, and they would sometimes argue that this masculine language and imagery was most appropriate to God's majesty and power. However, from the eleventh century on, there was also a growing host of serious medieval Christians (Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen, Marie of Oignies, and others) who felt validated in occasionally using female, especially maternal, imagery for God as well. As the fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich puts it:
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"And thus I saw that God enjoyeth that he is our Fader, and God enjoyeth that he is our Moder, and God enjoyeth that he is our very Spouse and our soule his loved wyfe."
But the religious truth that persisted for medieval Christians, regardless of whether they thought of God primarily abstractly or primarily in corporeal and gendered terms, was that God was a Person. The capital "P" on Person is quite intentional here; one might even say that God is the Person, more self-consistent, more realized, and more real than any mortal person could ever be. To speak of God as a Person is to recognize that he is not just an abstract spiritual power (like "the Force" of Star Wars) or a disinterested Prime Mover (like the clockmaker God of the eighteenth-century Deists), but an agent with intentions. More specifically, God's agency, infinite and omnipotent, is directed with benevolence toward the world. The Genesis account captures this aspect of God nicely: as God creates the world during the first six days, the text notes that "God saw that it was good" after the completion of each day's work. This benevolence extends to an active personal concern for human beings, as evinced in his dealings with the ancient patriarchs and with Israel and, in latter days, what Christians viewed as a unique intervention in human history through his son, Jesus Christ.
"And after this I saw God in a poynte, that is to say, in my understanding, by which syghte I saw that he is in althyng. I beheld with avysement, seeing and knowing that in that syght that he doth alle that is done." — Julian of Norwich "To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God." — Meister Eckhart |
Insofar as the God of medieval Christianity is a Person—an omniscient, omnipotent, eternal, impassible, simple, unified Person—most of the discussion above applies equally well to medieval Jewish and Islamic thinking about God. The Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (d. 1204), for example, believed that God of Israel was indeed the Ultimate Reality, that he transcended all regular categories of existence, and that even the biblical language used to describe him was necessarily insufficient and potentially misleading. The titular hero of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan by the twelfth-century Andalusian Muslim writer Ibn Tufayl comes to a very similar conclusion: God is the supremely beautiful and supremely good principle of order in the universe, and he transcends all parochial cultural constructions of him.
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For Maimonides and for Ibn Tufayl and other Muslim philosophers, who were all wary that striving too hard to define the ineffable God was skirting perilously close to idolatry, God could best be spoken of only apophatically—that is, not by stating definitively what God is (good, wise, powerful, etc.) but only by clarifying what he is not (evil, foolish, powerless, etc.) This apophatic approach to thinking about God has a long Christian pedigree as well: pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, John Scotus Eriugena, Bonaventure, and Meister Eckhart were among those who thought that one could only draw closer to God by a via negativa, by negation rather than affirmation.
However, Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, was also a revealed religion, drawing most of its doctrinal content from a written body of Holy Scripture. For Judaism, this boiled down to the corpus of the Torah and the Prophets; for Muslims, God (Allah) had revealed his commands for the human race to Muhammad and these were collected in the Qur'an. Although Christians accepted as authoritative both the Hebrew Scriptures as well as the documents of the lives of Jesus of Nazareth and his followers collected in the New Testament, the real revelatory content of the Christian faith was conveyed not primarily as an unerring holy text per se but as a person—or, rather, a Person, Jesus Christ—who claimed to be not just embodying God's wisdom, or speaking for God, or acting on God's behalf, or expressing God's love, but who in fact claimed to be intimately entwined with God himself, to the point that the two begin to seem almost indistinguishable. The claims that Jesus's early followers made about his status eventually gave rise to what remains the most uniquely Christian way of looking at God: the doctrine of the Trinity.
Further Reading
- Peter Abelard, The Ethics and Dialogue Between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian, trans. Paul Vincent Spade (Hackett, 1995)
- Anselm of Canterbury, "Proslogion" in Major Works, trans. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford University Press, 2008)
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Book I, Questions 1-26 (The Aquinas Institute, 2012)
- Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Ballantine Books, 1994)
- Augustine of Hippo, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson, revised ed. (Penguin, 2004)
- Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Penguin, 2009)
- David B. Burrell, Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (University of Notre Dame Press, 1986)
- Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (University of California Press, 1982)
- Donald F. Duclow, Masters of Learned Ignorance: Eriugena, Eckhardt, Cusanus (Ashgate Press, 2006)
- Étienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (Scribner, 1939)
- David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale University Press, 2013)
- Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Columba Hart (Paulist Press, 1990)
- Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale, trans. Lenn Evan Goodman (University of Chicago Press, 2009)
- C. S. Lewis, "Horrid Red Things," in Compelling Reason: Essays on Ethics and Theology, ed. Walter Hooper (Harper Collins, 1996)
- E. L. Mascall, He Who Is: A Study in Traditional Theism (Libra Books, 1966)
- Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016)
- Julian of Norwich, The Showings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Denise N. Baker (W. W. Norton, 2005)
- Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Chaim Rabin (Hackett, 1995)
- Philo of Alexandria, The Works of Philo: Complete and Unabridged, trans. C. D. Yonge (Hendrickson Publishers, 1993)