THE IDEA OF GOD

;

A CRITICISM OF SOME MODERN ERRORS.

BY

REV. EDMUND T. SHANAHAN, D. D., Ph. D.,

Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Catholic University of America,

Washington, D. C.

Reprinted from the Catholic University Bulletin, January, 1897, Vol. Ill, No. 1.



J



THE IDEA OF GOD

:

A CRITICISM OF SOME MODERN ERRORS.

BY

REV. EDMUND T. SHANAHAN, D. D., Pk. D.,

Asiiociate Profensor of Philosophy in the Catholic University of America,

Washington, D. C.

Reprinted from the Catholic University Bulletin, January, 1897, Vol. Ill, No. 1.





JOHN FISKE ON THE IDEA OF GOD.

Professor Fiske, of Harvard University, in discussing the

idea of God as affected by modern knowledge and especially by

the doctrine of Evolution, ^ makes the rather astonishing state-

ment that St. Augustine was an anthropomorphist. ^ The au-

thority of Prof. Fiske in matters historical and philosophical

carries with it no inconsiderable weight in the minds of schol-

ars, and inclines not a few to a ready acceptance of his views.

Not without interest, therefore, is his present contention that

the intellect of Augustine was darkened by an idea of the God-

head wholly at variance with the best thinking and utterly un-

tenable in the light and drift of modern science. The figure of

the great Bishop of Hippo stands out pre-eminent in the cent-

uries as that of a man who rose on stepping stones of his dead
selves to higher things

;
one who, once the heights were scaled,

could look with wonderment at the gradual fusion of many
narrower points of view, afforded him while climbing, into the

splendid vision of an orderly whole which fell upon his gaze as

a mighty unity always does, corrective, impartial and inspir-

ing. His works together with his confessions tell the story of

his gradual unfettering from the thrall of environment. His

retractations are nothing else than the obituary notice of his cast-

off former self. Has Prof. Fiske portrayed Augustine at his

prime ? Is the Augustine who thought and wrote in Africa the

self-same one whom Prof. Fiske has reconstructed in his pages ?
We propose to let Augustine’s works speak out objectively for
themselves and tell the story of the master-mind which penned

them.

^The Idea of God, as affected by Modern Knowledge, By John Fiske. Houghton, Mifidin
k Co., Boston, 1895. “Pp. 94, 95.



4 CATHOLIC UN/VERSITV BULLETIN.

I.—Pkof. Fiske’s Position.

Prof. Fiske is a theist who, to use his own words, recognizes

an omnipresent energy, which is none other than the living

Grod. ^ He is careful, in his j)reface‘'^ to the work in question,

to eliminate all possible misunderstanding of his view by the

explicit statement that he does not propose to divest the

theistic idea of every shred of anthropomorphism.^ On

the contrary, he quite agrees that this would be an utterly

illegitimate proceeding for any thinker actually defining his

position as theistic.^ Neither does he stand sponsor for the

contention that personality and infinity are entirely unthink-

able in combination. There is, according to him. scarcely less

anthropomorphism lurking in the phrase “infinite power” than

in the phrase “ infinite person. ” He is even prepared to admit

that God is spirit if the reader will but bear in mind the sym-

bolic character of the words.® Nay more, he expressly states
his desire to exclude the idea of God as Force, since this latter

concept calls up invariably a sort of blind necessity involved

in all Pantheistic notions. ^ What he singles out explicitly for
rejection is the idea of God outlined by Augustine under the

overpowering influence of Gnostic thought
;
an idea so unbefit-

ting the Deity as to be in very truth a barbaric conception,

suited alike to the lower grade of culture in Western Europe

and to the Latin political genius which was bent upon the con-

struction of an imperial church.®

“In his doctrine of original sin,” continues Prof. Fiske,

“Augustine represents humanity as cut off from all relation-

ship with God, who is depicted as a crudely anthropomorphic

Being, far removed from the universe and accessible only

through the mediating offices of an organized church.” ^ “The

God of Augustine is a Being actuated by human passions and
purposes, localizable in space and utterly remote from that inert

machine, the universe in which we live and on which He acts
intermittently through the suspension of what are called natural

laws.” ^ ® This Augustinian conception, he avers, has permeated

the whole fibre of Christianity and is responsible for the cries

raised nowadays by orthodoxy against every new discovery of

science. To Prof. Fiske’ s mind all conception of a Personal God

is anthropomorphic, and the idea of personality as attributed

to God by most modern theologians a relict of Plato and Augus-

tine which must be carefully toned down to be at all admissible.

In order to bring out his meaning to the full. Prof. Fiske

contrasts sharply on historical lines, “cosmic” and “anthropo-

^Preface, p. XII. =P. XIII. Ubid. Ubid. ®P. XV. «P. XVII. -Preface, p. XVII
*P. 94. »Ibid.

>op.
96. “Preface, p. 15.



JOHN FISKE ON THE IDEA OF GOD. 5

morpMc ’ ’ theism. The cosmic theists are Athanasius, Clement

of Alexandria, Origen, Spinoza, Lessing, Goethe and Schleier-

macher. Among the anthropomorphic theists are ranged Ter-
tullian, Augustine, Paley, Calvin, Voltaire, and most of the

modern theologians. He is, therefore, as anxious to make clear

his thorough-going assent to the position of Athanasius as to

have clearly understood his complete disavowal of the doctrine

of Augustine.^

Both these theistic views, according to Prof. Fiske, are

polar opposites. The anthropomorphic theists conceive God

as existing apart from the world in solitary, inaccessible maj-

esty. The world itself is but an inert lifeless machine impelled

by blind forces which have been set acting from without.

The origin of a position such as this Prof. Fiske traces back to

primitive ancestor-worship, which gradually suggested a sin-

gle ghost-deity far away from the world of sense as the origi-

nal ancestor of all the others. Thus was the Roman mind
imperceptibly inclinec* to certain fixed habits of judgment

concerning the Divinity which had much to do with ostracizing

God from the field of natural phenomena.

^

To the nature-worship of the Greeks, however, must we

look to find the root-conceptions of cosmic theism. Students

of the physical universe from the earliest Ionic days, the

Greeks were enabled to frame the conception of God as acting

in and through the powers of nature witliout the aid of grossly

anthropomorphic symbols. The traditional idea of the sea-

god and the sky-god actually at work in the upheaval of

things caused them to drift further and further apart from

their less fortunate Roman compeers who were led along the
lines of ancestral worship to look upon the Deity as the head

supreme of a world of ghosts. For the Greeks, God was never

a localizable personality remote from the world, acting upon

it by occasional portent and prodigy, nor was the world a life-

less machine blindly acting after some preordained method

and only feeling the presence of God in so far as He now and
then saw fit to interfere with its normal course of procedure.

To their thinking, God was the life of the world. It is through

Him all things exist from moment to moment and the world
is ever hallowed b}^ His indwelling presence. ^

Thus it was that Athanasius, formed under the influences

which shaped the idea of God among the Greeks, fell in with
the main line of thought and naturally became a cosmic theist.

Augustine, on the contrary, was the direct product of Roman
mythologic influence and never rose higher than the crude

anthropomorphic notions of the Deity bequeathed him as a

»Pp. 15, 112. *Chap. VI, pp. 87-97. =^Pp. 82, 83.

~~~



6 CA THOL IC UNTVERSITV B ULLE TIN.

legacy of thought by previous Roman thinkers. While Atha-
nasius looked upon God as immanent in the universe, Augus-
tine relegated Him to some far-off sphere out of all immediate
touch with the realities of nature.

The question now arises, Is this the concept of the Deity

which Augustine framed ? If so, we join Prof. Fiske most

heartily in its repudiation. A Being characterized by human
passions, local izable in space, and acting on the world by an

occasional dis])lay of miraculous power, answers but meagrely

the concept of a God. It is but a degree removed from jmre

humanity. The feebleness of such a notion is the best indica-

tion of its impropriety, and suggests some other intellect foi-

its birthplace than the vigorous one of Augustine, when finally

illumined by the light of Christian truth. Nor is such lack of

fitness the only reason for this persuasion. Augustine himself

in many of his latter writings has so unmistakably disavowed

all doctrine such as this that it is with difficulty we are brought

to realize how Prof. Fiske could have persisted, notwithstand-

ing such explicit denials, in fastening this unworthy notion on

him. The statements of Augustine on this one point in all his

latter works are unmistakably clear and emphatic, and the con-

struction Prof. Fiske puts on them shows a surprising unfamil-

iarity with Augustinian theology.

II.—The Position of St. Augustine.

To understand Augustine it must be borne in mind that his

mental development was after the manner of a chambered nau-

tilus. He was forever leaving his low-vaulted past and build-

ing more stately mansions for his unresting soul. At first the

study of the Aristotelian categories led him to conceive God as

of bodily shape and nature. From the crude idea of a God

embodied in human form, it was but natural he should drift

into Manicheanism and profess, as he did for nine years, a be-

lief in the dual princii^le of good and evil—a gross materialism.

He seemed forever committed to a philosophy of sense, when

Plato’s treatise on the Logos broke on him as a light through

the gloom, opening up a ymrer and a nobler view. The Sacred

Writings, notably the Epistles of St. Paul, at length became

objects of minute study. Plato and Paul argued out their re-

spective lines in the mind of the young African. Suddenly ir

dawned upon his soul that both were reconcilable, Plato and

Paul, scripture and reason, philosophy and revelation. He

became a Christian, a priest, a bishop. Materialist, Mani-

chean, Neoplatonist, Christian, theologian—such is the grad-



JOHN FISKE ON THE IDEA OF GOD. 7

uate development of Augustine, which his works make known

and describe with a vigorous clearnessA

‘
‘ Year after year beheld the silent toil

That spread his lustrous coil.

Still as the spiral grew,

He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,

Built up its idle door,

Stretched in his last-found home and knew the old no more.”

Taking facts as they are, the scholar is not privileged to

attribute to Augustine what he himself has most emphatically

rejected as the rubbish of his pagan notionsA The Christian

Augustine took great x>ains to refute Augustine unregenerate,

and the Christian, not the pagan, Augustine is at the bar of

reason for judgment. Whatever Augustine may have held in
his earlier years, when blown about by every wind of doctrine,

the historical fact nevertheless remains that, when fuller grown,

his old beliefs had vanished into mist, and in their stead there

came a newer and a nobler conception of things divine and

human.

III.—Faults of Interpretation.

Prof. Fiske’s failure to indicate directly the passages of

Augustine which might substantiate his view, is, we must con-

fess, out of keeping with critical methods. If his view of

Augustine be the fruit of long and careful research, it should

be critically supported, not badly stated. As a consequence,

therefore, we are compelled to oppose every statement Prof.

Fiske makes by counter-statements from Augustine, with as

little glossary as possible, preferring to allow the text itself to

speak out Prof. Fiske’s praise or condemnation.

In the third book of his Confessions, Augustine makes the

following observations anent his gradual unfettering from Pan-

theism and the dawn of a higher and purer conception of the

Divinity.

After stating his full assent in his younger days to the

Manichean doctrines, he says: “I did not know that God is a
spirit without members extended in length, and breadth, with-

out matter; and again: ‘‘I thought, O my God! that
your grandeur and beauty were in you as accidents are in sub-

stances—for instance, in bodies—while you are your own gran-
deur and your own beauty. I thought that you were a lumi-

^Cf. Confessionum, Lib. VIII., cap. VII. : Lib. IX., cap. I. : VII., cap. IX. Also, Epistola
CXXXVII., cap. IV.

^Of. Confessionum et Retractationum Libros, passim. Especially, Confessionum, Lib.
VII.. cap. XXI. : Ibid. Lib. VI.. cap. V.

^Confessionum , liber III., Cap. VII.



8 CA THOLIC UNIVERSITY B ULLE TIN.

nous body of enormous size, and I a small part of this body.” ^

And still further: “Yet, when I wished to think of God, I
represented Him to myself only under the form of a corporeal
mass, and all that was not corporeal appeared to me non-exist-

ent.”2 Finally: “If there is anything more excellent than

the truth, it is surely that which is God. If not, truth itself

is God. ^ . . . What is supreme truth, beauty without alloy,
goodness itself, if not God Himself?”'*

Thus he describes his own progress and acknowledges his

debt to Plato, whose books, he says, taught him “how to seek
out an incorporeal truth.”

^

With this contention in the foreground, supported by the

dictum of Augustine himself, we are now prepared to take u])

Prof. Fiske’s several statements and compare them with the

original text.

To do no violence to Prof. Fiske’s position, the substance of

his view is literally the following: “The idea of God, upon

which all this Augustinian doctrine is based, is the idea of a

being actuated by human passions and purposes, localizable in

space and utterly remote from that inert machine, the universe

in which we live and upon which He acts intermittently through

the suspension of what are called natural laws.”®

To observe his own order, we have as first point that the

Augustinian idea of God is that of a “being actuated by hu-

man passions and purposes.” We quote in opposition: “ We
do not adore a God who repents Himself, who is envious, who

is deficient, who is cruel, who finds pleasure in the blood of ani-

mals or of bullocks, who is appeased with shamefulness and

crime, whose domain has for bound a corner of the earth. ” ‘ ‘Hi s

inerrant virtue and His divinity marvelously surpass all lan-

guage human in its kind, and even in our hum an frailty itself, we
are made aware that what is humanly said of God, appears de-

spicable even to humanity.® The knowledge which results from

daily habit and which is the fruit of long experience, opens to

us a way towards the sublime conceptions which are becoming

to God. Thus, let me take away from human science its mu-
tability, let me suppress the steps from thought to thought,
those returns we make to impress upon the mind afresh what a

little while before we had conceived, so much so that we under-

stand things but partially and with the aid of frequent acts of

memory—let me suppress, I say, those imperfections, in order
^Confessionum Liber IV., cap. XVI. ^Ibid, Lib. V., cap. X. Compare also Lib. VII., cap

I., II., V., XIV., XX., and Lib. VIII., cap, I. Likewise: De Civitate Dei, Lib. IV., cap. XII.
and cap. XIII.; VI., cap. VII., VIII. ^De libero arbitrio, Lib. II., cap. XV. Ubid. Lib. II..
cap. VTII., X., XIII. ®Confessionum Lib. VII., cap. XX. The very opposite of Mr. Fiske's
contention, which is to the effect that Augustine’s intense feelings of man’s wickedness
dragged him downwards. ®The Idea of God, p. 94. ’^De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae, Lib. I.,
cap. X. ®De Diversis Quaestionibus ad Simplicianum, Lib. II., Quaest II.



JOHN FISKE ON THE IDEA OF GOD. 9

to consider solely the life-likeness of the substantial and un-

changeable truth, which in one eternal vision and one only takes

in the universality of things
;
and I will have in this wise some

idea of the knowledge of God.^ In like manner let me take
from human anger its disorderly emotions in order to leave

there the sole force of legitimate vengeance, and in a certain

measure, I shall conceive what is called the anger of God. Or

still further, if you take from pity that division-by-shares of

the suffering of him whom you pity, in order to leave there but
a tranquil goodness which is drawn to succor those who suffer
and to deliver them from their straits, you will have, after a

fashion, some notion of the divine mercy.

Elsewhere, he calls anthropomorphic notions— “ turpiter
vana cogitatio.”^ More pertinently still : ‘‘I ask also of my
readers to pardon me where they may perceive me to liave had
the desire rather than the power to speak what they either un-

derstand better themselves or fail to understand through the

obscurity of my language, just as I myself pardon them what
they cannot understand through their own dullness.^

And we shall mutually pardon one another the more easily, if
we know, or at any rate firmly believe and hold, that whatever

is said of a nature unchangeable, invisible, and having life ab-

solutely and sufficiently to itself, must not be measured after

the custom of things visible and changeable, mortal and self-

sufficient.”^'^

The trail of the serpent of anthropomorphism is not traceable

over these passages, that is, if human language have any power
at all. Prof. Fiske, in the preface of his own work, is very

careful to remind his readers of the symbolic nature of certain

words and phrases. ^ He should have given equal credit to
Augustine, who, like Prof. Fiske himself, craves it indulgently

of his readers.

The second point Prof. Fiske makes against Augustine is that

the latter believed God ‘ ‘a being localizable in space.” Wecon-
front this statement with the text of Augustine. “God is not
somewhere. For that which is somewhere is contained in a

place; that which is contained in place is a body. Now, God
is not a body. Therefore, He is not somewhere. And yet, as
He is, and is not in place, things are in Him rather than He
anywhere. On the other hand, however, things are not in Him
in such a way that He Himself is a place. For place is in space,
that wffiich is occupied by length, breadth and thickness of

bodies, and God is nothing of this kind. All things are in Him

Ubid. Ibid. Ubid. Ibid. ^De Trinitate, Lib. XII., cap. VII.. No. XII. '‘De Trinity te.
Lib. V., cap. I. ®Ibid. Ibid, ®The Idea of God, preface, page XVII. Compare also : Aug. in
loanms Evangelium, cap. III., Tract. XIII., No, 5. De Haeresi, cap. L.



lO CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY BULLETIN.

and He is not a place. ^ He who fills heaven and earth is nowhere
absent, neither shut in small spaces, nor spread over large, but

is everywhere whole and entire, and contained in no place.”

^

If therefore, he says that God is everywhere without being con-
tained anywhere, what becomes of the contention that Augus-

tine believed God a being localizable in space ?
The next statement of Prof. Phske is to the effect that God,

according to Augustine, is ‘bitterly remote from that inert

machine, the universe in which we live.” The passage just

quoted tells against Prof. F'iske quite pointedly here. But there

is abundance of disproof elsewhere throughout his works, as

when he says that God is at the same time affirmed and denied
as everywhere present in order to ‘‘resist carnal thoughts and

call away the mind from the bodily senses.”^ What clearer than
this? Augustine says the reason why some Christians make
God remote is simply to prevent a gross material misunder-

standing. He, it will be observed, actually explains and dis-

avows in others the “doctrine of remoteness” which Prof. Fiske

attributes to him.

Nor is this all. Augustine says most beautifully : “ Who
are you, oh ! my God ! Who are you, I ask, if not the Lord
God? Exceeding great, exceeding good, exceeding powerful,

all powerful, exceeding merciful and exceeding just, hidden

and everywhere present, infinitely beautiful, infinitely strong,

always the same, incomprehensible, unchangeable and chang-

ing all things, ever ancient, ever new, rejuvenating all that

is and leading the proud unconsciously on to old age
;
ever

active and ever in repose, gathering from all parts with need

of none : upholding, filling, maintaining the creatures to

which you give being, nourishment, maturity: asking without

cease, though lacking nothing
;
you love, but without disor-

der; you are a jealous God, but without unease; you repent

but without sorrow, you grow angry but without being

troubled. You change your works without changing your
plans; you pick up what you find without ever having lost

anything. You are not poor and you love gain; you are not

avaricious and you put out to usury. —But what are these
words^ oh ! my God ! my life, holy sorrow of my soul ! What
can one say when speaking of you? Unhappy those who hold

their tongue, since even those who speak, must pass for

dumb In passages such as these the burning heart of the
African empties itself in phrase, though he assures us in the

^De Diversis Quaestiouibus, Lib. LXXXIII, Quaest, XX.
“Nusquam absens est qui coelum et terrain implet, nec spatiis includitur parvis magnisque

diffunditur, sed ubique torus est, et nullo continetur loco. Epis. CXII., cap. XII.
Ad carnali resistendum eogitationi et mentem a corporis seusibus avocandam. Epist.

LVII. ^Confess. Lib. I, cap. IV.



JOHN FISKE ON THE IDEA OE GOD. 1

1

meanwhile that his intellect is clear and the stream of his

thought, crystalline-pnre. In this enthusiastic analysis, Prof.

Fiske’ s connter-view is made to vanish. A God who ‘ ^ changes
all things, ever active, ever present in the universe, creating,

maintaining, nourishing, maturing all things,” is hardly seen

as remote from that inert machine, the universe in which we

live. Especially so, as Augustine says most clearly: “If the

power of God ceased at any time from ruling what He has

created, creation’s kinds and all nature would immediately

fall to pieces.”^

The final point in Prof. Fiske’ s summary statement is to the

effect that God, “remote from the universe, acts upon it inter-

mittently through the suspension of what are called natural

laws.” Evidently Prof. Fiske here alludes to miracles, as he

speaks elsewhere of God acting upon the world by “occasional

portent or prodigy.”^ It is with reluctance we bring ourselves

to believe that an historical scholar such as Mr. Fiske unques-

tionably is, could imagine, much less prove, that Augustine

thought God’s action on the world to be merely intermittent.

But Prof. Fiske’ s statement about the “inert universe,” “man
cut off entirely from his Maker by original sin,” and the two

words “intermittent” and “occasional,” deprive him justly of

the benefit of a doubt. They are too clear to mean anything

else than that miraculous intervention was the sum total of

God’s activity in the world of realities. Again we appeal to

Augustine for enlightenment. He says “The miracle of our

Lord Jesus Christ, by which He changed water into wine,

is not a source of wonder to those who knew that God did it,

For in those six vessels commanded to be filled at the wedding

feast. He made wine who makes it every year on the vines.

For as that which the servants put in the vessels was changed

into wine by the work of the Lord, so also that which the clouds

outpour, is changed into wine by the work of the self-same

Lord. The latter we do not wonder at, because it comes to pass

yearly: by constantly happening, it has ceased to be a source

of wonderment. Yet it meets with more consideration than

what was accomplished in the vessels of water. For who is

there that considers the works of God, by which the whole

world is governed and administered, and is not dumbfounded

and overwhelmed by the miracles % If he consider the power

of a single grain, or any seed, it is a mighty fact indeed, and

palsies the investigator. But because men, on other things in-

tent, have lost their appreciation of the works of God, in which

^ Virtus Dei ab eis qiiae creata sunt regendis, si cessaret aliquando : simul et illorum ces-
saret species omnisque natura concideret, IV. Lib. super Genesi, cap. XIT. -The idea of God,
p. 83 : “ acting upon it only by means of occasional portent and prodigy,”

®In loannis Evangelium, Tract. VIII. Cap. II., (from the beginning).



12 CA THOLIC UNIVERSn Y BULLE TIN,

they might give the Creator their daily praise, God, as it were,

kept in reserve some unusual works of His, to bring back sleep-

ing humanity to His worship from sheer sense of wonderment.

A dead man arose and humanity wondered. Myriads come
daily into life and no one notes it.” If God’s work in the uni-

verse, as Augustine phrases it, be as equally portentous and

miraculous as His actual changing of water into wine at Cana,

what becomes of the idea of a God remote from the world and

acting on it by occasionol portent ?

Should anyone still doubt the mind of Augustine touching

the point under discussion, there are many passages to dispel
all misgiving. Among these there is in his commentaries much
that is pointedly relevant. Thus, commenting on the words of

Our Lord, “My Father worketh still and I work,” Augustine
says : “ Continuationem quamdani operis eius, qua universam

creaturam continet atque administrat, ostendit.” And again,
what more opposed to the idea of an absentee God, as Carlyle

took creator to mean, than the simple decade of words : “Non
fecit atque abiit, sed de illo in illo sunt.”^ Finally, what

more witness of words is needed than the following passages

against Faustus : “ When God does anything against the usual
course of nature as known to us, His works are called great or
wonderful. ‘ ‘At times God does something against the usual
course of nature. But the Creator and Founder of all natures

does nothing against nature. For that shall be natural to each

and everything which He, the source of all movement, number,

and cosmic order, shall have done. In no Avise does He act
against the highest law, because He does not act against
Himself.

”3

No comment is needed on passages such as these. Miracles
are not the only actions of God in the world. They are simply

extraordinary events Avorked by the same God who changed
water into Avine at Cana, ?md who to-day changes the rain-drops

of the clouds into the wine we press from the grape after vint-

age. Miracles are not the only government of the world, and

man lives not by the bread of portent alone, but by every word
which proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

Such is Prof. Fiske’ s vieAv of x\.ugustine and Augustine’ s view

of himself. Not one of the points raised can be critically es-

tablished against Augustine. The idea of the Godhead which

Prof. Fiske fastens upon him is without support, whether criti-

cal or hermeneutical, and we repeat our surprise that a scholar

such as he should have entertained and published it.

^Comment, ad Act. XVII. ®Cum Deus aliquid facit contra cognitum nobis cursum soli-
tumque naturae, magnalia vel niiribilia nominantur. Contra Faust., Lib. XXVI., cap. III.
»Ibid. Ibid.



13JOHN FISKE ON THE IDEA OF GOD.

lY.—

A

dditional Faults of Intekpretation.

In the light of passages such as these, clear, direct, and in-

cisive, Prof. Fiske’s contention vanishes in mist. Ideas of the

Godhead such as he attributes to Augustine are searched for

vainly in these pages. The very absurdity of constructing God

afterhuman fashion, which Prof. Fiske endeavors so strenuously

to avoid in his essay, and for which he rebukes Augustine, is

distinctly pointed out by the latter and characterized as a crude

and empty conception.^ One looks in vain for passages where-

in Augustine makes God so anthropomorphic as to be a mon-

ster of human passions. A certain strength of phrase and
vigorousness of expression in his treatise on predestination

might incline an uncritical reader to interpret Augustine’s

views in an anthroxiomorphic sense. But Augustine has so

unmistakably repudiated the crudities of such a view that to

still fasten them upon him is alike unscholarly and unwar-

ranted.^ Not a stray hint of meaning here and there, but the

general drift of thought which tempers the extravagance of

some particular turns of phrase, should be the source of a

scholar’s judgment.

There is, therefore, nothing clearer in Augustine than that

he disavowed the constant underdrift of anthropomorphism

which always lay beneath the human terms he was compelled
by usage to employ. Yet Prof. Fiske quotes piecemeal, with-

out reference or comparison of texts. His interpretation of

Augustine’s doctrine on original sin is likewise most unpardon-

able in an historical scholar. He says that Augustine imag-
ined man cut off by original sin from all relationship with his
Maker. ^ Nothing could be further from the real meaning.

Augustine does not father the thought that man was absolutely
cut adrift from God, but only supernaturally.^ Created in the

supernatural order, man simply lost his superadded gifts and
privileges, but was left untouched in all his natural relations.

Augustine would have descended to a glaring contradiction if

he held what Prof. Fiske alleges, because his main drift of mean-

ing was that God kept man in existence by a continuous exer-
tion of divine power, without which man would have lapsed
into his original nothingness.^ Original sin dexuived man of
all connection with God as the author of his supernature, but
still left him dependent on Him—as Creator, Upholder, and
Provider—for every breath he drew and every action he per-
formed.

^ “Turpiter vana cogitatio
;
De Trioit., Lib. XII., cap. VII., no, XII. Trinit., Lib. V.,

cap. I,

®P. 94. *“ Induite novum hominem, eum qui secundum Deum creatus est in iustitia et
sanctitate veritatis; ecce quid perdidit Adam per peccatum.” (De Genesi, ad Litt. L. 6; c.
24-26.) Likewise: De Civitate Dei, Lib. XII., 9; Lib. LXXXIII., QQ. 9. 21; Lib. II, De Pec-
cato Orig. c. 4 ; In Psalmo GUI., Serm. 4. ®IV. Lib. super Genesi, cap. 12.



14 CA THOLIC UNIVERSITY BULLE TIN.

Neither is Augustine an advocate of total depravity, for he

explains most clearly that man’s disposition to sin was not from

nature—for then God would be the prime author of his sin

—

but from the fact that the grace of original justice which sub-

jected man’s animal powers to reason once removed, man found
himself thereby greatly weakened when sense had no longer a

higher force to curb it hard and fast under the sway of reason. i

Mistakes like these are not expected in men of critical attain-

ments. To infer from the fact that man was cut off super-
naturally, the additional fact that he was entirely abandoned,

made subsistently independent of God in his natural powers,

shows lack of logic and critical insight. Again the statement

of Prof. Fiske that after original sin man, according to Augus-

tine, could regain relations with his Creator solely through the

offices of an organized church, is misleading. He makes it
with Augustine a political act inspired by the tendency towards

an imperial churcli. Yet Augustine argues out his view from

considerations of the Sacraments instituted by Christ and the

necessity of an organic custodian of the truth which he so

keenly felt in the unsatisfying philosophies through which he

had successively passed in his several evolutions.^ Prof. Fiske

argues from an assumed condition
;
Augustine from fact and

experience. Which shall we believe ?
Still further. Prof. Fiske makes out theBishoi^of Hipj^o th

product of the Gnostic thought of the day. Which Augustine

does he mean ? Augustine pagan or Augustine Christian % W

e

readily admit the full sweep of Gnostic inffuence on the young

African when a paganizing philosopher, but where is its in-

ffuence on him when turned towards higher things within the

pale of Christian thinking? Augustine retracted. He retracted

in order to emphasize what he retained. Yet Prof. Fiske pro-

ceeds as unconsciously as though Augustine never became a

Christian, or as if, what is worse, his Christianity was but

Gnosticism ffowering into fruit.

V.—Faults of Method.
One’ s curiosity is somewhat aroused to know precisely how

Prof. Fiske comes to stand sponsor for so many unwarranted

statements. The answer is simple enough. His fault is mainly

one of method. Prof. Fiske looks at things through an evolu-

tionist’s glasses. He studies history in the light of a precon-

ceived idea and suggestive hypothesis, instead of confining

himself rigorously at first to questions of actual fact.

‘Comparatur homo pecoribus per vitium, uon pecoris vitio. sed naturae. De Pecc. Orig.
0 . 4. Original sin was the privation of original justice ; not total depravity.

*De Doctrina Christiana, prob. No. 6; De moribus eccles. cap. I ; De Milit. credendi. cc. 6,
7, 14, et 17 ; Lib. II, cap. 10, No. 27.



JOHN FISKE ON THE IDEA OF GOD. ^5.

To look at history from an arbitrary ideal standpoint is

fatal alike to facts and truth. It is a speculative method and

is bound to result in extravagance. The history of philosophy

has not been without showing the vices of such a mode of pro-

cedure which starts with an idea —an hypothesis, and concludes

therefrom the impossibility of facts or so reshapes them as to

suit preconceived requirements. Descartes started from the

idea of the Infinite and found in it the distinction which marks

off God from the world of limit and imperfection. Spinoza

took the same idea and identified God and the world as one

substance. Malebranche, arguing from the same ideal source,

over-zealously gave unto God the monopoly of all activity.

In like manner, Schelling looking on the content of reason as

the infinite draws thence an inference in favor of free-will.

Hegel follows, and with the same apparent rigor concludes from

the same source as Schelling, not freedom, but universal, eternal

necessity. Something evidently is wrong with the instrument

of logic which turns out such contrary conclusions. Facts alone

should be the starting point. The mind should not be ham-

pered in its capacity to grasp facts as they are, by the colorings

of hypothesis, which strains them to its purpose. C’est Fa

priori a outrance.

The reason is that all hypothetical views must uncon-

sciously be colored. The entire question is begged at the out-

start, for in the point of view that everything is evolved,

everything becomes connected. The subjective continuity

which the hypothesis furnishes is projected into things and

the same delusion takes place that is so aptly seen in the kin-

etoscope—objectively discontinuous images succeed each other
in such fiash-rapidity that consciousness looks upon them as

a unified whole when in reality they are but a succession of

distinct and separate pictures. The impressions made upon

percipient consciousness by the kinetoscope, none the less than

those made upon the intellect by the evolutionistic assump-

tion cannot fail to make us see connection where there is but
sequence, cause where there is but condition, proof where

there is but suggestive hypothesis. Is it not plain to the mind’

s

eye that where history is written in the way Hegel wrote it

—

namely, with a view to discover the foreshadowing of his the-

ory in the writings of past thinkers—that what is merely a
suggestion, an inkling, a vague similarity, becomes in the

light of his preconceived idea, an assured fact—an undoubted
exemplification ?

The question is scarcely debatable from a methodologist’s

point of view that the attitude of the mind towards the objects

of . its attention especially if historic, is and should be the



i6 CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY BULLETIN.

simple one of action and reaction. The particular person

whose works we are to study should be considered according

to every circumstance contributing to his formation, in order

that a just estimate be formed of the conditions in which he

lived and the influences under which he labored. This no one

denies. It is scientific, philosophical. In such a wise we

may hit upon the general law which motivated his actions and
in a measure shaped the very trend of his conclusions. We
are thus carefully feeling our way from j)articular facts to
general laws and assuring ourselves from point to point of

proper footing. But when, hypothesis in hand, we look to

see how facts fall in with its exactions, we forget that we are
viewing things in an arbitrary light and unwittingly judging

what is absolute from the pure standpoint of our own philo-

sophic consciousness, instead of allowing the latter to be

deepened, broadened and corrected by the instreaming light

of the very objects themselves, as they are in their nude real-

ity, not as they appear when refracted through the medium of

an assumed idea.

Evolution as a theory is after all but a point of view, and a

point of view is generally a colored glass through which we

look at things. Scientists are wont to forget that though in-

duction gives them some warrant for the principle of evolution

as an hypothesis—a sort of general law of continuity—it be-
comes deduction as soon as they begin to use it for the conclu-

sion of particular facts. No one would think of taking Fech-
ner’s rules of Psycho-physics for the determination of a general

mean or average as a principle from which we could deduce

the precise nature of particular facts, the actual time-rates of

sensation or actual curve-description for any given individual.

The individual is either above or beneath the mean. If he

coincide with the average, it is purely accideutal, not rigor-

ously consequent on the mean as though it could be deduced

precisely from it.

The reason is that the principle is not purely universal

—

i. e., rigorously true of all things contained under it. There

are leaps in the process. Whatever science may prove con-
cerning evolution, by reading backwards through contiguous

species and overlaid strata does not insure the reverse emj)loy-

ment of the principle on a strictly universal basis of logical

deduction until science has sTiown^ not postulated the over-

leaping of the individual barriers. Sequence is not conse-

quence, however much it may suggest the latter. If, there-
fore, we employ the hypothesis of evolution to deduce the

precise tenets of any particular individual’s belief, in the

course of the history of philosophy, we have gone beyond the



JOHN FISKE ON THE IDEA OE GOD. 17

bounds which science has staked out for us and are open to

the broadsides of logic and philosophy.

This is the fault of method of Prof. Piske. He is so prepos-
sessed with his idea of the ghost-ancestors as entertained by

the Romans that he makes out Augustine not as he actually

is but what he should be to suit his hypothesis. The Gnos-

tics and Manicheans believed in a God remote from the evil

world. Augustine formed under their influence must have been

of like belief. He must have been in the hyposthesis, cer-
tainly. But was he in point of fact % That still remains to be

proven. We should not read into facts more than we And in
them, neither should we be so logically unwary as not to de-

tect the insertion of our subjective coloring into colorless ob-

jective facts. ^lethods of this kind will make things more

what we would have them seem than what they really are in

their unadorned reality. Our logical sense is certainly be-

numbed, if we make the transit from a general theory to a
particular fact with nothing else than an hypothetical bridge

as a warrant for our transition.

Of like nature is Prof. Fiske’s interpretation of Athanasius

as a product of the continuity of Greek thought and a believer

of God’s immanence in things. As a matter of fact, both Au-

gustine and Athanasius believed in God’s immanence in things.

Their absolute divergence is required by Prof. Fiske’s arbitrary

view of Augustine’ s formation on the lines of ancestral worship

and that of Athanasius on the lines of an indwelling cosmic

Deity, and what hyposthesis requires, he x>roceeds to set apart

in point of fact. His method is again at fault. He forgets
that the assumption of his hypothesis has settled the question

from the outset. If his hypothesis be true, Augustine and

Athanasius must come in line with it. The fact of the whole

matter is quietly dropped from view. Both these great think-

ers are interpreted to suit requirements. A preconceived idea,
not the hard realities of facts, is the arbiter of discussion. If

we have to reconstruct history because of evolution, why then
we must simply admit without demur that Augustine did not

know his own doctrine and that Athanasius was not under-

stood even by himself. Is not this the arbitrary speculation

Prof. Fiske repudiates in the Schoolmen ? Why should we look
at any man’s doctrine from our point of view and not from his?

Let men endeavor to gather all the additional light they can
from the view of Evolution, but facts should never be brushed

aside to afford their hypothesis passage.

Be it borne in mind that this criticism tells against Prof.Fiske

from his own principles. I am criticising him from his own
point of view, on his own principles, not mine. Evolution, if



i8 CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY BULLETIN.

it have any scientific worth at all, must not be made deductive.

Spencer’s own definition of it is incompatible with such a

notion. It is only the hasty generalizers that have lifted it to

a sphere in which it is out of place. My contention does not
imply that I hold any theory of evolution but simply that I

criticise the service to which Prof. Fiske has put it in writing

history. Its utter discrepancy with facts, its scientific fault of

method when made deductive, is its own refutation. Evolu-

tion is based on facts, biological and otherwise. From a con-

sideration of facts, the idea, the hypothesis sprang to mind.

At most it can give us but the general laAvof continuity, if you

will, the formative influences of environment and the like, but

the individual thinker may or may not be in ke'eping with these.

To admit Greek thought as a formative factor and deny Reve-

lation the benefit of any formative influence, is to take a partial

and a biassed view, to drop from consideration a fact of history

and of thought certainly not without its share of influence.

If therefore, from a few particular facts, evolutionists con-

clude to an idea, what warrant is there in making the idea con-

clude to all particular facts, until they have sufficiently estab-

lished its absolute universality ? Must we not examine facts first

to see if they square with our hypothesis? If we do not, we

have changed our method and become untrue to our princiides.

Admitting the hypothesis in its sweeping generality, in the

sense that all things are products of transition, we cannot con-

clude that any particular thing should be otherwise than it is,

until we have proven it thiis and so. If otherwise, hypothesis

is fact and fact the production of hypothesis.

VI.—Faults of Inference.

Still another fault of method which brings Prof. Fiske to

strange conclusions is the inference he repeatedly makes from

the retention of pagan names and customs by the Christian

peoples. It would seem, according to Prof. Fiske, that Yule-

tide and Easter were adopted directly from the old nature-

worship, the adoration of tutelar household deities survived

in the homage paid to patron saints, and the worship of the

Berecynthian Mother was continued in that of the Virgin

Mary. Again his hypothesis. Because suggestions of all

these Christian customs occurred in pre-Christian days. Prof.

Fiske proceeds to connect them, to make the development con-

tinuous. Why omit the historic ideas of early Christianity
as giving rise to these forms of worship ? The statement that

they are continuations one of the other requires proof, not hy-

pothesis. There may be a similarity, a resemblance. No one



JOHN FISHE ON THE IDEA OF GOD. 19

doubts it. But the question at issue is not are they viewable

as similar, but are they in point of fact developments in a

higher stage of older beliefs, with their roots struck fast in

some prehistoric soil ? Against this is the historic fact that

the veneration of the Blessed Virgin was of purely Christian

origin. Because such veneration followed after cruder beliefs

is sequence, not consequence. Prof. Fiske begs the question at

issue. His contention would be good if he could prove that

continuity in a given line, say of worship, was never broken,

but so long as hypothesis is his sole warrant for connection,

the stain of arbitrariness still attaches to his view. The whole

connection is in his hypothesis, not in the facts themselves.

To argue from the retention of old pagan names to the re-

tention of pagan notions along with them, is not of rigorous

inference. It does not take into account what evolutionists

should, if true to their own principles, namely, the historico-

philological fact that old names are constantly pressed into

service as conveyors of new and very different ideas. A sort
of sacredness lingers about certain words that have long done

duty as vehicles of thought. The ancients were loath to part

with such, and gave a new shade of meaning to the old terms

rather than invent a substitute. Even now the years come and

go with all their wondrous birth of new conceptions, their

myriad ways of making old things new by the magic of a turn

of phrase and still the world of phrase-makers respects the

consecration of years of usage and bows before the majesty

of a long-used word.

Words grow in meaning as the blossom Howlers into fruit.
They take upon themselves varieties of significance at different

times and from different writers, and so in their last stages of

development it is not unnatural they should have overleaped

their conventional barriers and reached a state of meaning

quite at variance with their original employment. Were we
to neglect this law which governs their development and take

their meaning at an earlier stage as the clue to their later shade

of significance, a budget of paradoxes must be the penalty of

the law’ s transgression. For we would thus unfairly j udge the

mere burgeon of a blossom by the fullness of the ripening fruit.

The consecration of usage as well as the desire to keep un-

broken the continuity of thought and expression, had so much
to do with the employment of a worn-out terminology that the

ancients would rather patch an old word with a new strip of

meaning than dress out an entirely new phrase. Their words

were custom made and not to order. This accounts for the re-
tention amongst Latin writers of such words as “species,”

“intentiones primae et secundae,” “similitudo, imago,” and



20 CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY BULLETIN.

the like, long after they had outgrown their original crude sig-

nificance. The word “species,” which the Latins used as a cor-

responding term to the el'809 of the Greeks, originally meant a

roving image, a sort of miniature picture or fire-atom (according

to Democritus) which migrated into the eye from an outer ob-

ject. Aristotle retained the term with scarce a vestige of its

former meaning in it,^ to signify the modification effected in

consciousness by the action of an outer object, through which

the soul was in somewise likened to the object it perceived.
“ Species was thus mustered into a service utterly out of keep-

ing with its first rudimentary meaning. Its etymology was

considerably lost in its new employment and it was no longer

the ideograph—the picture-word of Democritus, but the poor
conveyor of a much nobler idea. Yet men continue to argue
from its etymology that scholastic philosophy is still immersed

in the ignorant belief of roving images. They forget that it

was retained to express an entirely new idea and that its ety-

mology has nothing to do with the meaning which was, as it

were, thrust into it by the Schoolmen.

It is certainly very difficult to realize how in these days of

critical study Scholasticism should be judged from etymology

and philology, with never so much as an attempt to reach the
meaning, the ideas, encased as it were in a severe terminology.

And it is still more difficult to realize from what logical sense
those proceed who would argue from the etymology of a word

to the fact that all ideas under it are but continuations of its

original meaning—developments of it from stage to stage suc-
cessively. We have seen that this is unwarranted, because it
leaves out of consideration a by no means negligeable factor,

to wit : the conventional use of the term which only too often

differs widely from what etymology would exact or even jus-

tify. Words are elastic. They will not infrequently bear the

noblest thought if you fit them to it. And for this very reason
you can but very seldom conclude from identity of term to

identity of thought beneath. The continuity has been broken.

Thus one would not conclude from the term “ Manitou ” still

used by Catholic Indians to express the Great Spirit, that the

idea which it formerly conveyed to the untutored savages and

the idea which they learned from the lips of the black-robe

were identical, for the very reason that the same term is retained

to express an utterly different concept. The terms may be the
same to the very letter and yet not afford logical grounds for

concluding a continuous development of thought.

Thus it is that the law of evolution— at best but a very gen-
eral law of continuity—cannot be applied to particular facts

^Human Intellect, Porter; Theories of perception, heading, Aristotle.



JOHN FISKE ON THE IDEA OE GOD. 2 I

(for these latter invariably come under conditions which nul-

lify hypothesis and speculation), unless you have proven, not

postulated, the connection. There is certainly no warrant for

deriving the idea called up to-day by the word ‘‘pontiff” from

its first sense of “bridge builder,” although the term is iden-

tical and traceable to a pagan source. There is an enormous

difference between etymological and actual significance. The

former may be homogeneous, but you cannot drop from view
the heterogeneity of the latter. The reason is that novel ideas

are oftentimes engrafted on words and the continuity broken.

We should not be etymologists merely, but philosophers also.
What difference, therefore, does it make if the Teutonic

word for God be Wodan, the Roman carnival suggestiveof the
old pagan saturnalia, the worship of the patron saints remind-

ful of i)agan devotions to household gods, the retention of

pagan names a hint at pre-christian customs? The facts we

all admit. The inference we deny, at least till further proof

than a sweeping hypothesis be furnished. You cannot prove

the individual connection between particulars from a principle

which is established as only generally true. Sound logic and

scientific instinct forbid it.

YII.—Anthropomorphism and Analogy.

The apparent conviction of Prof. Fiske seems to be that

the modern world owes a lasting debt of gratitude to the pro-

moters of evolution for the death-blow which they have dealt to

the old notions of the Deity. He even ventures the assertion

that the Church has for centuries entertained an idea of God

which it received from the Latin writers and retains to-day in al-

most the same crude outlines in which Augustine left it cen-

turies since. ^ How far Prof. Fiske’ s statement is true concern-
ing Augustine, we have already critically examined. We have
seen that his contention is decidedly at a loss for support

in the writings of the Bishop of Hippo. We now propose to
examine briefly what grounds there are for believing with him

that theologians, generally, have inherited the Latin genius for

representing God in a human shape and after the frailties of

our much-abused human nature. In doing so, we single out

the prince of theologians and the peer of synthetists— 8t.
Thomas of Aquin, whom Haureau accuses, as Prof. Fiske ac-
cuses Augustine, of constructing God in human terms and

expressing in mere human relations.
Thomas of Aquin wrote in a terminology which requires

considerable technical education to decipher. Years of usage

The idea of God, p. 35.



22 CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY BULLETIN.

had given the words which he employed to express his meaning

a definiteness and at the same time a rigidity which baffles

the skill of the uninitiated : and we are not surprised to learn

that those who stopped at the letter never reached the spirit

that underlay his phrases. So many strange and ‘bizarre’
doctrines have been attributed to him by those who study his

views in second-rate sources, that a succinct outline of his

manner of conceiving the Godhead will dispel forever the false

imputation of his having entertained anthropomorphic ideas

and will evidence the perfect fitness of his view even in the

light of the rigorous demands of modern science.

St. Thomas and Herbert Spencer, arguing from the same

source, are both agreed that the human mind is compelled to
admit something “ self-existent.” St. Thomas says In

physical things we find a series of efficient causes, without find-

ing, without the ])ossibility of finding, that any given thing is

the cause of itself. For, on the supposition that anything was

its own cause it would have to exist prior to itself, which is

impossible. Now an infinite series of efficient causes, on the
other hand

,
is likewise impossible : because in a series of efficient

causes, the first is the cause of the intermediate, and the inter-

mediate is the cause of the last, whether the intermediate be

one or many. Therefore, on the supposition that there is no

first cause, there will be no last effect, nor any intermediate

causes : an inference counter to experience. Whence the ne-

cessity of admitting an efficient First Cause which is God.”

Spencer says in the same vein “ We cannot think at all about
the impressions which the external world produces on us with-

out thinking of them as caused, and cannot carry out an in-

quiry concerning their causation without inevitably committing

ourselves to the hypothesis of a First Cause.”

Thus far they are agreed, St. Thomas and Herbert Spencer.

Both start from the same considerations. According to both,

no inquiry concerning the facts of nature can be carried out

legitimately without the eventual admission of an Absolute

First Cause.

But Spencer drew back from the concept, thus thrust into

his observations of nature and magnified by him into an insu-

perable difficulty—namely, the concept of self-existence. He
felt and saw that we can have no adequate, comprehensive con-

ception of self-existence. A concept of this kind, manifesth^
impossible under the finite conditions of human intellect, he

made the goal of his efforts and the object of his mental re-

search. Naturally he was baffled in his quest of a compre-

hensive notion of self-existence which He alone can fully for-

‘Sumina Contra Gent., Lib. I. cap., XIII, prope ad finem. =^First Principles, p. 37.



JOHN FISKE ON THE IDEA OE GOD. 23

mulate who is self-existence itself. His fault was in putting

too much into the concept itself as we know it and thereby

belying experience. When he said that self-existence was
literally unthinkable, he meant that it was such according to

the peculiar tenets of his own philosophy. If the acts of the

human intellect be nothing more than certain refined effects of

organic impressions and all human thinking reduced to ideo-

graphs reproducible in and by imagination, we certainly can-

not conceive of self-existence, if to conceive of it be equiva-

lent to picturing it on the retina (if one may so speak) of the
imaginative faculty. In such a view which is his, all univer-

sal concepts would be alike inconceivable. If, in addition,

eternity be nothing else than infinite past time, which he asserts

it to be, eternal self-existence is a conceptual impossibility.

But Spencer’ s difficulties are of his own making. He makes

no distinction between ‘‘ comprehending a thing thoroughly
”

and ‘ ‘ conceiving it at all. ” He sets up ideal requirements and

because the concept which he actually has concerning self-

existence falls short of the arbitrary one he imagines he should

have, he proceeds to fritter away into the unknowable the little

knowledge we actually do possess concerning the Absolute.

Instead of holding hard by the concept, such as experience

furnishes it, he endeavors to criticise it away by subjecting it

to tests which are foreign to it—namely, comprehensiveness and

the imagination’s power to reproduce it. But his criticism is

valuable in so far as it emphasizes the recognition of an old

truth that something self-existent is somewhat conceivable.”

If it were not, his elaborate criticism would have a more than

Hegelian nothingness for its point of rebuttal, and so much ado

about nothing would certainly not be very flattering to the phi-

losopher of Down.

The ways between the two are not long in dividing. Spen-

cer dwells upon the meagreness of detail which the concept of

self-existence contains and relegates it to the sphere of the un-

knowable. St. Thomas, however, holding to the fact that sucli

a concept is actually given, essays the analysis of its content.

Thenecessity of a First Cause, which Spencer deems unavoidable,

the great Dominican takes as the ground-stone on which to rest

his subsequent reasonings. The concept of a being wholly un-

caused and vvdiolly independent, to which human reason is im-

pelled by reflection on the data of experience, is for him in very

reality a concept of self-existence. On this he lays stress and

upon its elaboration he concentrates his attention.

With him, the domain of such a concept is the intellect.

An after-idea such as this is not pictureable in the imagination,
neither is it essentially cognizable nor fully and intimately



24 CA THOLIC UNIVERSITY B ULLE TIN.

known. Nay more, a comprehensive concept of such an exist-
ence is not only not had, but is impossible, whether in this life

or in the vision of the blessed. In its full nature and essence,

self-existence is beyond the ken of human thinking. In this

sense he agrees with Spencer that the Absolute is unknowable.

But all the while he never once loses sight of the great known

fact, to which all searchers of nature are irrevocably committed,

that there is a self-existent Being, surely though inadequately

known, really though inadequately conceivable. For compre-

hension is not the only kind of knowledge but the highest, and

the knowledge which we actually have concerning self-existence

cannot be rejected on the grounds that such knowledge is not

full, all-embracing and thoroughly comprehensive.

Thus Spencer’s impossibility of infinite past time is irrel-

evant. The concept of self-existence, by the very fact that it

is inadequate, does not set forth and explicitly exjiress the

duration of such a being. The nature of its duration is impli-

citly discoverable in the fact that the laws of empirical phe-

nomena and of change cannot apply to an existence unique

and apart from theirs. The conception of indefinite possible

time is very easy when we reflect on the possibility of an

indefinite series of successive changes before or after any given

moment. But to say with Spencer that self-existence implies

the conception of actually infinite past time is to measure the

unchangeable continuance of a self-existent being after the

manner of beings subject by their very nature to the vicissitudes

of change. It is an unphilosophic attempt to ajjply the same

standard of measurement to two essentially distinct kinds of

duration. After all, succession is essential to the proper con-

ception of time, and where there is and can be no succession,

time is an impossibility. The concept of self-existence which

excludes succession cannot therefore be measured by time,

whether finite or infinite, actual or possible. A self- existent
act is notguageable by the standards of imperfection. Agnos-

ticism at its best is but an extravagant confusion of the mono-

theistic position.

Thus while Spencer’s analysis is an attempt to judge self-

existence by conditions which are utterly foreign to its con-

cept, St. Thomas remains within the sphere of the legitimate

idea afl’orded him by experience and proceeds calmly to the

work of its elaboration. Induction is his basis, deduction his

guide to further conclusions.

Agreeing with Spencer that the Absolute is not fully com-

prehensible as to its innermost nature and, therefore, in this

sense unknowable, he does not, like the latter, lose sight of

the one great fact that the existence of the Absolute is demanded



JOHN FISKE ON THE IDEA OE GOD. 25

by experience as a necessity and is known and formulated

through the agency of a painstaking analysis. He does not

commit the logical fallacy of asserting that because God is not

comprehensively knowable in the intimacy of His essence, His

existence is likewise unknowable. Had he done so, he would
have shut his eyes to a truth into which all causal research

must eventually resolve itself.

After establishing that God is inadequately conceivable

and as inadequately knowable, St. Thomas notes that God and

creatures each exist : the one as demonstrably uncaused, the

other as demonstrably caused : the one with the full reason of

His own existence within Himself, the other with the reason

of its existence in another from which it must needs borrow

its every shred of reality. He proceeds forthwith to compare
these existences and ends in the assertion that both are in

some wise similar.

Here lies the rock of scandal for many. The word ‘‘simi-

larity’’ calls up anthropomorphic shudderings into the con-

sciousness of those who are unacquainted with the delicate

meaning of the term. What is the nature of this similarity %
Let us turn again to the great Dominican for answer.

From what has Just been said it can be nothing else than a

similarity in existence. The question is thus reduced to tan-

gible form by the statement that both God and creatures are

real actual existences. We are using, it will be observed, but
two ideas, both guaranteed by clear experience—the caused
existence of things, the uncaused existence of the Creator,

which these very things in the mind of Spencer himself im-

peratively demand.

Nor can we be accused of fault of method when we thus

compare the Creator and His creatures. We have first argued
from the data of experience and reached an idea of the Un-

caused Reality. We have postulated nothing, neither have
we begged the question at issue when so doing. For it is only

after reaching an idea of the Absolute, ^. 6., of God, that we

have begun to compare our ideas each with the other, God with

creatures. In doing so we have the products of two analyses,

and on the comparison of these two products the nature of

similarity must now be made to rest.
From a comparison of these two analytic products it is clear

that the similarity of existence is neither specific nor generic.

SeJf-existence stands in an order peculiarly its own, and is

therefore unclassifiable, for it can have no generic or specific

agreement with objects which necessarily involve a received

and borrowed existence. The similarity, therefore, in exist-



26 CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY BULLETIN,

ence can be none other than analogical—namely, a real pro-
portional relation.

St. Thomas proceeds to elaborate the notion which induc-
tion and deduction have furnished by showing that the simi-

larity between the world and God is not reciprocal, that is, the
reverse is not true of God with regard to things. Nor should
this surprise us. Similarity between two things is reciprocal

when each possesses properly and fully some common quality.
But where one thing alone possesses the quality to the full and
the other only an iinitation, a participation of it, the latter is

similar to the former, although the converse does not hold good.

A painted j)ortrait is like the hero which it represents. The
hero himself, we would not think of saying it strictly, is like
the portrait. Thus cieatures have through a deficient partici-

[)ation that which God has in all perfection — namely, existence.
And so it is that though things be like unto God, it does not
follow that God is like unto things.

From this it is clear that the likeness, the similarity is im-
perfect. Creatures are like unto God in so far as they repre-
sent His perfections, and at the same time are very unlike Him,

because their perfections are found in God in a vastly different
way and according to a self-existent, not a finite nature. In
the light of similarity such as this, the spectre of anthropo-

morphism is made to vanish.
Here is the very essence of the Catholic notion of God’s

knowableness — analogical proportion of existence between
creatures and God. The similarity, the likeness of creature to

the Creator is, ])roperly speaking, expressible only in an agree-

ment of two proportions. Creatures; Their existence: : God:
Pure self-existence. In this manner alone is the great pjroblem
of the Absolute to be studied. The knowableness of the Abso-

lute depends upon a similarity of proportions, just as if one

were to put it mathematically 6 : 8 : : 100 : 50. The greater or

lesser distance between the perfections of different natures does

not affect the proportionality,—2: 1 : : 6: 3 remaining unaffected,
should we choose to write it 2: 1:: 1,000: 500. When men
begin to realize the force and beauty of reasoning such as this

they will be spared a great many, and alas ! too frequent logi-

cal pitfalls. To say that this view fritters away the idea of God
to a mere abstraction, is to acknowledge one of two impossibil-

ities, either that we, as finite, should be better able to grasp

the infinite, or that the infinite should become finite for the sole

sake that we might compass it with knowledge.
The knowableness of God corresponds to this analogical simi-

larity between creatures and Creator. We conceive the perfec-
tions of creatures to be in God originally and superabundantly.



JOHN FISKE ON THE IDEA OF GOD. 27

Originally: because, as all efficient causes contain their effects

in the active power they have to produce them, self-existence

which is really and conceptually the source of all, must of ne-

cessity hold all within itself after the manner of its own sub-

lime nature. For existence is the perfection of all things,

whether substance or quality, attribute or property. Super-

abundantly: that is, without imperfection and in the most

noble manner.

The imperfections of creatures do not come from God as cause,
but result from their original nothingness, and the fact that

they borrow existence from Another who could not create an
infinitely perfect being for the reason that infinity and created

reality are, in combination, self- destructive, impossible. The

infinite power of God is not exhausted in creation, any more than
the power of an atom of oxygen loses its efficiency to enter into

combinations though it may have done so for ages. If a simple
atom does not lose an iota of its power by the constant work it

is perpetually accomplishing, what a lesson for us concerning

the infinite power of Him, who is a boundless sea of essence and
existence ! He has without imperfection the perfections of all
superabundantly.

Again, we have said, God contains all perfections of creatures

in a most noble manner, that is, in the highest possible degree.

For there is nothing to limit His existence, and what is

scattered piecemeal through a multitude of effects, is united in

Him in one completely rounded whole of pure and infinite
actuality. In this sense is God truly remote from all and dwell-
ing in inaccessible majesty.

From all this it is clear that the perfections of creatures,

whatever they be, cannot be attributed to God in the deficient

manner in which they are found in creatures. The imperfec-

tion of the mode is denied of God; the perfection, whatever it

is, is affirmed of Him in the highest degree. We will go fur-
ther. There are certain perfections in things which concep-

tually involve no defect, as wisdom, goodness. Such as these

are, with all propriety, affirmable of God, who, in one simple

existence, possesses all perfections unitedly, fully, and abso-

lutely. Here it may be remarked that the metaphysical reason
back of the attribution of all such perfections to God, for ex-

ample, wisdom, is not the sole derivation of wisdom from the

fountain-head of the Deity—the cause has nothing from the
effect—bat the imitation by creatures of the Divine Wisdom
itself. The motive of this observation lies in the fact that God

was intelligent and full of wisdom before creatures sprang into

existence and did not acquire this attribute from them, but re-

flected it in them.



28 CA THOLIC UNIVEERSn'V B ULL TIN.

Other perfections there are which imply in themselves a

certain amount of modal imperfection as the direct result of
their finite nature. Such, for instance, would be the attribu-

tion to God of the powers of sight, understanding thereby a
knowledge of visible objects through a faculty conjoined with

an organ of sense. These cannot be affirmed of God except in
a metaphorical sense. The reason is that, though perfections

in their way, they are not pure, and result directly from finite

and less noble conditions. All that x)ertains to the nobility

of creatures does not pertain to the nobility of the Creator, who
exceeds all beyond measure. Ferocity ennobles the lion. It

would redound to man’s conceptual discredit, even though he

be the lion’s superior as the centre-])iece of creation.

Thus it is that the Angel of the Schools weighs well in the

l)alance of a critical reason his every statement concerning God.

He has left us page after \)2igQ in his Summa Theologica of care-
ful discernment between the words and ideas through which we

stammer out our notions of the Deity. So far from being an-

thropomorphic, he carefully discriminates against any such in-

terpretation. His two ways of expressing God, to wit, by

denying all imperfections and by affirming all xterfection, cover

the ground required in the problem.

Perhaps the criticism Hamilton made of the argument from

analogy might strike some readers of these pages as weakening

the x)osition we have been sustaining. To such as these we

would suggest a consideration of the following. According to

the doctrine which we have just been exposing, God is known

by affirmation and denial. By affirmation, God is known from
those perfections which He is^ and by negation He is known
from those things which He is not. ^ The latter is, as apparent,
the chief mode relied upon in our investigations of the concept

of God. We affirm perfection and at the same time deny its
mode, its limit, its condition in creatures. We remove all im-
perfection entirely from Him and in this wise essay to reach
some glimmering knowledge of God’s eternal self-hood.^

This would appear to make God, as Hamilton said, a pro-

duct of negative thinking, a bundle of negations. Let us look

critically into the worth of this statement.

It is a well known fact of logic that the more we penetrate

into and discover the differences of any object from all others,

the more perfect knowledge do we reach of the object itself.

Whence, in establishing its definition, we first classify the genus

and then add the differences which mark it off from all others.

^Ex iis quae est. ^Exiisquae non est. These striking expressions are from St. Cyril of
Alexandria. De Sancta et Consubst. Trinit., Dial. I. ®For theory of analogy in St. Augustine,
cf. Aug. in loannem. III., tract. 39, No. 7; Ibid, tract. XIII.; Ibid, Sermo de verbis Apostoli;
Lib. contra Meodacium, cap. X.; DeTrinitate, Lib. V., cap. XIII.



JOHN FISKE ON THE IDEA OF GOD. 29 .

In tMs wise we acquire complete knowledge of the object’s

nature. But as this is impossible with the Divine Nature,which

is above all classification and irreducible to any genus or species,

we cannot distinguish it from other objects by affirmative dif-

ferentiations. Thus when I deny of God that He is corporeal,

a body, I distinguish him from all such. If I deny again that

He is an accidental being, I affirm implicitly that He is some-

thing else. Proceeding thus, I come to know what God is not.

But all the while I am denying, I am implicitly affirming, just
as when I deny that man is a lion, I do not deny all reality of
him, but that only which is comprised in a lion’s nature. A
residual product is left over after denial—namely. He is not
the particular object denied, but something else. I do not deny

perfections of God in order to exclude them from Him, but to

demonstrate His sublimity and excellence. If I did not know

something of God, I could not deny anything of Him, because

affirmation must precede denial.

If therefore, I affirm before I deny, what is the result? I

first affirm wisdom and I say that God is wise. But as wisdom

is in God in a more perfect way than in creatures, I deny that

God’s wisdom stops at the nature of human wisdom such as I

see it. Does not this mean that God is over-wise as compared

to creatures ? The negation does not destroy what has been

said in the affirmation, but simply denotes that the thoughts

expressed in the affirmation should be understood in a sense

more noble than we are prepared fully to comprehend. In this

wise, so far from destroying our positive knowledge negation

perfects it, because in the denial of an imperfection a greater

perfection is indirectly affirmed.

Consideration of thoughts such as these cannot fail to im-

press us that in St. Thomas we are dealing with a genius who

was acquainted with every inch of ground over which the

human intellect is forced to travel carefully and slowly if it

would be sure of firmest footing. Once the nature of the simi-

larity between creatures and Creator is sifted down to propor-

tional analogy, no fear need be entertained that we are con-

structing God after human fashion or projecting Him without
warrant out of our own finite consciousness. Close reasonings

there are and must be in such a problem. But these in no wise

impair the discussional worth and objective validity of the

position of St. Thomas.

Such is the nature of similarity, such the basis of attribut-

ing to God the perfections of creatures in a way compatible

with His self-subsisting nature. God is not reconstructed

through the principle of analogy as though he were a sum total

of abstractions, but the concept of self-existence which expe-



CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY BULLETIN.• 30

rience intrudes upon us is broadened, deepened, rounded out

by such considerations. Nor should this surprise us. The

nature of the human mind is sucli that it understands the sim-
])lest realities by breaking them into a multiplicity of partial

considerations, and by ])ie(dng these latter together again into

the synthesis of a whole. The piecing together is a mental

process, an aid to a further conception. It is as serviceable

and as useless as a scaffolding
;
serviceable and necessary in

reaching the heights we would attain unto; useless once the

goal is reached.

VIII.—The CliKA'l’lON-lDEA AND MoDERN SCIENCE.

The underdrift of modern science is toward an all-pervad-

ing unity. Powerful reseaich work has called forth from the

depth of things an answer wliich Augustine received long ages

since from the liowei's of the field when they bade him seek

their cause above and beyond their floral selves. The scat-

tered fragments which mere analysis yields up to the pains-

taking observer will not remain apart. They are beaded to-

gether in a rosary of relations. The more one ydunges into

the consideration of realities for the sole sake of the pleas-

ureable knowledge afforded by the plunging, the more does

one feel that each apparently separate reality reaches out to

some other of its kind by a hidden bond that makes for unity

and suggests the presence of some great polarizing powder. The

spectrum has made the heavenly bodies tell their mute story

of themselves and assert their kinship with the elements which

we know and see more immediately about us. The ether acts

as avast telegra])hic system between the wheeling worlds, flash-

ing the quivers of the one into the very heart of the other.

Purpose is seen in the steady march of the universe towards

its goal, and is discernible under the petals of the meanest

dower that blows. In the midst of variety, do what one will,

order thrusts itself into consideration. Events that seem the

furthermost apart are on deeper search found to be in close

communion. Analysis has at last made evident the need of

its consort, synthesis
;
men are gradually beginning to realize

what St. Thomas struggled to express some centuries since,

that the vast network of interacting objects which men call

Nature is throbbing with the unison of a mighty purpose and

impelled ever onwards toward the goal, dramatically, irre-

sistibly.

Considerations such as these, suggestive of an all-pervad-

ing Unity actually at work in the heart and fibre of the world,

have impressed modern theistic thinkejs with the solemn



JOHN FISKE ON THE IDEA OF GOD.

thought that the idea of God hitherto entertained needs radi-

cal reshaping. The fact that in the midst of so much change

there is constancy of development, in the midst of death, decay

and apparent confusion there is the steady march of purpose,

has burst upon some minds with all the brilliancy of a new

revelation. When examined critically, however, it all turns
out to be an old truth arrived at by new avenues, the mere ac-

centuation of an old belief, not the trumpet-blast of a new

discovery. The hypothesis of evolution in the minds of many
has brought God closer to things, has made it impossible to
banish Him from the field of phenomena. To read the writ-
ings of such men and to note their insistence upon God’s
presence in nature one is tempted to think that the whole

world was of opposite persuasion. ^ The notion seems preva-

lent among such that the doctrine of creation cai-ries with it

the idea of a God who completed the world in the twilight of

the ages and remained away from it ever since lost in the com-

pass of His own infinity. Fabulous derivations of the crea-

tion-idea are peddled out in the guise of scientific hypotheses

and men are urged to reject it on the ground that it no longer

answers the needs of science which demands a Deity that has

actually something to do with the world of realities in which

we live, who is its heart, its life, the controller of its forces,

the goal of its destinies.

Nothing could be further from the truth than the thought

that Creation implies subsequent inertia on the part of the

Creator, a sort of “divine absenteeism,” to paraphrase Car-

lyle’s sneering allusion.

Creation, rightly understood, gives to the idea of God the

one essential characteristic which saves the divine Being from

gross confusion and identity with the force and matter of the

universe—the characteristic of complete distinction from it in
nature. It implies none of the crudities to which Prof. Fiske

refu ses to subscribe. Distinction does not mean God’ s absence,

nor does creation imply utter inactivity. God’s separation

from the world by nature does not involve his separation from

it in power, guidance and continuous development.

A creator who is not also an upholder, a conservator, is a
myth. There is as much absurdity in admitting continuous

existence of reality without continuous creation, as there would

be in admitting actual sunlight from a sun that had ceased to

irradiate. When conservation is called perpetual creation, it

^One of the great sources of misunderstanding nowadays is the new terminology which
has come into use. The old phrases seem weighted down with a meaniug they can no longer
carry. Especially is this seen in economics and philosophy. Perhaps a new St. Paul will
come to tell men that the God whom they have hidden under phrase and thus made unknown
is the God of patristic and Christian conception.



32 CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY BULLETIN.

is not meant that things are constantly dropping out of exist-

ence and as constantly returning to it. This would be the

height of absurdity. It simply means that if there is nothing

in things to warrant our belief in their {)Ower of self-produc-

tion—nothing to warrant their eternal existence of themselves,
there certainly is nothing to make ns scientifically believe that

a reality wliich owed the entirety of its being to another for

the hrst moment of its existence, does not remain debtor to the
same power every additional moment that such existence con-
tinues to endure. If the sun x>roduced illumination of the at-

mosphere centuries since, it must continue its action to-day,

else all actual illumination is impossible.

The Creation-idea has all the virtues of the other cosmic

theories with none of theii- vices. It rejects emphatically their

one most ignoble feature. It excludes God as the formal cause

or formal constituent of this universe of realities. God is the
efficient and the final cause, the Beginning and the End. He
hurled the universe into existence, and He has as much to do
with it to day as on creation’s dawn. Out of His power, infi-

nite and eternal, things that were not, came to be. They came

from no preexistent, except the preexisting power of God, the

infinite actuality of which they are but meagre participations.

It rejects God as part of things, as compounded with them,

as identical with their fleeting, finite selves. It does not pre-

clude His presence. His power. His actual working in things.

It rejects Pantheism as ignoble, a sort of blind necessity and

gross confusion. It lays down the facts that God made things ex-

ist that were previously non-existent, that He upholds them by

His power, that He rules their actions, supplies them with ac-
tuality to be and power to do, that there is not a shred of re-

ality in them that is not of His pure giving. But it denies that

things are God or that God is things. He is distinct from them

as all-perfect reality must be from the finite and imperfect, as

the Giver from the gifts of His hands.

But it admits all the while that He is intimately present in

them, that He has more to do with their workings than they

have themselves, that their myriad individual natures act of

themselves through Him and He in them. He is not a far-off
deity, but a God creating, conserving, provident and predestin-

ing. The existence of the tiniest atom as well as every parti-

cle of its force comes from Him. The outlay of its little store

of power is by virtue of His infinite reservoir of self. He

gives without losing. Things receive their nature, their pow-

ers, their every act from Him, are moved by Him in every opera-
tion, remain within the bounds He set them, and march ever

onwards toward the purpose that He wills. Everything they



JOHN FISKE ON THE IDEA OE GOD.
33

have is borrowed, yet none the less is all reality real without

being the reality of God, and God is real without being the
reality of creatures. The crudity is in Professor Fiske’s concep-

tion, not in the traditional idea that has come down to us from
the Christian Era.

Things and God act simultaneously. Two causes are at
work—the Creator and the creature. The universal and the
particulars. Every finite effect is due to both, referable to

both, though unequally and in different measure. There is

unity in the individual causes when at work, because He gives
the power to work and the instinct that seeks the goal particu-
lar, and thus contributes the quota of light and shade to na-

ture’s picture of purpose. He is everywhere, though not con-
tained in space. He acts everywhere a pulse of life is beating
or a coral reef is forming in the depths of a silver sea. He is
in all, acts in all, moves all, guides all, controls all, yet is He
none of the works of His hands, though the universe is a pur-

poseful activity and the heavens a rosary strung with beaded

stars. ^

He is infinitely distant from them in nature. But this
does not imply absence from the field of phenomena. It means

that despite His presence He is the pure actuality infinitely
different in His constitution from the petty realities which are

but as nothing in His sight.

^Some of Professor Fiske's conceptions of the “ Dark Age” theology are, to use his own
word, barbaric. He says (page lOo) : ” To conceiv^e of physical forces as powers of which the
action could in any wise be ‘subsrituted for the action of the Deity would in such a case have
been absolutely impossiide ’ Such a conception involves the idea of God as remote from the
world and acting upon it from outside. The whole notion of what theological writers are
fond of ealling ‘ secondary causes’ involves such an idea of God.” First ot all, no philoso-
phic writer of the “Dark Ages” would dream of saying that physical forces were powers
whose action could be substituted, etc. Only in our own day have the distinct notions of
force, power and action been grossly confused, to the real detriment of science. (Cf. The
Correlation of Phj sical Forces, by Grove, pp. 13, 15, and 3o.) Professor Fiske reads into the
scholastic notions the peculiar phases of Mill’s Philosophy of Causes. He judges the Schoo'-
men from Mill’s point of view without first ascertaining theirs. We know no scholastic
writerof repute who conceived of physical forces as powers whose action could be substi-
tuted for that of God. Action is the exertion of power. Force, properly speaking, is the
amount of the exertion, or the quantity of the action, as measured by the effect it is able to
produce. To say therefore that forces were powers was past all scholastic belief. But what
is more unworthy still is Professor Fiske's view of the then current theologic position. No
one ever dreamt of holding that the ac ions of secondary causes were substituted for those
of the Deity. Professor Fiske simply describes a past that never was a present. The doctrine
held then as now is simply this ; God and creatures are not partial causes. They are two
complete causes, each producing the same effect, but in a different manner. The eff'e ct isdue
to both, but the mode of producing it is different in each. God acts as the universal cause.
Creatures act as particular and finite causes. It is the same philosophic fact that underlies
the production of a statue by a sculptor and his chisel. Both contribute to the effect, each in
the proper way. The thought that the creature’s action was substituted for that of God no
more crossed the imagination of a scholastic than the thought that the action of a chisel is
substituted for that of the sculptor would be entertained nowadays. How could they bold
such a view when the kejmote to the position ot St. '1 homas on God’s indwelling in nature is
such that he gives expression to his thought in the following : “Tlte first cause exerts more
productional activii y on the effect of the second cause than the secojid cause itself.” tCausa
prima est vehementioris impre-ssionis supra causatnm causae secundae quam ipsa causa
secunda. TV. Dist. 12

,
art. 1. ad. The second cause was never a substitute for the first.

Such an idea is puerile and unphilosophic. Yet Professor Fiske says it is common. He gives
no reference and cites no authority. He may not believe in cause as implying the notion of
production, since he follows John Stuart Mill’s system, which Jevons (Pure Logic and Other ^
Minor Works, p. 201) does not hesitate to characterize as an incubus of bad logic and bad
philosophy. But because he does not believe in cause as implying production is no reason
why he should judge those who do believe such, by the standard of those who do not. Pro-
fessor Fiske is stating a positioi?, and should state it fairly, not invent it.



34 CATHOLfC UNIVERSITY BULLETIN.

Without creation, distinction is impossible. Without dis-

tinction, Pantheism is the legitimate outcome. Prof. Fiske

distinguishes in vain when he makes out the God of the Theist
different from that of the Pantheist, on the score that he is

not blind force but omnipresent energy. What is this energy
at the heart of the circling worlds? Is it the very cosmic en-

ergies themselves or something apart and distinct from them?

If it be these very energies, no process of reasoning can make
his position other than Pantheistic. Recourse to omnipresent

energy as against blind force is a makeshift. For intelligent

or blind, force is force still, energy is energy, and if God be
either, the world is God, however much subtlety may distin-
guish or ingenuity substitute.

Theism is removed from Pantheism in words, in formula

only and not in the thought that lies at the heart of each.

Arid if Prof. Fiske objects to this view as foreign to his con-

siderations, he must siinjily be struggling to express what the

nobler stream of thought within us all must outpour eventu-

ally—the idea of a God which Augustine outlined and Thomas
of Aquin developed to the highest—Eternal, Infinite, Personal
Intelligence, Will and Power, back of all phenomena, under

the petals of the meanest flower, nowhere absent, everywhere

at work, the source of all phenomena, because the cause of

them, yet not identified with any single phenomenon, for the

reason that they are not made out of Him but by Him, are
not emanations from Him, but productions of His infinite

power.

Such a concept is the only one worthy of science, of philoso-

phy—of religion. It is not anthropomorphic, unscientific, un-
philosophic It would need no modification even if Evolution

had made good its myriad claims. The very insufficiency of
all other concepts of God to realize Him satisfactorily is a
lasting monument to the victorious truth of the Creation-idea.

Such a God alone is one whom scientists can afford to adore
and whom knowing not, their very struggles at expressioji
reveal and their meagre makeshifts proclaim as the only legi-

timate outcome of modern science. Lest this latter statement

be thought a burst of fervor merely, or as some would view it,

the trumpery of a defunct metaphysic, we apx^end in conclu-

sion the scientific suggestion of the Creation-idea by Prof.

Clerk-Maxwell, F. R. S., the eminent English mathematician

and natural philosopher.

^

^This qiiotation furnishes us with interesting’ and suggestive considerations. No one dis-
agrees with Mill when he says that by reasoning from the facts of experience we can never
rise to the conviction that the specific elementary substances of things (i. e. the elements) are
created out of nothing, for the reason that they are not known to us as beginning to exist, but as
constantly enduring throughout all changes. To argue thus is fault5' in the admission of all.
The method pursued by St- Thomas is to argue from experience to a First Cause of changes.



JOHN FISKE ON THE IDEA OE GOD, 35

‘‘The molecule, though indestructible, is not a hard, rigid

body, but is capable of internal movements, and when these are
excited, it emits rays, the wave-length of which is a measure

for the time of vibration of a molecule. By means of the
spectroscope the wave-length of dilferent kinds of light may be
compared to within one ten -thousandth part. In this way it
has been ascertained not only that molecules taken from every

specimen of hydrogen in our laboratories have the same set of

period s of vibration, but that light having the same set of periods

of vibration is emitted from the sun and from the fixed stars.

We are thus assured that molecules of the same nature as those
of our hydrogen exist in those distant regions, or at least did

exist when the light by which we see them was emitted. . . .
Light, which is to us the sole evidence of the existence of these

distant worlds, tells us also that each of them is built of mole-

cules of the same kind as those which we find on earth. A
molecule of hydrogen, for example, whether in Sirius or Arctu-

rus, executes its vibrations in precisely the same time. Each

molecule, therefore, throughout the universe, bears impressed on

it the stamp of a metric system as distinctly as does the metre

of the Archives of Paris or the double royal cubit of the Tem-

ple of Karnac. No theory of evolution can be formed to account
for the similarity of molecules; for evolution necessarily im-

plies continuous change, and the molecule is incapable of growth

or decay, of generation or destruction. None of the processes

of nature, since the time when nature began, have produced

the slightest difference in the properties of any molecule.

W e are therefore unable to ascribe either the existence of the
molecules or the identity of their properties to the operation of

aay of the causes which we call natural. On the other hand,
the exact quality of each molecule to all others of the same

kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel has well said, the essential

character of a manufactured article, and precludes the idea of

its being eternal and self-existent.

Thus we have been led, along a strictly scientific path, very

near to the point at which science must stop. Not that science

is debarred from studying the internal mechanism of a molecule

which she cannot take to pieces, any more than from investiga-

ting an organism which she cannot put together. But in tracing

back the history of matter science is arrested when she assures

herself, on the one hand, that the molecule has been made, and,

on the other, that it has not been made by any of the processes

which Spencer guys is an inevitable conclusion. Once this First Cause is established, it is in
order to inquire into its nature and the relations between the primitive elements of matter
and the First Cause itself. Such a procedure is soundly raethodologrical. Yet Mill attacks at
frreat length the former method, forgetting, evidently, that in so doing he strikes no antago-
nist. The quotation from Clerk-Maxwell is from: A Lecture on Molecules delivered before
the British Association at Bradfcrd.~2Vatwre, teptember 25, 1873.



36 CATHOL/C UNIVERSITY BULLETIN.

we call natural. Science is incompetent to reason upon the
creation of matter itself out of nothing. ^ We have reached
the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we have ad-
mitted that, because matter cannot be eternal and self-exist-

ent, it must have been created. That matter, as such, should

have certain fundamental properties, that it should exist in

space and be capable of motion, that its motion should be per-

sistent, and so on, are truths which may, for anything we know,

be of the kind which metaphysicians call necessary. We may
use our knowledge of such truths for purposes of deduction,

but we have no data for speculating as to their origin. But
that there should be exc1,ctly so much matter and no more in
every molecule of hydrogen is a fact of a very different order.

. Natural causes, as we know, are at work, which tend

to modify, if they do not at length destroy, all the arrange-

ments and dimensions of the earth, and of the whole solar

system. But though, in the course of ages, catastrophes

have occurred, and may yet occur, in the heavens
;
though an-

cient systems may be dissolved, and new systems evolved out
of their ruins, the molecules out of which those systems ai'e

built, the foundation-stones of the material universe, remain

unbroken and unworn. They continue to this day as they were

created, p>erfect in number and measure and weight, and from

the ineffaceable characters impressed on them we may learn
that those aspirations after accuracy in measurement, truth

in statement, and justice in action, which we reckon among
our noblest attributes as men, are ours because they are essential

constituents of the image of Him who, in the beginning, created
not only the heaven and earth, but the materials of which

heaven and earth consist.”

'Edmuisd T. Shanahan.

Ht is competent, however, to furnish the philosopher with all the materials of snch a
reasoning, as this very passage clearly shows.





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