RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
God
alone, so that, in so far as anything exists in the universe, God is the essence of it; a practical pantheism, in spite of his attempting to enforce a creative activity on the part of God. The influence of this pantheistic view on medieval theology was a limited one; Amalric of Bena (q.v.), with his proposition that God was all things, was its main disciple.
In accordance with its fundamental character, scholasticism attempted to reduce the idea of God into the categories which related to the laws of
thought, to being in general, and to the
8. The Scho- world. It began by adapting the
lastic Phi- Aristotelian terms to its own pur-
losophers. poses. God, or absolute being, was
to Aristotle the primum mobile, regarded thus from the standpoint of causation and not of mere being, and also a thinking subject. The ideas and prototypes of the finite are accordingly to be found in God, who is the final Cause. God, in Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, is not the essential being of things, but he is their esse effective et exemplariter, their primum movens, and their causa finalis. Aristotelian, again, is the definition of God's own nature, that he is, as a thinking subject, actus purus — pure, absolute energy, without the distinction found in finite beings between potentiality and actuality. In opposition to Thomas, Duns Scotus emphasized in his conception of God the prim/urn ens and primum movens, the element of will and free causation. The arbitrary nature of the will of God, taught by him, was raised by Occam to the most important element of his teaching about God. Upon this abstract conception of the will of God as arbitrary and unconditioned depend the questions (so characteristic of scholasticism from Abelard down) as to whether all things are possible to God.
About the end of the thirteenth century, by the side of the logical reasonings of scholasticism, there arose the mystical theology of Eckhart, which attempted to bring the Absolute near to the hearts of men as the object of an immediate intuition dependent upon complete self-surrender. The transcendental Neoplatonic conception of the Absolute is here pushed to its extreme, and Dionysius has more influence than Thomas Aquinas. The view of God's relation to the world is almost pantheistic,
unless it may be rather called acos- 9. The mistic, regarding the finite as naught. Mystics. This is Eckhart's teaching, although
at the same time he speaks of a creation of the world and of a Son in whom God expresses himself and creates. This God is regarded as goodness and love, communicating himself in a way, but not to separate and independent images of his own being; rather, he possesses and loves himself in all things, and the surrender to him is passivity and self-annihilation. The ruling ideas of this view were moderated by the practical German mystics and found in this form a wide currency. On the other hand, pantheistic heretics, such as the Brethren of the Free Spirit combined antinomian principles with the doctrine that God was all things and that the Christian united with God was perfect as God.
In partial contrast to the speculative theology which has been considered above, the practical popular view of the Middle Ages tended to represent God as a strict autocrat and judge, and to multiply intermediate advocates with him, of whom Mary was chief. Luther went back to the God of Scripture, regarded primarily in his ethical relation to man, pronouncing curses, indeed, against the impenitent, but really aiming at man's salvation. As the love of God has an ethical, 10. The personal character, so it requires from Reformers, its human objects not self-annihilation, but an entrance with all the power of personality into communion with this love and enjoyment of the filial relation. The Christian, though free from bondage to the world, is to realize that it was made by God to serve his purposes. Melanchthon and Calvin, in like manner, avoiding scholastic subtleties, laid stress upon these practical relations. The dogmatic differences, however, between the Lutheran and Reformed confessions point to a fundamental difference in the way of regarding God. The former emphasizes his loving condescension to man's weakness, and teaches a deification of humanity in the person of Christ and a union of the divine operations and presence with means of grace having a created and symbolic side, which the latter, with its insistence upon the supreme exaltation of God, can not admit; and it rejects a theory of an eternal decree of reprobation against a part of humanity which the latter defends by appealing to God's rights over sinners and his absolute sovereignty. The next generation of dogmatic theologians was accustomed to define God as essentia spiritualis infinita, and, in the description of his attributes, to pass from general metaphysical terms to his ethical attributes and those relating to his knowledge. The older rationalistic and supranaturalistic theologians showed an increasing tendency to return for their definitions and expositions to the Scriptures. Nor did they accomplish much in the way of solving the real problems or investigating the relation between the content of revelation and the knowledge or conception of the divine to be found elsewhere.
The independent metaphysical systems of the philosophers, which embraced God and the world, did not at first make any profound impression on the thought of theologians. Spinoza's pantheism was by its very nature excluded from consideration; but the philosophy of Leibnitz and Wolff, with its conception of God as a supremely per- 11. Leibnitz feet, personal Being, in whom all posand Wolff, sible realities were embraced in their highest form, and with its demonstration of God's existence, offered itself as a friend to Christian doctrine, and was widely influential. In so far, however, as the theologians adopted any of its conclusions, it was with little clearness of insight or independent thought as to the relation of these metaphysical concepts to the Christian faith or as to their own validity.
A new epoch in German philosophy, with which theology had and still has to reckon, came in with Kant. Confidence in the arguments by which God's existence had been proved and defined was at
God