From Finite Person to the Infinite Divine Person

De: Josef Seifert

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

This work defends a highly original version of the first four of the famous ways of Aquinas to God.
It starts with an analysis of being-in-time and shows that the infinitely fast movement from the not-yet of the future to the actual present being that passes immediately to the “no more” of the past does not allow in any way make temporal self-explanatory. Though not only psychologically but also ontologically all actual consciousness occurs on an island of time that cannot be reduced to unextended “Now-points”, still beings-in-time justify Augustine’s statement that they are only by tending to nothingness (past).
At the same time, the moving present fills a certain time and the human person is a moving image of eternity (Plato).
In the light of the absolute impossibility of a person-in-time being beginningless and eternal, the totally different person who alone can create a temporal person, shows Himself.
Also the contingent (non-necessary) existence of all beings and persons in the world prove God through the impossibility that a being that could also not be could exist through itself. Thus, an entirely different kind of being that could not not be reveals itself to human reason. This being alone can possess the reason to be in itself and can be the first cause of the world and of the human person, but only if it does not act by the necessity of its nature but is a free person. As Kierkegaard pointed out, a free omnipotent God is so far away from destroying our free will that He alone can explain human free will and let us free. No physical and chemical forces, no animals or brain processes can create a soul and endow a person with free will.
Another contingency (non-necessity) is inseparable from the limits of all values and perfections we possess. As we cannot explain why we have an exact measure of physical seize and time of our life, so also not the limits of our perfections within an infinity of possible more or less. As these non-necessary limits can in no way explain themselves, only an infinitely perfect personal God can both explain Himself and have given us the exact and precise measures of our greatness and our misery.
Chapter four overcomes Kant’s big objection that time and space, free will and causality are full of antinomies and contradictions and therefore would invalidate our knowledge of God.
Chapter five on the sense and senselessness of apophatic theology distinguishes in a subtle way the different ontological and logical meanings of the “3 ways to speak of God” and shows that not all philosophical theology must use a negative way but that the “pure perfections” which are absolutely better to be and to possess than not being and possessing them (like reality, life, knowledge, wisdom, justice, love) allow us to use also the positive and the supereminent ways to speak of God and to know Him in an imperfect but true way.
An extraordinarily successful analysis of analogy and univocity solves a hundreds of years old conflict between Thomists and Scotists on the question whether we can speak of God and man in univocal or only in analogical terms,
Chapter 7 finally faces courageously and forcefully the biggest challenge of any philosophy or religion that speaks of a good God: the problem of evil. Three attempts to “tame” the ferocious problem and mystery of evil fail in their claims that: (1) good and evil are relative and we do not know that evils exist, or (2) that only the good exists and evils are merely a lack of being and goodness, or (3) that the world is the best possible one only because also evils exist in it (Leibniz).
The book shows both the impenetrable abysses of the mystery of evil but also the many luminous answers to the question why a good God can allow the atrocious reality of evil, particularly by showing that the free will that allows moral evils contains many clues to understand the existence of pain.