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“That divine uniqueness is modal is exactly what we should except from the fact
that modality appears in its (neoclassical) definition,” writes Hartshorne, “i.e., as
coincidence or co extensiveness of the individual’s actuality with all actuality, and of its
possibility with all possibility” (85). Hence, God is all that is, and all that may be. For
Hartshorne, every particular state of affairs is God in his contingent actuality. Any
particular, actual state of affairs entails contingency because of the arbitrariness of its
parameters. At a given location in space, for example, the possibility of someone
occupying the exact space that I occupy cannot be realized. Where there is this-and-not-
that arbitrarily, argues Hartshorne, there is contingency. However, because God is
complete modal coincidence with all actuality and all potentiality, his contingent actuality
is not an imperfection, nor is it incompatible with His absolute and necessary existence.
For Descartes, on the other hand, God is not such complete modal coincidence,
but rather is an absolute other. To begin with, Descartes fails to recognize his own
essential properties before moving on to consider God, which may explain his
misconceived notion of the latter. Descartes fails to separate his modes of thought from
the abstract existence of his thought like he fails to recognize God’s concrete actuality
from his abstract existence. “Is there any one of these attributes [doubt, understanding,
etc] which can be distinguished from my thinking or which can be said to be separable
from my nature?” (23), asks Descartes. He responds negatively. However, the naked
cogito is absolute, necessary, infinite, eternal existence, whereas the various modes of
thought are concrete and contingent. Those who do not know by experience must take
the substantiation for this claim of the nature of the cogito on faith, but it can shortly be
summarized as follows. When the soul (the knowledge of which emerges after proper
examination of the cogito) contemplates God not in His contingent actuality but as
Perfect Love, it is carried by His grace into Himself and finds its true existence in Him.
Therefore, the true self of the soul is the true self of God.
Descartes writes this after wondering if “possibly I am something more than I suppose
myself to be.” It is still possible to the meditator that “the perfections which I attribute to
the nature of a God are somehow potentially in me.” This idea, as we see, Descartes
quickly refutes because in the idea of God, nothing at all is potential. However, if God is
conceived only as pure actuality, pure Being, this denies Him creativity, it negates
teleology, falls into a morally reprehensible determinism, and ignores the fact that the
Almighty, greater than which none can be conceived, must be the Author of all possible
worlds, all possible states of being, all potentiality, and not just rest contented as an
impersonal absolute other. “Gradually increasing” is far from being a most certain mark
of imperfection as Descartes so authoritatively assumed. Here, as elsewhere, Descartes
fails to make the distinction between God in his necessary existence and in his contingent
actuality. Certainly God, Perfection, cannot be called imperfect in his concreteness.
“If everything that exists requires a cause for its existence, then I need merely
argue backwards from any substance to its cause”, reasons Descartes in establishing the
existence of God. The objection here is that I, as a necessary being, indubitable (as
Descartes has shown but perhaps not appreciated) am not just another instance of a thing
that exists. Whereas everything else is contingent in its existence, I am essentially,
necessarily existent. My necessary existence constitutes the existence of all other things
that appear to me as existent. Descartes argued that if a substance X contains the idea of
God, then X couldn’t be self caused, unless it is God. At this point, we can either say
with Descartes that the cogito must be caused by God, thus making God an object of
knowledge to the cogito, thus limiting the Almighty as object-to or creator-of, or we can,
with the mystics, recognize the cogito (the naked cogito: the transcendental ego) as one
with God and retain a coherent picture of divine perfection, as defined by Hartshorne and
others.
In Stephen Menn’s book Descartes and Augustine, the reader finds the following
“scholarly” definition of God’s knowledge: God can know X essentially either if X is
identical with God or if X depends essentially on God’s will: in the latter case God knows
X just by knowing his own will to produce it, and so he does not become dependant for
his knowledge on anything outside himself. God’s knowledge of me, according to this
conception, is knowledge of his will to produce me. In this case, unless God’s will
included the course of my entire life, my choices and desires, etc, he would have, at best,
incomplete knowledge of me – knowledge only of his will to create me but not
knowledge of my particular concrete actuality. This we cannot accept, for God knows all
and loves all. The other option, within this framework, is that God’s will in fact includes
everything I attribute to my own free will, and thus we fall into a strict determinism.
However, should we invoke the neoclassical conception of God as modal co incidence
with all actuality and all potentiality, God becomes the worthiest object of devotion for
He would know every actual state of affairs and every possible state of affairs – would no
longer be an impersonal object of knowledge – and his love would rightly be conceived
of as infinite – i.e., complete participation in all mind and all being, possible and actual.
Furthermore, such a conception brings to light the creative aspect of God, the relative
indeterminism inherent in the process of becoming. I quote again from Hartshorne:
We see, then, that Descartes was guilty of a “huge error of careless analysis” which
identified God with “the wholly indefinite.” The neoclassical metaphysics carefully
argued by Hartshorne makes coherent divine perfection and our relation to it.
Recognizing God as all-potentiality, all-actuality gives meaning to the dictum “God is
Love,” and gives meaning to the all-encompassing God of worship that an impersonal,
“objective” conception of God cannot coherently sustain.
[1] Or Supra-Existence