Tractatus de Deo uno secundum naturam

On the sense in which the Fathers call the notion of God innate to human nature.

« The primitive and still confused notion of God is called by the holy Fathers innate to nature, not in the sense in which some more recent writers speak of innate ideas. For the Fathers say that this knowledge of God is bound together with the rational nature itself, in that by the innate light of nature it is conceived, as it were of its own accord, from the obvious consideration of worldly things, without philosophical inquiry and without instruction by positive revelation; and so they distinguish innate knowledge not merely from acquired knowledge simply, but both from the more cultivated knowledge through more diligent and subtler meditations, and above all from the more perfect knowledge which is owed to revelation. »

That some knowledge of God, common to all men who use reason (« with the exception of a few in whom nature is too greatly depraved »), and arising as it were of its own accord, is asserted by the Fathers with great agreement, and that the same is called innate to nature, is sufficiently clear from the preceding thesis. From this and from other expressions and descriptions akin to these, certain learned men, Thomasinus, Henricus Klee, and after them Staudenmair, have undertaken to demonstrate that their opinion concerning the idea of God, innate and concreated in the rational nature, is genuine and is almost the common doctrine of the Fathers. We indeed think that this opinion, considered philosophically, can be demonstrated to be supported by no solid foundation whatever; but now we speak only of the sentiment of the Fathers, who on this matter often speak in connection with the doctrine of the Scriptures, and indeed theologically.

Having therefore examined the contexts of the Fathers throughout, it is wholly established that this very knowledge, which by their words is asserted to be innate and congenital to nature, is taught to arise from the inspection of the works of God, though obvious and presenting itself of its own accord; the names and descriptions which are put forward do not mean that the idea and knowledge of God is concreated in the soul, but that the rational soul was made an image of God so as to know God, such that by an undeliberate exercise of the innate rational faculty, and so by a natural movement, it attains to some knowledge of God; which, therefore, innate and conjoined with nature, is opposed not indeed to knowledge simply acquired, but to a more cultivated knowledge, which flourishes from studies undertaken with meditation, and above all to that which is owed to instruction or to positive revelation. Wherefore, if that ruder and primitive knowledge of God is compared with this other, subsequent and more polished one, it can also be called immediate, although it is not immediate in the sense that we know God with no intervening means. For the holy Fathers and the ancient Doctors knew no immediate knowledge of God of this kind, in himself and from himself, except the beatific vision, about which there will be occasion to speak in what follows. Now it must be shown that the origin of the innate knowledge which we have declared is taught by the Fathers.

1°. The very Fathers who speak of innate knowledge of God first lay down the general principle that the soul, so long as it composes one nature with this mortal body, can progress from knowledge of sensible things to knowledge of intellectual things, and specifically of God himself, only in such a way that the former is necessarily presupposed to the latter, and the latter rests upon the former as on a certain step of ascent; these are the words of Clement of Alexandria¹. Among the Fathers whom the cited authors Thomasinus, Klee, Staudenmair have brought forward as undoubted champions of the idea and knowledge of God concreated in human minds, there are scarcely any who have not expressly taught the theory of human knowledge which we have indicated: Clemens Alex. Strom. II. p. 364; Tertull. de anima c. 18; Origen. contr. Celsum l. VII. n. 37; de principiis l. IV. n. 37; Athanas. contr. gent. n. 35. (to which may be compared Cyrillus Alex. thesaur. assert. 31. T. V. P. 1. p. 264. 267; Damascene de fid. orthod. l. I. c. 4; Dionysius de divin. nom. c. 1. §. 4.); Gregor. Nazianz. or. 28. al. 34. n. 5-21²; Basil epp. 234. 235; Gregor. Nyss. contr. Eunom. l. I. p. 82. (in appendice Opp. edita a Gretzero); l. XII. T. II. p. 920-931³; August. de Genes. ad litter. l. IV. c. 32. n. 49; Ioannes Damasc. de imag. or. I. n. 11.

« Reason takes us up, says Gregory Nazianzen l. c. n. 16, desiring God (reason, therefore, is naturally carried toward God, but hear how): and not enduring anything to be without author and ruler (from the law, namely, of causality and of sufficient reason there continually arises in us, upon observing this universe, some knowledge of its author, and from this a desire for further knowledge); whence, considering visible things and dwelling upon them, which have existed from the beginning, it does not cling to them (as happens to many who do not use reason rightly, of whom he had spoken at n. 14. 15.): for it was not the business of reason to give primacy to these things, which in respect of sense are of equal condition with us; and through these it rises to the things above these, and to him from whom they have that they are............ Thus reason, given by God and congenital to all, and the first law in us, and joined to all (namely the law by which reason is governed in thinking), has led us to God from visible things »⁴. How necessarily the process of reason must run in our present condition, Gregory declares at n. 12: « it is clear to us, as no reasoning can bring it about that anyone, however much he hastens his step, outruns his own shadow, or that the eye is joined to visible things without intervening light and air, or that fish swim out of water: so it is also impossible for those who are in bodies to be joined altogether to intellectual things without corporeal things; for something of our own (sensible) things always falls in » (because by this means we arrive at intellectual things)⁵. For, as he adds at n. 21: « as if with a small instrument we undertake great things, while human wisdom hunts the knowledge of beings and summons intelligible things by the senses, or not without the senses, by which we are carried about and led into error (which indeed would not exist if we saw the essences of things immediately in themselves), and we cannot, with the naked mind (for we are a composite nature), coming upon bare things, approach nearer to the truth, or shape the mind by conceptions⁶. » The holy Father argues all these things, and many others twin to them, in that oration, to show against the Eunomians that we have no other natural knowledge of God than that acquired from consideration of the works of God, and that God's own revelation of himself can be understood by us only analogically, through ideas derived from creatures: « for although by revelation we are raised to know something which otherwise would have been unknown to us, says St Thomas (in Boët. de Trin. lect. II. q. 2. a. 3.), yet it is not so that we may know it in any other way than through sensible things. »

Tertullian holds this order of sensible and intellectual knowledge as most certain, not only on the opinion of the philosophers but on the very authority of the Apostle, and rests upon it as upon a foundation, to demonstrate more clearly the unity of the nature of man, which is the subject of both kinds of knowledge, sensible and intellectual. « For how is the intellect preferred to the sense, by which it is informed for the knowledge of truths? For if truths are apprehended through images, i. e. invisible things are known through visible ones, since the Apostle also writes to us: invisibilia enim eius a conditione mundi de factitamentis intellecta visuntur;…. the intellect seems to use the sense as its guide, its author and its principal foundation, and that truths cannot be touched without it; how then will it be greater than that through which it is, which it needs, to which it owes all that it attains? » etc. l. c.

Origen likewise draws the same doctrine from the testimony of the Apostle, contr. Celsum VII. n. 37. From those words of Paul, he says, « one may know that although in this life men must begin from the senses and from sensible things, so that thence they may ascend to the nature of intelligible things, yet one must not remain among sensible things⁷. »

The reason why our process of knowledge must necessarily be as it is here, Athanasius, Cyril, Dionysius, Damascene ll. cc. and others declare to be this: that the proper object of human knowledge is the essences of sensible things, and therefore God, who is above all beings, transcendentally diverse and eminent, is not knowable to us in his own nature, nor through it; whence it comes about that he can be known by us only in a certain measure from his effects. « God, says Athanasius l. c., is invisible and incomprehensible in his nature, as one who transcends every created essence; and therefore the human race would be deprived of the knowledge of him, because these things (all created things) are from things that did not exist, but he is uncreated. Wherefore God so arranged the creation by his own Word that at least from the works it might be known by men⁸. » The other Fathers mentioned express the same thing more clearly still. « Since all our cognitions are of beings and terminate in beings (namely, our most universal concept is proper to being in common, which we first received from created and sensible things, and under which we know all things), God, since he is above all essence, escapes our cognition » (in his own nature). So, in the passages cited, Dionysius⁹ and from him Damascene, who both deduce from this that God can be known by us only by concluding from these lower things (ἀναλόγως), and imperfectly¹⁰.

Now, those who lay down this theory of human knowledge certainly teach that the knowledge of God is acquired; if therefore at any time they say that it is innate and congenital to human nature, they cannot be understood in that sense which the words seem at first sight to present, and which not a few more recent writers have ascribed to them since the XVII. century was drawing to its close.

2°. Indeed, from the contexts in which those expressions occur, or at least from a comparison of the doctrine of the authors expressed in other places, it appears that the knowledge is called innate and congenitally joined to the rational nature because the existence of God belongs to those truths which human reason attains easily, by a consideration of objects obvious to all, when the intellect has already been informed with the ideas necessary for ready exercise, by the light implanted in it and by its congenital power, without any special and scientific cultivation of the mind, or reflective and more difficult reasonings, or any human instruction or divine revelation coming from outside being required beforehand for this truth. From this very fact, moreover, that this knowledge of the existing God lies open to reason from those things alone which are naturally at hand to all men, it is universal and common to all who have not perverted the nature of reason, who are not vain by nature (μάταιοι φύσει), as it is said in Sap. XIII. 1. For this double reason the notion is rightly called innate (ἔμφυτος) by the Fathers: first, because it flourishes from the rational nature itself by the use of faculties connatural to all, and so is intimate to the nature which is made for the knowledge of God¹¹; second, because it is not restricted to persons distinguished by singular gifts, but extended to the common nature of the human race¹², just as St James I. 21. called the revealed word an implanted word (λόγον ἔμφυτον), not indeed for the human race but for Christians.

Now we shall easily grasp the true sense of the testimonies from which the more recent writers cited above have tried to vindicate an innate idea of God, as if from the common doctrine of the Fathers.

a) Tertullian, in all the places which are usually brought forward by the adversaries to prove that the idea of God is taught as concreated in the soul, asserts nothing whatever except the universality of the consciousness of the existing God, which is owed not to letters or philosophy or positive instruction, but only to those faculties which are naturally present in the soul. They seize upon the words by which it is said « the consciousness of God is the dowry of the soul from the beginning, » as if it were said that the soul is conscious of God from the beginning of its existence; although Tertullian himself indicates in those same places, and teaches most expressly elsewhere, that from the beginning of things there is no other mode of our natural knowledge of God than by ascent « from sensible things to invisible ones, » « from works to the maker. » This doctrine of Tertullian is plain to anyone who reads in context the testimonies usually cited: de testimon. animae cc. 1. 2. 5. 6; contr. Marc. I. cc. 10. 11; Apolog: c. 17; de anima cc. 2. 20. coll. 18; ad Scapulam c. 2. The sum of all can be brought back to this view: « God never unknown, and therefore not uncertain. For from the beginning of things the Maker of them was discovered together with them, they having been brought forth for this purpose, that God might be known........ See whether they know him whom all things testify that they know; nor do they owe this to any books of Moses: the soul is before prophecy; for the consciousness of God is the dowry of the soul from the beginning, the same in the Egyptians and in the Syrians and in the Pontics..... God has testimonies, all this which we are and in which we are » contr. Marc. I. 10.

From the book of Cyprian, de idolor. vanit. p. 227. ed. Baluzii, and from Lactantii instit. l. III. c. 1., you will extract nothing in favour of the opponents' opinion, except what is read there, as in Tertullian, that even the gentiles who use natural reason do not fail to know the true God: « this is the sum of wrong, not to acknowledge him whom they cannot fail to know. » Minucius Felix, however, in Octav. c. 17. 18. 32., also declares the origin of this universal persuasion, which he attests in the same words as those writers: « for in his works, and in all the motions of the world, we always behold his power present. »

b) Other Fathers, who are cited as witnesses to concreated knowledge from broken-off phrases taken out of text and context, teach only that reason is innate to us as a seed of wisdom, through which we are constituted the image of God, whose nature is that it be made for truth, and first (not in execution but in end) for the knowledge of the first truth. Concerning this innate power of reason, by which the natural image of God exists, and which is called the seminal word (λόγος σπερματικός), enough has been said above.

c) By an intolerable abuse, the same learned men bring forward, in confirmation of concreated knowledge, certain sentences of some Fathers, from which, when they are seen in context, the opposite is manifestly demonstrated. Thus Gregorius Naz. or. 28. al. 34. n. 6. 16. is said to have taught congenital knowledge of God from the « law of nature implanted »; and Athanasius contr. gent. n. 33., and Gregorius Nyss. or. 6. de beatitud. T. I. p. 815., from the fact that the knowledge of God, being most intimate and consubstantial with the soul (κατουσιωθέν), they draw knowledge of God from what is most intimate and consubstantial with the soul (κατουσιωθέν), and so are reported to have taught it as congenital. But to one considering the context of Gregory Nazianzen described above by us, there can be no doubt what « implanted law of nature » means; it is nothing else than human reason itself, insofar as, by concluding from understood effects according to the principle of causality, it arrives at the knowledge of God the Creator¹³.

Athanasius, however, and Gregory of Nyssa, and with them Basil, hom. attende tibi n. 7. T. II. p. 23. ed. Maur.; Aug. Confess. VII. c. 10; Gregor. M. in Ezech. l. II. hom. 5. n. 8. 9., and others, teach in express language that the soul can, from consideration of itself and of its own perfections, understand the existence and perfections of God; whence the soul itself is for itself the objective means of knowing God¹⁴. Hence Athanasius says, n. 33. 34., that the soul, insofar as it knows from its operations that it is a spiritual substance, is « to itself a way to the notion and thought of God, and thus from itself receives the knowledge of God the Word » (of God the Word considered absolutely it receives knowledge from itself; of God the Word considered personally it receives from itself analogical knowledge, supposing revelation). The doctrine of Gregory of Nyssa l. c. is this: God in himself and in his nature is immeasurable and incomprehensible to human reason; yet there are works of God from which we can know God; therefore the works of God are for us the measure of the knowledge of God; among these the spiritual soul stands out especially if it has cleansed itself from the filth of sin. Hence « the measure of the knowledge of God comprehensible to you is in you, since he who created you has implanted in your nature so great an essential good; for God has imprinted upon your structure the imitations of the goods of his own nature¹⁵…. So he is blessed in heart who is pure, because in seeing his own cleanness he sees the archetype in the image. » Anyone can see that the Fathers speak of a concreated medium of knowledge, and not of concreated knowledge.

d) It must further be noted that many texts of the holy Fathers are adduced, both by Thomasinus and by Staudenmair, to prove an idea of God divinely impressed upon the soul, although in those texts there is question solely of the habit of supernatural knowledge and of infused faith.

e) Finally, those Fathers come into consideration who say, in so many words, that the notion of God is innate, implanted in the mind of all men, and natural; those whom we cited at p. 94. sq. Yet on inspecting all those passages it will become entirely clear that the sense is that which we proposed at the beginning and have hitherto explained. Namely: a) knowledge is not opposed by those epithets to acquired knowledge simply; indeed b) it is expressly or equivalently indicated that it is acquired from a prior knowledge of creatures; γ) it is opposed rather to knowledge either cultivated through reflective meditations and scientific demonstrations, or raised up by revelation; δ) finally, the doctrine of the Fathers about the manner in which human reason is naturally informed by the knowledge of God, expressly set forth in other places, cannot be ascribed to them as an opinion of a concreated knowledge of God, without their manifestly contradicting themselves. Therefore no other sense lies under such expressions, except that the knowledge of God is taught to arise, at least confusedly, of its own accord, from a consideration which is obvious and common to all who have the free use of reason; a doctrine which, as has been demonstrated above, is already indicated in the Scriptures themselves, th. V. n. 3°.