The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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"[T]he idea that God's existence could be just another case of existence in general has always been a failure to comprehend theism. . . . [I]t is blasphemous to think of God as merely an additional fact, however great, merely one side of a significant alternative, rather than as the soul of factuality itself and the very basis of all alternativeness, the potential registrant of whatever value or importance either side of any disjunction can have, hence not subject to intelligible denial" (AD: 146, 148). 

Thus we have the traditional statements that God "transcends the categories," which cannot be applied "univocally" to God, and that God "does not have but is God's being or goodness." In other words, the nature of God is not a universal property capable of being embodied in this, that, or the other individual. On the contrary, the unique excellence of God necessarily implies a logical-ontological type difference from all other individuals, actual or possible. 

On the other hand, "[a] sole example is not a supreme example. . . . We do not exalt God by giving [God] a unique category, like creative power, for [God's] very own. . . .The unsurpassable power of God should be the supreme form of 'power' in the general sense, exhibited elsewhere in inferior degrees or 'resemblances'" (195; cf. 67). "[T]he supreme must not be the sole form of a category" (196). 

Thus we must say such things as, "God has the supreme form of creativity, creatures have lesser forms" (197). "[I]f supreme reality consists in supreme creativity . . . , then lesser realities must be lesser—but not zero—f orms of such creativity" (207). God's is not the sole creativity, but rather "the selfsurpassable, otherwise unsurpassable Creativity" (218). 

13 October 2004

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