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Prosopon and Icon: Two Premodern Ways of Thinking God
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Prosopon and Icon: Two Premodern Ways of Thinking God J O H N P A N T E L E I M O N M A N O U S S A K I S I. Ontological Necessity: Freedom Toward Death and Toward Love Aristotle, in distinguishing between actuality (νγεια) and possibility (δ ναμις), undertook two crucial steps that have haunted the history of Western metaphysics ever since: he gave a qualitative priority to actuality over potency, and then he identified the former with pure essence. Possibility, for Aristotle, is a mode that denotes transition and corruption, and thus imperfection. However, the risk that he acknowledges and fears most is that potency is ambiguous and undecidable. In his words, ‘‘the possible could be both a being and a non-being . . . it could equally be both things and neither’’ (1050b10, 1051a1). It is this coincidentia oppositorum that prevails in possibility that forced Aristotle to exclude it from the categories that properly define God. For Aristotle, a ‘‘possible God’’ might not be a God at all, since ‘‘a possible being may not be’’ (1071b15). The risk that the God of the possible runs is that He might choose not to exist and, in this case, ‘‘there would be nothing’’ (1071b25). That is why Aristotle argues for the concept of a God that subsists as pure activity (νγεια), eternally ( ϊδως) and continuously (συνεχω ς), a noesis totally identified with its noema (1072b25–30). As such, the Aristotelian God enthrones Himself in the summit of ontotheological assertions. Bound to the absolute necessity, that of 279 ontology, He not only cannot be but His own being, but also He cannot cease to be. His very essence condemns Him to an unavoidable yet tautological existence. Enclosed in the monism of his ipseity, He autistically thinks Himself. Being is the prison of God. Of course, in front of such a God one ‘‘can neither pray nor sacrifice. . . . Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god.’’1 Thus the fact of His existence, proven or not, remains our most indifferent reality. Aristotelian philosophy was inherited, via the exegesis of Averroe ̈s, by Scholastic theology, and the identification of God’s essence with pure actuality was carried on in Aquinas’s system: ‘‘Deus est actus purus non habens aliquid de potentialitate.’’ As Kearney has shown in the exemplary case of Exodus 3:14, a great dose of Greek metaphysics had been injected into Christian theology long before the Thomistic tradition and already with the translation of the Bible by the LXX. By translating the epiphanic name of God (‘ehyeh ‘aser ‘ehyeh) as γ εμ ν and thus crystallizing God’s identity as His own being, they ‘‘missed too much of the original dynamism of the Hebraic expression, and conceded too much to Hellenistic ontology’’ (GMB, 28). Since then, the highest understanding that we can have of God is that of a motionless and apathetic presencing of His being. In this way, however, ‘‘the God of Exodus secure[s] ontological tenure in the God of metaphysics . . . a tendency to reify God by reducing Him to a being—albeit the highest, first, and most indeterminate of all beings’’ (GMB 24). Although metaphysicians had desperately tried to avoid the introduction of any kind of necessity into the concept of God, what they did accomplish was exactly that: the subjection of God to the absolute necessity of existence. ‘‘ξ νγης α στν ν,’’ writes Aristotle of the ‘‘unmoved mover’’ in Book 12 of his Metaphysics, condemning God’s existence to necessity. He exists, therefore, of necessity ! The price that God is called to pay for His existence is something much more important than His being: His freedom. II. Freedom Prior to Existence: The God-Who-May-Be The aporia here is our inability to imagine freedom prior to existence. And reasonably so. How are we ever to imagine a choice prior to its agent? How can we possibly stretch freedom that far back, even before the moment when for the first time existence emerges?2 For us humans, it is impossible. Our freedom is limited and conditioned by 280 John Panteleimon Manoussakis [34.230.84.106] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:53 GMT) our existence, which is given. It is precisely this ‘‘givenness’’ of our existence—beyond our will—that constitutes our facticity. I exist, it is true, but it was not my decision. Our only possibility for freedom lies on the other edge of the existential...