The Moral Perfections of God

THE MORAL PERFECTIONS OF GOD I. AONG WITH ABSTRACT metaphysical perfections, certain moral attributes have typically been ascribed to God. God is not only incorporeal, eternal, selfexistent , and so on, but also loving, wise, merciful, and just. Under the impact of these distinctively personal characteristics, the magnificent but remote divinity of philosophical theism takes on a degree of human accessibility. Perhaps for this reason the vocabulary of moral perfections characteristically plays a prominent role in the primary language of religious faith. God is praised for his wisdom and goodness, thanked for his mercy, loved for his unqualified loving-kindness. The interlocking network of these moral attributes fills out the abstract notion of a perfect being with personal content. The theological tradition has been quick to caution, however , that God must not be represented as a magnified human being, even though our thought about God must work with the linguistic resources we have developed in describing creatures . Anthropomorphic imagery makes God available to the human spirit, but it also threatens to make God less than God by turning him into one of us. Developed theological positions, therefore, have most often carefully qualified the personalistic predicates they ascribe to God: the God of the theologians cannot be caught in any net of anthropomorphic allusions, however important these may be in nourishing the believing imagination. The decisive counterpoint to anthropomorphism is provided by the metaphysical perfections of God. These remind us of the strangeness of God, his unfathomable otherness. " Between the creator and the creature," it has been said, " no likeness can 473 474 THOMAS F. TRACY be discerned without a greater unlikeness having to be discerned as well." 1 The metaphysical per£ections of God anatomize this unlikeness between God and creatures. In stressing the otherness of God, however, we establish a tension at the very center of theological reflection. For the more we hammer home the truth that God is profoundly unlike us, the more it becomes necessary to ask whether familiar personal perfections have any place in our talk of God. As we develop the ontological contrast and epistemological distance between God and creatures, we may wonder whether it becomes impossible to make sense of the claim that God is an appropriate subject of attributes like "loving" and "just." How are we to maintain the meaningfulness of talk about God's moral perfections in the face of the radical distinctions which typically are drawn between the divine and human subjects of these terms? This, of course, is part of an ancient problem in Christian theology: theologians perpetually struggle with the double agenda of insisting upon God's unspeakable transcendence while speaking about God at exhausting length. In the discussion which follows I want to look briefly at the classical Thomistic solution to the problem about ascribing moral perfections to God and then sketch the outlines of an alternative account. Thomas Aquinas provides the paradigm for pressing vigorously both God's ontological-epistemological transcendence and the appropriateness of ascribing to God certain" pure perfections" drawn from our familiar vocabulary of character assessment. Thomas's account of God's moral attributes is controlled by his primary commitment to a set of categories which articulate God's metaphysical perfection. The result of this procedure is that the moral perfections are submerged within a metaphysic of being which enforces an impenetrable ignorance about what these terms signify in God. In contrast to Thomas's strategy, I want to place the moral perfections at the center of the doctrine of God and follow out the consequences of this 1 Fourth Lateran Council, as quoted by Eric L. Mascall, Existence and Analogy fLondon: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1949), p. 100, n.2. THE MORAL PERFECTIONS OF GOD 475 for the account we give of the distinction between God and creatures. Where Thomas grounds the theological ascription of moral attributes in a scheme of metaphysical categories which distinguishes Being from beings, I will ground the theological use of these terms in our ordinary practice of appraising an agent's character on the basis of his actions. On this account, we are able to acknowledge the profound incompleteness of our understanding of God's moral perfections, but we...