Part Five - Atheism and Salvation
Atheism and Salvation
Part Five (5/10)
Luther
The Lutheran Concept of God
To Luther [1], God does not appear as the first cause or subsisting Being, an object of intellect, the first and most perfect being whose existence is affirmed through a rational process starting from the sensible effects of His creative activity. Despite Luther's acceptance of the biblical God—wise, provident, omnipotent, creator of heaven and earth, just and merciful, incarnated in Jesus Christ—his Lutheran concept of God is undeniably salvific. However, it struggles to detach itself from an emotional veneer to reveal itself in its intelligibility. Luther leaves implicit the inductive and inferential rational process, hiding beneath a sentimental and antirational fideism. Explicitly, Luther seems to approach God with a "faith" that replaces reason corrupted by original sin—a faith not accepting the Word of God on the authority of the Church but a spiritually inexpressible sense of the terrifying or consoling presence of God. For Luther, the Word of God, rather than being the object of faith, is an expression of faith as communion with Christ in the power of the Spirit.
Luther confesses that he struggles to distinguish God from the devil in practical life. Why? He appears to him in the guise of the devil, and sometimes the devil seems to him like God. He says, for example - a startling statement - that it was the devil who convinced him to stop saying Mass! [2]
God appears to him as a tempter and tormentor, an accuser of nonexistent sins. Alternatively, God seems hateful because, in our will to sin, He prohibits us from sinning— Better the devil who permits us! Moreover, when God covers our sins and pretends not to see, is He not akin to the devil? What consolation is it to know by faith that God forgives us even if we are not repentant? Isn't it the devil who advises us not to repent and offer sacrifices, as Christ has already paid for us? This confusion illustrates the great dilemma within Luther's concept.
Furthermore, the Lutheran notion of God has the defect of conflating the suprarational with the irrational or antirational. The former is a property of the divine mystery, justifying the act of faith, which adheres to something beyond reason. The latter, however, distorts the concept of God with contradictory attributes. Thus, these aspects of the Lutheran God make the concept unusable where they are present. Where the concept is exempt, it can be utilized.
Luther's concept of God, presented by him as authentically biblical against the Thomistic one that employed Aristotelian ideas for centuries in scholastic theology, seems to echo the irrationality, restlessness, and violence of ancient Germanic deities like Thor and Odin.
The Word of God is a Scandal to Reason
For Luther, the content of faith is contrary to reason. It is not so much about adhering to certain concepts as it is to Christ Crucified, a "stumbling block to Jews, foolishness to Gentiles," in His singular and ineffable Person. Nonetheless, this did not prevent Luther from composing two catechisms and commenting on Scripture throughout his life—a clear sign of his vivid appreciation for ideas and concepts. One might say that the fundamental thrust of the Lutheran Reformation is not so much a moral demand but rather a demand for truth. Luther accuses the Pope, even before charges of despotism and immorality, of falsifying the Gospel. We know how concerned he was with issues of orthodoxy and heresy, despite what his ideas turned out to be.
At the same time, all of this does not prevent Luther from denying the possibility of natural theology and ethics, showing disdain for Aristotle and St. Thomas. He also denies the possibility and necessity of reasonable motives leading to faith. Like Tertullian, his motto is: "I believe because it is absurd."
How should we interpret Luther's professed adherence to Augustinian theology and his strong aversion to that of Aristotle and St. Thomas? What explains this? Luther is attracted to emotionally charged biblical images of divine presence, reminiscent of aggressive and awe-inspiring Germanic mythological deities such as Odin and Thor - the impetuous wind, thunder, hurricane, storm, lightning, fire, earthquake, and telluric force. Luther struggles to understand and appreciate the fundamental biblical concept of God as an intelligible entity or spiritual person endowed with intellect and will, of which we are created images. Hence, the dialogical, reasoned, and filial relationship with God, when normal, is challenging for him.
The fundamental key to understanding Luther is his notion of truth [3], conceived not as an act of reason—matching our judgment to reality—but as divine revelation. Truth comes from faith, not reason; from God, not humans. Luther understands faith not as knowledge mediated by the Church but as divine illumination. There are no rational or natural truths, only truths of faith. This is the characteristic of Lutheran fideism.
For St. Thomas and Aristotle, Philosophy Leads to Theology
For Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, as for the Bible, philosophy—philía tēs sophías, love of wisdom—is the wisdom that leads to faith and theology. In contrast, for Luther, philosophy is deceitful, misunderstanding Paul's condemnation (Col 2:8), which refers to false philosophy. If any biblical author values natural wisdom, it is precisely St. Paul.
For Luther, Scripture does not need any philosophy for interpretation; it only needs itself, approached with trust and obedience. The paradoxical turn that will occur in the 19th century with Hegel, who declares himself Lutheran, is a revenge of philosophy. It replaces reason with faith, not by recovering the natural reason of Aristotle and St. Thomas, but by understanding reason as divine revelation.
Now, philosophy is no longer deceitful but the "absolute science" above religion. This does not prevent Hegel from considering himself Lutheran, revealing the rationalistic and gnostic soul hidden beneath the Lutheran faith. It is interesting how rationalism and irrationalism complement each other in destroying the true value of reason.
Regarding Lutheran irrationalism, when Scripture contains statements about God that seem contradictory, St. Thomas endeavors to resolve these apparent contradictions to reconcile God's Word with our reason. Conversely, Luther does the opposite: he considers these contradictions with satisfaction, thinking, like Nicholas of Cusa, that what is contradictory to us is not so for God. In his biblical exegesis, he takes special pleasure in humbling reason, leaving it bewildered, scandalized, lost, confused, frustrated, and dissatisfied.
For Luther, faith is total darkness for the intellect, a denial of concepts. Faith, under the pretext of mystery and the incomprehensible, is not light for reason but its negation. Being a negation of concepts, leaves one speechless, as words express concepts. Here, Luther misunderstands mystical experience, which involves silence. Mystics are silent not because they abstain from conceptual activity but because they cannot express what they have experienced in words—such is the ineffability of their spiritual union with God.
However, we wonder: what concept of God emerges from this perplexity of reason? How can one speak of God in such conditions? What is the Word of God? Yet, Luther passionately devoted himself to preaching the Gospel until his death. But what weight did he give his words if God cannot be expressed in concepts and judgments? What did he communicate? Ideas or emotions? Intellectual and reasoned convictions or moods? Did he make others feel what he felt, or did he communicate objective truths expressed in the dogmas and words of Christ? Universal content or his subjective experience? Articles of faith or a life experience? A "lived" experience, to use Husserl's language or a thought?
Thomas is concerned with showing how the attributes of God harmonize with each other, forming a unified whole. He highlights the logical and reasonable connection between them, such that denying even one essential attribute undermines them all. Relying on Scripture, St. Thomas Aquinas emphasizes the likeness, analogy, and possibility of agreement between God and man, the divine and the human, human reason, and divine reason. Human reason is created by divine Reason in the image of divine Reason.
In contrast, Luther, using the opposition between the human and the divine—sometimes found in Christ's words, which indeed follow original sin—creates an insurmountable opposition or fracture between the human and the divine. Man no longer appears as God's creation but as a sort of enemy of God, akin to Manichaeism. Conversely, God seems to be an enemy of man. To affirm the divine, Luther denies the human; to affirm the human, he denies the divine. To affirm faith, he denies reason; to affirm forgiveness and grace, he denies nature, free will, and merit. To affirm mercy, he denies justice.
As a result, the affirmation of nature entails the negation of grace, leading to the Pelagianism he intended to exclude. From the negation of nature arises Hegel's idealism and pantheism; from the negation of grace arises the rationalistic and Masonic Enlightenment of the 18th century, culminating in Marx's atheism.
Believing is Repugnant to Reason
According to Luther, faith is indeed an effect of grace, but it does not arise from reasoning; rather, it comes from a formidable, spontaneous, overwhelming, and original emotional experience. This experience is captivating, enthusiastic, and fascinating, triggered by contact with the Bible or the believer. It emerges from a preconscious and pre-conceptual stage of the self—an experience alternating between heavenly and ineffable comfort, mortal anguish, and indescribable fear. It fluctuates between absolute certainty and agonizing doubt, shaking and involving the entire human being to its core.
Faith engenders the absolute certainty of being saved "by pure faith" (sola fides), and "by the promise of Christ," despite the reproach of conscience pointing out our guilt. Certain of forgiveness even if unrepentant, is this a contradiction? Is it impossible? Not at all, answers Luther; rest assured, for nothing is impossible for God. He misinterprets the angel's words to Mary, intending to convey that God is infinitely more powerful than man, not denying the principle of non-contradiction by asserting the possibility of the impossible.
While Scripture occasionally employs paradoxical expressions about God, one must not confuse paradoxical language with absurd, contradictory, or senseless discourse. Paradox is only a mode of expression with its effectiveness and incisiveness, unrelated to the conceptual content of discourse. Luther, using biblical language as a pretext, ends up playing on the ambiguity that leads to heresy.
Paradox is used in oratory or literature, not in science or theology. It may be valid in mysticism. Nevertheless, an honest and loyal writer uses paradox sparingly and judiciously, integrating it with formal, appropriate, and orthodox expression to avoid generating confusion, misunderstandings, or scandals—especially in the minds of the simple and unaware of this rhetorical figure.
Luther Identifies Theology with Mysticism
The merit of Thomas Aquinas's theology, its concept of God, and how it speaks of God lie in the fact that Thomas gives due legitimacy to mystical experience and language [4]. Thomas fully acknowledges the obscurity of the divine essence, its knowability and conceivability in dogmatic formulas, as well as its intuitive and immediate visibility to the intellect of the blessed. He also recognizes the divine incomprehensibility and ineffability, adhering to biblical teachings. However, he denies that it is impossible to form a rational concept of God and His attributes or to name the name of God without embracing Hegelian gnostic forms of idealistic reasoning, with its idealistic way of conceiving the concept.
At the same time, Thomas grants speculative reason all its limited power, rights, and duties to investigate, conceive, and demonstrate what is investigable, conceivable, demonstrable, and expressible in the language of theology and preaching.
The contrast between Luther and Thomas is emblematic of two fundamental ways of approaching the relationship with God, a contrast that can be expressed as follows: Thomas wants to understand to experience; Luther cares little about understanding; for him, feeling and experiencing is crucial.
For Thomas, the word contains the truth, and experience tests what is expressed in the truth of dogma. For Luther, the word is only a secondary, provisional, and ambiguous emotional expression of the truth of experience. It is necessary but only to express or evoke the experience or lead to it. Nonetheless, Luther is deeply attached to the formulas of his faith. However, for Luther, the truth is not in the dogma but in mysticism.
For Thomas, mysticism is an emotional experience of what is expressed in the truth of dogma. As Luther himself says, "God cannot be understood, but He can be felt."[5] There is a sensist and materialist tendency, masked by mysticism. This is why the Church recommends Thomas and warns against Luther.
In Lutheran apologetics, unlike Thomistic apologetics, genuinely in line with Scripture, the goal is not to communicate concepts but sensations; not to illuminate the intellect but to warm passion; not to demonstrate but to narrate; not to reason but to make one experience; not to persuade but to stimulate; not to attract the will but to captivate sensitivity and instinct.
Rosmini
Rosmini's concept of God [6] - sufficient for salvation - is that of God as the absolute ideal being intuited by explicating the a priori notion of the ideal being as such. Here, the path is similar to St. Anselm's, with the difference that while St. Anselm starts from the concept of the most perfect being, Rosmini starts from the absolute ideal being identical to the real—a coincidence of essence and being, as in Anselm as well. Rosmini avoids idealism and remains in realism because, for him, God exists truly outside the soul, as the creator of the soul. This is the essential aspect to be saved, even though the a posteriori proof is absent.
Insufficient Concepts of God
The importance of metaphysics lies in considering being as such and the transcendental properties of being. God is the highest, first, supreme, and most perfect being. Now, the most perfect being, id quo nihil maius cogitari potest, is the being whose essence is to be, as God revealed to Moses: "I am" (Exodus 3:14). I’m the necessary being: I can not exist because a subsistent being is my essence. That is, I am or exist by essence. Therefore, I am the ipsum Esse per se subsistens, as St. Thomas said.
God says of Himself: my being is my essence, and my essence is to be. God is a pure act of being, without the potentiality of being, or an essence that serves as the subject of being, as in all creatures that have being but are not being. This means that in God, the essence-potentiality of being is not distinct from His act of being but coincides with His being. In this sense, He is a pure being.
Note well: God is not simply a being in general or a common being that concerns all things as beings. Otherwise, one would fall into pantheism. God is a very special, individual, singular, unique, substantial, and personal being: the ipsum Esse. And there is only one ipsum Esse. This is monotheism.
To form a concept of God, it is necessary, in particular, to have the concept of the spirit. It is necessary to have discovered the existence of the spirit, which is possible by reflecting on one's own and others' spiritual activity. It is necessary to understand the primacy of the spirit over matter. Esteeming the spirit in general does not yet mean proving the existence of God, as God can be mistaken for an angel, whether holy or wicked. Polytheism is a cult of angels, and rightly, St. Paul reminds us that "the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons" (1 Corinthians 10:20).
The Spirit of Hegel and (Giovanni) Gentile, the negativity that posits itself as the world to return to itself as Spirit, in opposition, where good and evil, being and non-being, true and false identify, do not truly exhibit the properties of the divine nature but those dark properties of the impure or evil spirit—the demon, a well-known character in Scripture and religions, "the god of this world," a Hegelian expression found in St. Paul—that precisely opposes himself to himself in disobedience to God, and in the act of pride by which he absolutizes himself.
Idolatry
In this regard, Scripture speaks of the god "made by human hands"[7]. It immediately refers to the making of idols, but the discourse can also apply to the work of thought or imagination, that is, to the production of an imaginary God that does not correspond to the real God.
Then it is clear that idolatry is not only the crude and vulgar worship of idols, which easily becomes or hides totemism, shamanism, voodoo, spiritism, Satanism, divination, or witchcraft, but idols are also those refined concepts of God that do not represent the real God but an ‘ad usum delphini’ [8] invented God (or tailored to our convenience) where God is the same content as the concept.
We produce the concept of God, but we do not produce God.
If thought coincided with being, we would produce God.
Now, given that we produce our concepts, if we form a concept of God not based on the real God but by including false divine attributes—whatever suits us—clearly, the intelligible content of this concept will not correspond to what God truly is, to the real God outside our soul, but to an idol invented by ourselves, alien to the real God. It will no longer be the transcendent God, creator of our mind, but our mind that produces God. But God here is nothing more than an imaginary being. It is nothing more than an idol.
What kind of God is a God produced by us? How can it save us? How is it possible to depend on what depends on us? It's absurd! Let's be frank that we want to replace God to regulate our conduct according to our pleasure and not bring out metaphysical, existential, transcendental, or philosophical pretexts or the like.
Feuerbach might be right in saying that God does not exist but is only an invention of our mind. However, Feuerbach is indeed concerned with overthrowing idols but does not care to replace them with the true God. This is because Feuerbach does not only overthrow Hegel's God but also the true God of natural reason and faith. In the end, he would like to replace God with man, so his idol becomes man.
If, instead, the concept of God is devoid of the minimum elements that are essential to constitute divinity, such as transcendence, spirituality, infinity, and omnipotence, then its face disappears altogether, to be replaced either by our ego or by some sublime creature, like the fallen angel who "disguises himself as an angel of light" (2 Corinthians 11:14). These are pagan gods.
In essence, to establish a salvific relationship with God, some very subtle attributes of God can be overlooked or not understood, such as aseity, predestination, or election, as long as we recognize Him as the transcendent, just, and merciful first cause and ultimate end. We can experience His presence in our soul in silent mystical union with Him, conceive Him as being, substance, and person, of which we are an image. Thus, in the Bible, God speaks of Himself, and gives us orders on how to behave, we can speak to Him in prayer, and speak of Him to others in preaching, guiding them toward salvation by revealing His will.
There are conceptions of reality or knowledge that lead to atheism. For example, anyone who argues that the spirit is an evolutionary sublimation of matter does not escape atheism because God is the pure spirit, the creator of matter. Here, we must mention Democritus, Marx, Lenin, Engels
[Friedrich Engels (Barmen 1820 - London 1895). Collaborator and friend of K. Marx, he is credited with the paternity of dialectical materialism as a general conception of reality. Engels formulated some dialectical laws, which he claims to have abstracted from both the history of nature and that of human society. He is heavily influenced and openly acknowledges the influence of Darwin's evolutionism and Haeckel's ideas, which Engels combines with the patterns of Hegelian dialectics, attributing practically all forms of reality to them. He proposes the utilization of the bourgeois state and bourgeois legality to seize power. Cf. https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/friedrich-engels/, (Ed.)],
Comte, Spencer, Darwin, Freud, and Teilhard de Chardin, even though he was indeed a religious spirit.
Parmenides
Parmenides' ontological monism [9] leads to atheism as it identifies being with an absolute being. According to this view, there is only one being, which is an absolute being, and multiplicity and becoming are mere appearances. The world is the appearance of God. And we are the appearance of God. Here is pantheism. But if everything is God, and God is all things, God does not transcend the world; rather, the world is God. The world replaces God. Hence, atheism.
Regarding Heraclitus' evolutionism, it implies nihilism. Since having its fixity, necessity, and immutability, allowing its identity and identification, the becoming or movement entity is also being because it too is an entity. If this identity is denied, what's the point of discussing becoming or movement? The denial of being is nothingness.
It should be noted that even becoming has its face, its identity, is something determined, has an essence. Therefore, at the moment it occurs, it cannot fail to happen and be, belong to being. Otherwise, it would be unknowable and unrecognizable. Instead, we distinguish what moves from what does not move.
However, it is a mistake to believe that becoming is more than being, just as the motion of life is more than the inertia or immobility of a stone. On the contrary, becoming is less than being because it is a tendency toward being, an imperfection that tends toward perfection, a being in potentiality, a not yet being, while being is its actualization.
Fr. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, November 3, 2023
Source:
https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/ateismo-e-salvezza-quinta-parte-510.html
[1] A good exposition of how Luther conceived God can be found in Rudolf Otto's "Il Sacro" (The Sacred), SE Editions, Milan 2018, pp. 110-131.
[2] Jacques Maritain reports this in his book "Tre Riformatori" (Three Reformers).
[3] Heidegger presents the Lutheran concept of truth, clothed in Greek attire and stripped of its relationship of faith in God, in his book "L’essenza della verità" (The Essence of Truth), Morcelliana, Brescia 2021.
[4] See my book "Il silenzio della parola. Le mistiche a confronto" (The Silence of the Word. Mystics in Comparison), ESD Editions, Bologna 2002; Jean-Hervé Nicolas, "Dieu connu comme inconnu" (God Known as Unknown), Desclée de Brouwer, Paris 1966.
[5] Quoted from Rudolf Otto, op. cit., p. 147.
[6] Cornelio Fabro, "L’enigma Rosmini" (The Enigma of Rosmini), Italian Scientific Editions, Rome 1988.
[7] Cf. Dt 4:28; II Kings 19:18; II Chr 32:19; Ps 115:4; 135:15; Wis 13:10; Is 2:8; Dn 14:5; Hos 14:4.
[8] For example, a purely ideal God, an abstract God, contradictory, pure will, capricious, irrational, material, mutable, passible, sinful, tyrant, cruel, unjust, inept, powerless, etc.
[9] Cf. Parmenides, "Poema sulla natura" (Poem on Nature), edited by Giovanni Reale and Luigi Ruggiu, Rusconi, Milan 1991.