God as Biblical Character and as Divine Reality

When Thomas Aquinas and Baruch Spinoza write about the God of the Old Testament, they write about numerically the same Biblical character using the same Latin word, Deus.  They write about this character, refer to it, and indeed succeed in referring to it.  But Aquinas and Spinoza do not believe in the same divine reality.  Of course they both believe in a divine reality; but their conceptions of a divine reality are so different that it cannot be maintained -- or so I argue here contra F. Beckwith -- that it is one and the same reality that they believe in.  Nor do they succeed in referring to the same reality.  Since it cannot be the case that both divine realities exist, one of the two philosophers fails to refer to anything at all.  It follows that they cannot be said to worship the same God: one of them worships an idol.

God, Adam, Moses, "and all them prophets good and gone" (Bob Dylan, Gospel Plow) actually exist qua characters in the Biblical narrative.  But of course it does not follow that they exist 'outside' the narrative in reality. 

A few months ago in the wake of the Wheaton contretemps we were much exercised over the question whether the God of the Christians is the same as the God of the Muslims. I wonder if the distinction between God as Biblical character and God as divine reality can help in that dispute.  Perhaps some variants of the dispute arise from a failure to draw this distinction.  Perhaps the following irenic proposal will be acceptable:

Christians and Muslims write about, talk about, and refer to one and the same Biblical character when they use 'God' and 'Allah.'  In this sense, the God of the Christians and that of the Muslims is the same God.  It is one and the same Biblical character, God. But Christians and Muslims do not refer to one and the same divine reality by their uses of 'God' and 'Allah.'  This is because extralinguistic reference is conceptually mediated, not direct, and no one item can instantiate both the Christian and the Muslim conceptions of God.  Nothing can be both triune and non-triune, to mention just one important different in the two conceptions.  

So either the Christian is failing to refer to anything such that his worship is of an idol, or the Muslim is failing to refer to anything such that his worship is of an idol.  The situation is strictly parallel to the Aquinas-Spinoza case.  The two philosophers are clearly referring to the same Biblical character when they write Deus.  But their conceptions of God are so different that they cannot be said to be referring to the same being in external reality. 

My suggestion, then, is that some may have got their knickers in a knot for no good reason by failing to make the above-captioned distinction.

According to Ed Buckner over at Dale Tuggy's place,

. . . there is at least one sort of case where it is clear they [Aquinas and Spinoza] are using the name ‘God’ in exactly the same way, namely when they discuss the interpretation of the scriptures. Aquinas does this many times in Summa Theologiae, using the words of the Bible and the Church Fathers to support complex theological and philosophical arguments. Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise is an extensive commentary on the text of the Bible and its meaning, also supported throughout by biblical quotation. So when Thomas writes

According to Chrysostom (Hom. iii in Genes.), Moses prefaces his record by speaking of the works of God (Deus) collectively. (Summa TheologiaeIª q. 68 a. 1 ad 1)

and Spinoza writes

As for the fact that God [Deus] was angry with him [Balak] while he was on his journey, that happened also to Moses when he was setting out for Egypt at the command of God [Dei]. (Tractatus ch. 3,  alluding to Exodus 4:24-26)

it is clear that they are talking about the same persons, i.e. they are both talking about God, and they are both talking about Moses. It is somewhat more complicated than that, because Spinoza has a special theory about what the word ‘God’ means in the scriptures, but more of that later. In the present case, it seems clear that whenever we indirectly quote the scriptures, e.g. ‘Exodus 3:1 says that Moses was setting out for Egypt at the command of God’, we are specifying what the Bible says by using the names ‘Moses’ and ‘God’ exactly as the Bible uses them. Bill might disagree here, but we shall see.

I agree that they are both talking about the same persons qua characters in the Old Testament.  The fact that Ed puts 'God' and 'Moses' in italics suggests, however, that he thinks that there is more here than reference to Biblical characters: there is also reference to really existent persons, and that our two philosophers are referring to the same really existent persons.  But here I suspect that Ed is attempting a reduction of bona fide extralinguistic reference to what I will call text- and discourse-immanent reference, whether intertextual (as in the present case) or intratextual (as in the case of back references within one and the same narrative).  If Ed is proposing a reduction -- or God forbid an elimination -- of real extralinguistic reference in favor of some form of discourse-immanent reference, then I have a bone to pick with him.  

The issues here are much trickier than one might suspect. They involve questions Ed and I have been wrangling over for years, questions about fiction and intentionality and existence and quantification and logical form and what all else.  

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Comments

[londiniensis]

Thanks for the link. The questions you raise require detailed treatment beyond the scope of a comments box. I agree "The issues here are much trickier than one might suspect."

[Ed from London]

In the novel War and Peace, Tolstoy claims that Prince Andrey Nikolayevich (a fictional character) is adjutant to someone called ‘Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutuzov’. Wikipedia says that Kutuzov was a ‘real-life Russian general’. Is that correct? Should it not have said that Kutuzov was just another character in the book? In which case, why do we say it is a ‘historical novel’, as opposed to The Lord of the Rings, which contains no element of history whatsoever? I agree of course that Kutuzov had no such person as adjutant. Tolstoy clearly invented that element of Kutuzov’s career.

Sherlock Holmes famously shoots the initials of Queen Victoria in the wall in his room, presumably after injecting too much cocaine. Did he shoot the initials of a another fictional character? Is it true to say he lived in the same city as me, or is London a fictional city too? There are apparently many problems with your position here.

[Ed from London]

The Victoria example is a parallel to the Deus problem. Is Conan Doyle making a false assertion about Queen Victoria (in that one of her subjects, a detective called ‘Holmes’ shot her initials on the wall of his apartment, or an assertion about someone else, who he falsely suggests was the British monarch of that time? Clearly only one of them could have been monarch at that time, just as the monotheistic God can be the only god for any time.

[David Brightly]

Apologies if this example has come up before but it does seem apropos.

Suppose Harry worships Hesperus conceived as the heavenly body that's visible only at dusk, and Phil worships Phosphorus conceived as the heavenly body visible only at dawn. Do Harry and Phil worship the same thing? Yes, because they both worship Venus. No, because their conceptions of their object of worship are mutually exclusive.

[BV]

Ed,

I can't see that you have made any attempt to understand what I said above. This fact absolves me of the duty to puzzle over your comments beyond the puzzling I have already engaged in.

[londiniensis]

Quite honestly I didn't understand what you wrote, although I repeatedly read it. I think you agree that when Tolstoy uses the name 'Napoleon', he is referring to Napoleon, yes? The alternative view is that, as used by Tolstoy, it refers to a character in a work of fiction. I.e. there is no such person as Napoleon, qua character in the book War and Peace.

I am not sure which of these you mean.

[londiniensis]

I read this a fourth time and can still make no sense of it.

You say that Aquinas and Spinoza are referring to the same Biblical character (i.e. the character that Aquinas calls ‘God’ and the character that Spinoza calls by the same name, are numerically identical). But you say immediately afterwards that they are not referring to the same ‘really existent persons’. This suggests, indeed logically implies that the Biblical character of God is not the same as the really existent God. For if they were one and the same, and if they are referring to the same biblical character, they must also be referring to the same ‘divine reality’.

Can you not see why I am struggling?

[BV]

Ed,

A character in a narrative may or may not exist in reality. Three cases. Sherlock, a character in the Conan Doyle stories, does not exist in reality. He is purely fictional. Paul Morphy exists in reality but is also a character in an historical novel. Noah is a character in the OT who may or may not exist in reality.

I hope you won't deny that there is an OT character named 'Yahweh.' Does Spinoza think that Yahweh exists in reality? No. Does Aquinas? Yes. Clearly they are talking about the same Biblical character, but only one of them thinks that this character exists in reality.

[londiniensis]

>>Does Spinoza think that Yahweh exists in reality? No. Does Aquinas? Yes. Clearly they are talking about the same Biblical character, but only one of them thinks that this character exists in reality.<<

Totally agree with this. What I don’t follow is the claim in the post that ‘their conceptions of God are so different that they cannot be said to be referring to the same being in external reality’.

You seem to be contradicting yourself. You say (1) that they are referring to the same biblical character but (2) they are not referring to the same being in external reality. Let the biblical character be A. Then from (1) it follows Aquinas is referring to A and Spinoza is referring to A. Now suppose that Yahweh exists in reality. Then A exists in reality, and Spinoza, whether he believes it or not, is referring to A. So they are referring to the same being in external reality.

[BV]

I plead innocent to the charge of contradiction.

I am suggesting that one can talk about a Biblical character qua Biblical character while bracketing the question whether anything in reality corresponds to the character. The character Yahweh in the OT has all and only the properties assigned to him in that narrative; but what corresponds to this character in reality has many more properties and perhaps not all the properties he has in the narrative. So two philosophers can talk about the same character without referring to the same item in external reality.

So there is a sense in which Jew, Christian and Muslim all refer to the same God: they are referring to the same Biblical character even though in reality there is no one deity answering to the three different conceptions of God that we find in the three religions.

[Ed from London]

>>I am suggesting that one can talk about a Biblical character qua Biblical character while bracketing the question whether anything in reality corresponds to the character.<<
I agree. However, if

1. You are talking about A
2. I am also talking about A
3. A exists in external reality

then it follows that you and I are talking about the same character in external reality. I agree that if A doesn’t exist in external reality then we are not referring to the same item in external reality, but that is because there is no such item in external reality.

>>So there is a sense in which Jew, Christian and Muslim all refer to the same God: they are referring to the same Biblical character even though in reality there is no one deity answering to the three different conceptions of God that we find in the three religions.<<

When you write ‘different conceptions of God’, do you mean different conceptions of the biblical character, or different conceptions of something else? I suspect the latter.

[Ed from London]

>>The character Yahweh in the OT has all and only the properties assigned to him in that narrative; but what corresponds to this character in reality has many more properties and perhaps not all the properties he has in the narrative.<<

This is also problematic. Is the entity that ‘corresponds to this character [Yahweh] in reality’ numerically identical with Yahweh? In that case, Yahweh = Yahweh-in-reality, and how can one have more (or different) properties than the other?

I think my original response to your post was correct. Tolstoy says things about the Napoleon character in War and Peace. Who is it that corresponds to the Napoleon character in reality? Napoleon of course. Are you saying that Napoleon in War and Peace has all and only the properties assigned to him in that narrative? Are you saying that Napoleon in reality has many more properties and perhaps not all the properties he has in the narrative? I reply: Tolstoy was writing about Napoleon, the guy who ruled the French and invaded Russia and occupied Moscow etc. Otherwise it is not a historical novel.

[BV]

>> Is the entity that ‘corresponds to this character [Yahweh] in reality’ numerically identical with Yahweh?<<

No.

Don't you distinguish between an historical NOVEL and a factual historical account?

We'll have to come back to this later.

[Ed from London]

>>Don't you distinguish between an historical NOVEL and a factual historical account? We'll have to come back to this later.<<

1. Historical novels include characters who are wholly fictional (Bezuhov), but also characters who really did exist (Napoleon). A ‘factual historical account’ will purport to include only the ones who really did exist.

2. The notion of ‘factual historical account’ is of course problematic, given much of early history is embroidered and embellished. The Old Testament kings going back to the Babylonian exile seem to have actually existed, but once we go further back past about the 8th century BC, scholars have expressed increasing doubts. E.g. did King David ever exist? Did Moses ever exist? How do you distinguish between the factual bits of the history and the more ‘imaginative’ bits?

3. It also seems you are assuming that Yahweh is a fictional character, no? Much of the bible was intended as a pure historical account, as a history of the people of Israel, of their leaders, prophets and kings, and of course their God. Why shouldn’t a supernatural figure feature in the history of a people? Or are you assuming that only ‘naturalist’ accounts are appropriate to history? I put ‘naturalist’ in scare quotes because Spinoza is a naturalist, and thinks that the natural unfolding of history includes the involvement of God. Of course he has a very special understanding of ‘God’, but you know what I mean.