ONCE YOU KNOW HOW, YOU KNOW WHO: So I’ve had two problems with St Anselm’s “ontological proof” of God. (You know, the one about how God is that than which no greater can be conceived.)

The first is the problem just about everyone has: The proof is like LSD. From what I’ve heard (…I have no firsthand experience here), LSD provokes these crazy visions, and you’re so sure that you have access to ultimate reality, and it’s amazing–and then the drug works its way out of your system, and you can’t get into that part of your head again.

So too with the ontological proof. Every now and again I think I’ve made my brain turn that corner, grasped the entirety of that crazy Mobius strip of theology. And then… five minutes later, it’s just gone.

But my other problem is maybe more interesting. I groused that even if Anselm’s proof “went through,” all he’d proved was an empty box labeled “God.” He’d basically proved Platonic forms. That’s completely less interesting than the Christian God.

Today, a quick comment at Amy Welborn’s place made me think perhaps I was wrong about this criticism. Amy’s comment:

One point that struck me a couple of weeks ago as I was mulling over these matters was that in Jewish Monotheism and Hebrew Scriptures 101, there was always this emphasis on the difference between the Jewish way of thinking about God and, say the philosophers’ way. The Jews were not about God as a collectionof attributes. One knew who God was by reflecting on what God had done through and for Israel. Which indicates, then, that although these events might be seen through the eyes of faith, they were keenly intent on understanding these events. There was an historical core to religious experience in Judaism, an understanding that translated right into the Christian experience of Jesus.

(link)

This got me thinking about how far Anselm’s claims actually get us. He’s in some respects taking up the claim of Plato’s Parmenides (if the One is not, then nothing is) and in some ways working the same theological plot of land I describe in this post about Augustine, the sunflower, and the asymptote. I had thought that Augustine did it much better; now I’m not so sure.

If Anselm’s proof works, it would behoove us to look around for a claimant to the godhead who talked in ways compatible with that proof: a god who claimed to be ultimate reality, morally best and somehow more alive than us. This sounds, actually, a lot like the God of the Bible. “I am that ‘I Am'”–I am what it is to be; I am more thoroughly than any other thing could be; I am the source and summit of Being. (CS Lewis, in the introduction to The Problem of Pain, puts what might be the same question this way: Why does the Biblical God unite morality and “the numinous” or the sublime? Other religions don’t make their sublime gods the standard of morality; other philosophies don’t imbue their moral standards with the awe and personality that attend the Biblical God. What difference does this difference make?) People argue that Hellenistic philosophy somehow corrupted the early Church; but why was the Church so attractive to the philosophers? Perhaps because it answered some of the questions they’d already discerned. Certainly the Christian story allows for the most striking elements of Platonism: love as the spur to wisdom, Being as something separate from this world that nonetheless somehow flows into the particular beings we see all around us.

In other words, if Anselm’s proof goes through, by knowing how Good or Being is, we can know who Good/Being is; and by looking to the actions of God we can fill the empty box, and know what it looks like to be good, to be real.

Now, okay: I don’t think reason alone–or aesthetic acuity, through which we can tell intriguing stories from bland ones–can walk across the “if” in that preceding paragraph. Walking across the “if” is what faith is. And really, this entire post is incredibly speculative, since it’s been years since I read the ontological proof, or really any Anselm.

[eta: Except for the part where that’s totally not “what faith is” at all. Why do I let myself get carried away by imagery??? Obviously, no one should have “faith” in Anselm’s proof–that’s just ridiculous. Sometimes I think I should listen to myself when I talk… so that I can make what the philosophers call “sense.” Sorry people. I still think the rest of this post is useful.]

But I think I might understand better now why Anselm approaches theology the way he does. Maybe he’s trying to show us how, because when we see how, we’ll look around and find only one culprit whose m.o. fits the facts: We’ll flip through the Identikit and come up with a sketch of God.