![St Anselm By Morris Meredith Williams (Anselm by Ethel Mary Wilmot-Buxton) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://wp-media.patheos.com/blogs/sites/637/2016/10/AnselmP136.gif)
What this leaves, then, is that there is one and only one nature which is superior to others and inferior to none. But such a thing is the greatest and best of all existing things. There is some nature which is of all that exists, supreme.[1]
Following this insight we can better appreciate Anselm’s description of God in the Proslogion. In it Anselm continued with the notion that God is supreme, but he followed through with a slight change to what we found in Augustine by saying in his dialogue with God: “Now we believe that You are something than which nothing greater can be thought. “[2] Augustine considered it enough to show there is something greater than us to find God. Anselm wanted to do more and set up a way to know how great God is by saying he is greater than anything else we could think; he is so supreme that our ideas about him would have to indicate that supremacy. While there is value in this line of reasoning, some could say it is too dependent upon our thoughts, that God should be greater than what we can think of, but by saying this, we are thinking of God and this greater than we can think is itself paradoxically part of what we can think about him, allowing Anselm’s reasoning to remain . The key is to realize how all of these considerations serve as pointers to God; if we try to think as if our reasoning is what establishes God, we have misunderstood the signification of our words, even as Anselm would say, those who deny the existence of God also fail to address the signification of God as that which is supreme, that is, that which nothing greater can be thought:
No one, indeed, understanding what God is can think that God does not exist, even though he may say these words in his heart either without any [objective] signification or with some peculiar signification. For God is that-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought. Whoever really understands this understands clearly that this same being so exists that not even in thoughts can it not exist. [3]
One of our difficulties lies with the fact we are trying to deal with God as a thing like anything else, and yet, God is not a thing. So when we talk about him we talk about him in a way which he is not; he is not a contingent being with a nature that we can comprehend. He transcends all other things. But we can and should use our experience in the world, our experience with the various phenomena around us, as things which point to God. We can use them to know something about God, for we find the vestiges of God’s existence are found in everything which exists. All things point to God, if we know how to philosophically engage them, to discern how their participation in existence points to the superior nature of existence itself. This is why that which is the greatest thing we can observe shows us that God is, and might itself be God or at least an aspect of God which our minds can know.
Since God is not a particular contingent thing in creation, he transcends all categories, as Henry of Ghent wrote, “It must be said that God is not a thing belonging to some category. Rather, things belonging to a category are only those things that come from him. “[4] When Henry of Ghent wrote that God is not a thing which falls into any category, this meant that anything our mind can construct, any of the categories which we establish, all emerge from God and are less than God and so fail to relate what God is in his essence.
![Nicholas of Cusa. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://wp-media.patheos.com/blogs/sites/637/2016/10/Nicholas_of_Cusa.jpg)
Now, I give the name “Maximum” to that than which there cannot be anything greater. But fullness befits what is one. Thus, oneness – which is also being – coincides with Maximality. But if such oneness is altogether free from all relation and contraction, obviously nothing is opposed to it, since it is Absolute Maximality. Thus the Maximum is the Absolute One which is all things. And all things are in the Maximum (for it is the Maximum), and since nothing is opposed to it, the Minimum likewise coincides with it, and hence the Maximum is also all things. And because it is absolute, it is, actually, every possible being; it contracts nothing from things, all of which [derive] from it. In this first book I shall strive to investigate – incomprehensibly above human reason – this Maximum, which the faith of all nations indubitably believes to be God. [5]
Note, then, Nicholas began his discussion of God by discussing the Maximum, that is, the Absolute, the Absolute One “which is all things.” The indication is that all things are somehow contained within it so that nothing is outside of it, that is, nothing can be found opposed to it. In and with all things, the Maximus, the Absolute, is able to be found and experienced. Nothing gives the Absolute its essence, but rather, all things come out of it, represent it, derive their being from it. It is beyond our reason, and yet it is found in and in all things which our reason can explore, as all things coincide with it even if it is more than those things or even their summation.All beings find themselves established in this Absolute, in this One, and so by existing and knowing that they are not the Absolute themselves, their being points to the Absolute from which they come, and so to God. In this fashion, Nicholas continued:
Accordingly, it follows that the actual Maximum is the Beginning and the End of all finite things. Moreover, nothing could exist if the unqualified Maximum did not exist. For since everything non-maximal is finite, it is also originated. But, necessarily, it will exist from another. Otherwise – i.e., if it existed from itself – it would have existed when it did not exist. Now, as is obviously the rule, it is not possible to proceed to infinity in beginnings and causes. So it will be the case that the unqualifiedly Maximum exists, without which nothing can exist.[6]
We can talk about but we do not attain what God is in his essence by our exploration of who and what we believe him to be. In doing so, we get something from it, we learn something about God, but we must recognize the limitations of what we have attained. What we learn is limited, less than what God actually is, and so it is easy for someone else to question what we have learned and deny it because of its imprecision. They take what we say too literally, as the limit to what God is like instead of a representation of God from his vestiges in creation. This denial can easily lead to atheism because human reason can only construct partial representations of the transcendent truth, and those representations, when overly literalized, are easily shown to be faulty. That is, many use the imprecise way human reason grasps over that which transcends human conceptuality as proof it does not exist instead of seeing that it points to the paradox of such transcendence. Paradox is not contradiction. Paradox is a part of human engagement with reality because what exists transcends our comprehension, and when we try to map it out, it will be imprecise and leave all kinds of paradoxes in its wake. Any systematic representation of reality will be imperfect.[7]
This brings us back to St. Anselm: “Of all things that exist, there is one nature that is supreme.” [8] It is supreme, the Maximus, the Absolute, the One which ontologically precedes all enumeration, all conditionality. All things flow from it as that which is First, that is, what Proclus calls the One:
Since, then, things cannot be uncaused, and cause is not convertible with effect, and infinite regress is excluded, it remains that there is a first cause of all existing things, whence they severally proceed as branches from a root, some near to it and others more remote. For that there is not more than one such first principle has already been established, inasmuch as the subsistence of any manifold is posterior to the One (prop. 5). [9]
The very nature of plurality itself presupposes the One, for it contains a multiplication of the One. While we might, epistemologically, work to the revelation of the One by the plurality which is around us, we do so because the One is found in all such plurality, while plurality itself is not found in the One. Seeing how all things are contained by and represented in the One, by its use of the One, we can conclude that there is a One which is prior to all:
Suppose a manifold is prior to the One. The One will then participate in the manifold, but the prior manifold will not participate in the One, seeing that, in the first place, it exists as a manifold before the One comes to be, and it cannot participate in what does not exist; and secondly, because what participates the One is both one and not-one (prop. 2), but if the First Principle be plurality, no ‘one’ as yet exists. But it is impossible there should be a manifold in no way participating the One (prop. 1). Therefore the manifold is not prior to the One.[10]
All of this, then, serves to present where theists begin when talking about God. When those who deny God talk to those who affirm God, usually those who deny God do not know the foundation for the affirmation which the others hold. Atheists want to talk about God as a particular being, and once they do that, they are no longer talking about God. God is the Absolute, the Maximum One, the Supreme One which transcends all being for being comes from it; to argue against the existence of God because some presentations of God are impossible is to argue against the existence of existence itself because flying invisible purple horses do not exist. Sure, we can agree with all kinds of denials about God, but such denials can only form when there is some truth which is being used to affirm such denial. And that, Augustine would say, is all we need.
[1] St. Anselm, “Monologion” in Anselm of Canterbury. The Major Works. ed. and intr. Brian Davies and G.R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 15.
[2] St. Anselm, “Proslogion” in Anselm of Canterbury. The Major Works. ed. and intr. Brian Davies and G.R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 87.
[3] St. Anselm, “Proslogion,” 89.
[4] Henry of Ghent, The Questions of God’s Unity and Simplicity. trans. Roland J. Teske, S.J. (Paris: Peeters, 2006) 120.
[5] Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance. trans. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 1990), 51.
[6] Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance, 55-6. In several of his works, he explored this theme in diverse ways, such as considering God to be the not-other which, by being not-other, is with all things and so establishes them as not something independent from him. Likewise, the conditioned potency and act of all things indicates that there has to be unconditional potency and act, which such potency participates in:
“The mind sees how it is that Not-other is the Actualness of actuality, the Maximality of maximum, and the Minimality of minimum. And so, it sees that pure actuality, which cannot be purer, was never in [the state of] potency. For [otherwise] it would have come into actuality by means of a still purer actuality. Hence, [the mind] sees (1) that all the things which could be other can always be other and (2) that, consequently, in the case of things which admit of being more, or of being greater, we never come to an actual maximum, than which there cannot be a greater. Those things which can be something other can always be something other because they never attain to Not-other,” Nicholas of Cusa, On God as Not-Other. trans. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1979), 147.
[7] The way light can be a wave or particle, depending upon our mode of observation, is a demonstration of where such paradoxes exist in science. Quantum mechanics presents such a paradox with the famous thought experience concerning Schrödinger’s cat.
[8] St. Anselm, “Monologion,” 11..
[9] Proclus, Elements of Theology. trans. E.R. Dodds (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1963). 13.
[10] Proclus, Elements of Theology, 5.
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