Reading the Five Ways
12. The Ways to mystery
The Five Ways begin with the intelligibility of the world, and end with the assertion that something must end the chains of question and answer that constitute that intelligibility. Implicitly (in a way that his later arguments will make explicit), the same Ways that demonstrate the necessity of some such answer at the same time show that this answer is bound to be deeply incomprehensible. In other words, the Ways are arguments that lead from intelligibility to mystery.
My invocation of ‘mystery’ is here not meant to be any kind of hand-waving resignation of intellectual responsibility. The mysteriousness that stands at the end point of Aquinas’ arguments is a direct consequence of those arguments. When, in the ensuing discussion of the ‘manner of being’ that God is, Aquinas makes his explicit case for the mysteriousness implicit in the Five Ways, he is extremely precise about what kind of mystery he means: he shows that the Ways unavoidably lead us to characterise the answer they point to by a series of negations: this ‘X’ that the Ways point to is not a body, is not composed of form and matter, does not allow us to distinguish its essence from its existence, and so on. Those negations do not simply mean that the ‘X’ we are talking about is unlike anything we have met before; they make it impossible to give any kind of direct, positive description of ‘X’ at all. Without making the nature of X in any way self-contradictory, the Ways snip the cords that hold our ordinary language together. The Ways are, for Aquinas, a rational demonstration that the pinnacle of rational understanding – the heart and summit of our attempt to make full sense of the intelligible world – must be mystery.
I am reminded of a remark by Karen Kilby, in her paper, ‘Mathematics, Beauty and Theology’:
one of the beauties of some theology [is] that it aims to advance our knowledge not by letting us comprehend God just a little bit more, but by making us more aware of the incomprehensibility of God. Theology is at its most elegant … when the mystery of God and the clarity of the theology are directly, rather than inversely, related. Theology does not at its best, or at least at its most beautiful, acknowledge the mystery of God by vagueness in its formulations or half-heartedness in its assertions, nor does it achieve intellectual seriousness by in the end knowing quite a lot about God; at its most elegant, the more precise it is, the more effective it is in presenting us with the ungraspability of God. Part of the attraction of thinkers like Aquinas … is the way in which considerable intellectual resources and rigor are devoted to bringing to clarity the mysteriousness of God…
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