Reading the Five Ways
14. Absolute Dependence
The demonstration of the Five Ways involves God being made evident to the inquirer indirectly. That is, the Ways do not make God clearly graspable and definable; they make God evident only by making the character of the world evident. The Ways teach the inquirer to see the world as an ordered whole, a cosmos – as held together by webs of interdependence. And the Ways teach the inquirer to see this whole cosmos as utterly dependent upon a mystery from which it flows – so that, as it were, she begins to see that the world is patterned by lines of perspective, whose vanishing point remains tantalisingly out of view.
The Ways point to a basic reorientation of one’s understanding of the world. The inquirer who fully internalises the Ways will begin to see the movements and actions of things in the world as the expression of an Activity flowing through them; she will begin to see contingency not simply as mutability and decay but as creatureliness, and as the marker that finite things are gifts; she will begin to see the world as coming from and going to mystery. She will, in other words, begin to see the world as creation.
It strikes me that we are not a million miles from Schleiermacher at this point, despite the vast differences in idiom and philosophical machinery. I’m thinking of Schleiermacher’s discovery of the feeling of absolute dependence woven in to all his active and knowing engagements with the world. Of course, Schleiermacher’s emphasis falls more on this dependence as the thread that holds together the subject in the world, and Aquinas’ emphasis falls more on this dependence as a thread that holds together the world known by the subject, and so (to use the terms in a rather clumsy fashion) Schleiermacher is more psychological where Aquinas is more metaphysical. Nevertheless, there’s a similar intuition at the heart of both accounts, and both Aquinas and Schleiermacher are fundamentally theologians of creation.
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