The Autism of Gxd: An Atheological Love Story

Where to Begin?

Why do I write not God but Gxd? This is the question of Gxd’s x. Really, I would prefer that you think this through as a polysemic riddle; in other words, there are a number of ways to interpret this word, and it is for you to ponder which one, or ones, might be valid. Chapter 4 will reveal at least one of these answers. X marks the spot . . . of hidden treasure, of a kiss, a multiplication, a crossing out, a non-gender . . . ? You must decide for yourself. Now we can begin.

What is the autism of Gxd? Doesn’t this make Gxd some kind of impaired being?

People with ASD tend to have communication deficits, such as responding inappropriately in conversations, misreading nonverbal interactions, or having difficulty building friendships appropriate to their age. In addition, people with ASD may be overly dependent on routines, highly sensitive to changes in their environment, or intensely focused on inappropriate items.¹

ASD (Autistic Spectrum Disorder), for sure, is a dis-ability.

Carers (but perhaps not so often autists themselves) have been known to claim that Gxd heals autism, or that Gxd can be known in spite of autism; autism remains an impairment which needs to be managed, or even, if possible, removed (with a (covert) sigh of relief, all too often) in the faith community. The faith community, and by implication, God, are the safe, normative world of non-autism.

So, is the idea of Gxd’s autism absurd? This absurdity is irreverently depicted with cruel but undeniable humor in the satirical animation series, Family Guy, when the characters Peter, Quagmire, Cleveland, and Joe go to heaven to meet Gxd. Gxd, here, is the archetypal old man with a beard, mild, doddery, and an ineffectual meddler. As they leave, Peter goes to give Gxd a hug, and Quagmire tells him, I wouldn’t do that. God doesn’t like people touching him—he’s mildly autistic.² An autistic God is everything Christian theology wouldn’t want him to be. Family Guy’s Gxd is funny, and part of an all too incisive commentary on the ineffectiveness of much contemporary religion. And obviously (few things are off-limits in Family Guy) autism is the butt of humor here as well.

So we have two concepts here—both an autism and a (stereotypical) God who are all too worthy of satire. Turning both these perceptions upside down is the different, holy blasphemy which this book is intended to express. This means arguing that an autistic theological perspective is a privileged one, speaking from the margins but with a truth which the neurotypical (normal) world misses to its cost. To suggest the autism of Gxd might also be to offer praise to a Gxd who is known in ways the World misses to its cost. If it is perceived as heresy, it is a divergent heretical view which has the honor of integrity, and is, in fact, like much heresy, profoundly Christian.

1

. American Psychiatric Association, Autism Spectrum Disorder,

1

.

2

. Acts of God, Family Guy.

By My-self

Alternatively:

Firstly, this book challenges, interrogates and celebrates different modes of theological thinking, in a radically counter-cultural way. In this sense, it is a deeply theological project, leading the reader into demanding intellectual questions.

Secondly, it also, however, begins and ends with lived experience: the experience of living with, and observing, autism; and the lifelong experience of wrestling with Gxd. As befits autism’s atypicalities, this lived experience leads into the counter-cultural questions which challenge theological norms.

Thirdly, this book embraces art, music, and the poetic. Indeed, autism is cast in the form of a story, and a sacred story at that. This is a radical departure from the stereotype of autism as a positivistic or pedantic condition, and its premise leads to some surprising results.

This particular story, then, (because, be aware, this is a study of myth, personal and theological) arises from the lived experience of autism. Like all stories, it is unique; like all stories, it aims to reach something of the universal. It works by means of myth, and at its core, the myth of the absence of Gxd; autism coming into dialogue, ultimately, with what the atheologian Thomas J. J. Altizer terms The Gospel of Christian Atheism.³

Lest this seem too much the eccentric preoccupation of one autistic person, let me relate the following story. In 2012, under the auspices of the University of Glasgow and ASPARRG (the UK Autistic Spectrum People and Religion Research Group), I co-organized, with the autistic writer and advocate Christopher Barbour, a seminar on Autism and Religion. Christopher and I wondered, with some trepidation, whether anyone would attend, and if so, who. To our surprise, a call for papers produced a fascinating array, including a number of papers written by autists whose special interest was in some way religious. We were delighted on the day to find that the seminar was not only so full as to be standing room only, attended by academics and pastoral/carer specialists, but there were also a fair number of autists themselves (interestingly, largely female autists). It seems that an autistic quest after Gxd is perhaps less incredible than it might seem.

Lastly, the chapters of this book chart a journey of theological discovery, so it is best to read them in the sequence in which they are presented. Here are the Beginner’s Guides: feel free to use them, or skip them and go straight to the Introduction (entitled: What does this book do?) which follows them.

3

. Altizer, Gospel of Christian Atheism.

Our Theology

A Beginner’s Guide

What is theology?

It might sound strange but, on my journey of wrestling with the Gxd of my autistic understanding, I had a shock of joy upon discovering theology. And I mean that fundamentally—discovering that theology existed, what it is, and is for. My options had been severely limited before studying theology; I hadn’t known the most basic ideas of theological debate—for example, that the doctrine of the Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) hadn’t been finally formulated until the fourth century, or that during the early Church’s history there had been fierce controversy about whether Jesus was divine, human, or, as the Nicene Council finally decreed, mysteriously both. I had everything to learn. I would love to include my dialogue with other faiths, from many of which I have learned much, but the scope of this book is limited to the Christian tradition. I hope people from all faiths and none could write similar accounts; it would be fascinating to find our points of divergence and agreement.

The word theology comes from two Greek words—Theos and Logos. Theos is god or Gxd, and Logos is word, but word also in a deeper meaning than how we normally use it—as meaning, as rationale, as truth. In the Beginning, Gxd said let there be light—and there was light⁴; the Word, then, is also creative and generative. Jesus, in the Prologue to John’s Gospel, is called the Word⁵: the Cosmic Logos.

My revelation was that it is possible to search for the meaning and significance of that opaque word, Gxd; and to explore different people’s searches for that meaning. My church had presented one fixed meaning, which was taken more or less from a literal meaning of the whole of the Bible, with little or no room for questioning or exploring different ways of reading that book and its contents. So I am, however strange it sounds, excited about theology, and I am all too aware that this short introduction cannot even scratch the surface-of-the-surface of an incredible tradition, or traditions, of theological thinking and its dazzling array of thinkers.

Instead, I am going to briefly outline the thinking of the theologians who feature in this book. In following chapters, it will become apparent, if you don’t already catch a glimmer, of why they have been chosen. Central to the Autism of Gxd is the twentieth/twenty-first-century American death of Gxd theologian, Thomas J. J. Altizer. First, however, in chapter 1, we need to establish our parameters and lay a foundation. What can an autism of Gxd mean? Chapter 2 then explores why this might be approached as poem and story, in terms of myth’s use of language. Then, to begin approaching toward Altizer’s atheological breakthrough, chapter 3 will turn to mystical theologians before turning to Altizer’s atheology in chapter 4, along with some of his theological forebears.⁶ Each one, like all good theologians, shook things up, and encouraged Christians to consider new possibilities for approaching Theos-Logos. It seems to me that there is a particular resonance for our concept of autism with Altizer. There could be many paths for this book to take, but this, from my own, particular autistic point of view, is the strongest and truest. For this reason, because of the importance of Altizer’s twentieth and twenty-first-century writing, there is a focus on the Christian theologians of the twentieth century, with one or two exceptions.

Hermeneutics

Before we start, I should say that another amazing concept was explained to me as I studied theology. This concept was hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is the study of how we examine the messages we receive, and discern them. It means becoming aware of different individual hermeneutics (plural). For example, a historical-critical hermeneutic reads the Bible as a book written in different styles by different, historical authors; an allegorical hermeneutic reads the Bible as a symbolic story from which we can learn, and so on. A large part of the purpose of this book is to develop an autistic hermeneutic.

But as you read on, you will be aware (as I had not been) of the fascinating, creative range of hermeneutics each of our theologians develops.

The theologian Werner Jeanrond defines hermeneutics as the theory of interpretation, adding that:

The word contains a reference to Hermes, the messenger of the gods in Greek mythology. Hermes’ task was to explain to humans the decisions and plans of their gods. Thus, he bridged the gap between the divine and the human realm [so that] hermeneutics is concerned with examining the relationship between the two realms, the realms of a text or a work of art on the one hand, and the people who wish to understand it on the other.⁷

He then provides a useful way to think about becoming hermeneutically self-aware:

The hermeneutical problem may become clearer to us when we recall the odd experience of reading a book for the second time. Such a re-reading often opens up a new reception of the text. We may discover something new, something different in the text, and we may say now that we see the book with different eyes. . . . our perspective has changed. . . . This experience teaches us that understanding is in fact not an automatic and unproblematic exercise of deciphering a set of consistently identical signs on paper . . . it demands that we lend of our reality to the text so that it can become real for us.⁸

If we can see the text through new eyes, by re-reading it, the implicit logic is that some particular set of eyes is always required, as we create our own response and understanding. If different eyes bring different realities to the text, different hermeneutics create different textual worlds. This is a question not only of technical approach but also of epistemology (how we can know things). For example, the purpose of a historical-critical hermeneutic of the Bible is to bring out the stylistic differences between different parts of Scripture, which make it possible to construct a redaction history.⁹ However, underlying this is an (implicit or explicit) set of philosophical, theological, and epistemological assumptions. In this case, it might be that the reader might believe, for example, that the Word of Gxd is divinely and literally inspired; or that the word of Gxd is a human construct; that the Bible contains the Word of Gxd but is not itself the Word; or that we cannot postulate any divine authorship, but only what can be demonstrated in empirical historical terms. The science of hermeneutics establishes that "we never read a text ‘objectively’ or ‘neutrally’ . . . no human reader has an unlimited perspective."¹⁰ Consciously or unconsciously, we adopt our own hermeneutic. One could well say that hermeneutics are inescapable; all reading, whether we are aware of it or not, is interpretive.

Deism, Natural Theology, and Liberal Theology

The Church as an institution no longer has the central place it once had in public life; we have lived through a long period of secularization. In the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the West, two related forms of belief gained traction. Firstly, Natural Theology was the belief that we could prove the existence of Gxd without needing Scripture to reveal Gxd—William Paley’s famous analogy of the watch and the watchmaker¹¹ encapsulated this. If a man found a watch on the seashore, he would look at its complexity and workmanship and conclude that there must exist a watchmaker; similarly, looking at the complexity and workmanship of a vast and beautiful cosmos should, according to this analogy, lead people to believe that there must be a Creator. Natural theology had a long and venerable history in Christianity, complementing Scriptural authority. However, secondly, in the Enlightenment and related to Natural Theology, was a theological stance known as Deism, from Latin Deus (Gxd). Deus, unlike theos, did not demand particular Christian belief in a personal Gxd, but could have a sense of the divine without needing these clear parameters. This was more a philosophical than a theological Gxd. As Natural Theology and Deism eroded biblical ways of doing theology, the Church began, largely in Protestant countries but also in the French Revolution, to lose its authority. A new form of theology called Liberal Theology attempted to accommodate these belief systems which no longer saw the Bible as completely, historically and literally true. We could perhaps say, rather crudely, that Liberal Theology tried to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So, for example, a tireless nineteenth-century Scottish Church reformer named Hugh Miller, fighting for social justice and Christian morality, was also a geologist who comfortably explained to his audiences at public lectures that the days in which Gxd created the cosmos in the book of Genesis were symbolic representations of vast geological eras. In a sense, this was nothing new—analogy and symbol had had important roles in Medieval theology—but now, in the nineteenth century, there was a sense that the truth of the Bible was altogether more slippery than we might believe.

Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a major nineteenth-century German philosopher who conceptualized Gxd as Geist (Spirit), as human consciousness evolving. Geist is the World-Spirit which develops through history. Hegel’s concept of progress was that of dialectic—namely, that when opposing intellectual or spiritual phenomena meet, they cancel each other out through a process of synthesis which results in a new phenomenon, and this is repeated as consciousness develops teleologically¹² throughout history.

Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was a twentieth-century philosopher. Although not a theologian, he is relevant to our theological thinking because of his understanding of phenomenology which, put very simply, is a state of simply being and observing, in the first person, without thoughts or judgements which take us away from the essential experience of being there, which is an approximate rendition of his most famous term, Dasein.

Existentialism

We need to explain briefly what Existentialism was (and is). For intellectuals in the early twentieth century, a Gxd-less world meant experiencing both an emancipation and a certain sense of dread and emptiness. By taking charge of our own existence, we face existential questions with new force. The nineteenth-century Christian philosopher-poet Søren Kierkegaard approached the Bible and morality in existential terms, and this was a powerful way for an early Existentialism to view the world. Existentialism then was able to move into altogether non-theistic approaches. Twentieth-century writers such as Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and (earlier, in the nineteenth century) Fyodor Dostoyevsky explored these questions in philosophical writing which also had a poetic or novelistic form. Dostoyevsky, although not overtly religious except in rare moments, nonetheless could be seen wrestling deeply with questions of faith and in particular, the problem of evil.

Karl Barth

Into this context of Liberal Theology and Existentialism, a Swiss pastor named Karl Barth emerged in the early twentieth century. Barth came from a family of fairly conservative religious beliefs in the Swiss Reformed Church, but as he was led more and more deeply into theological thinking, he became more and more aware of Liberal Theology. Barth was also profoundly influenced by Existentialism. The two Existentialist thinkers who feature most significantly in Barth’s work are Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, and both of these writers articulate something of the human situation as flawed and uncertain.

In Barth’s famous biblical commentary, The Epistle to the Romans, he reveals something of his own poetic sensibilities through his use of striking metaphors. The Epistle to the Romans was written in 1918—precisely the end of the carnage of the First World War where he had served in the midst of the trauma. A number of his metaphors are taken from the world of war and catastrophe; for example, his metaphors for the cosmic Christ event include crater, exploding shell, and flood.¹³ This expresses two separate but undoubtedly related realities. First, Barth’s traumatic service in the trench warfare of the First World War clearly influenced his thought. Secondly, however, there is a related but not identical sense that Liberal Theology is not enough to carry us through a world of trauma and uncertainty. Barth termed this trauma and uncertainty Krisis and, in his theology, Krisis becomes the meeting point where human fallenness, imperfection, and uncertainty are met in Gxd’s (and our) own crisis, with the Incarnation and saving Crucifixion of Christ.

The saving power of the Crucifixion as Christ dying to absolve or annul human sinfulness and guilt was not new in theology. It is a powerful theme in Paul’s Epistles, and Medieval Christianity developed various different models for this soteriology (study of Christ as savior). What was new in Barth was that he saw Christ as the answer to Existentialist anxiety, but also as an Existentialist phenomenon. Krisis as the meeting point between Gxd and humanity could be where the extremes of guilt in Dostoevsky and uncertainty in Kierkegaard could be thought on a cosmic level. So, Christ as Atonement could be an answer to the Existentialist crisis of the twentieth century.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Barth survived World War One; however, famously, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer did not survive World War Two. Unlike many German church leaders, Bonhoeffer preached against National Socialism, and after being found guilty of a failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, was executed by the Nazis—just weeks before the Camps were liberated at the end of the War. Bonhoeffer’s theology, it might be surmised, was a very practical one, and two key themes were discipleship and community. There was nothing sentimental about his understanding of these realities of Christian practice, as will be seen. Like Barth, Bonhoeffer’s thinking has a flavor of Existentialism. In his letters from prison, he writes in truly opposite terms to any pious platitudes: The same God who is with us is the one who forsakes us (Mark 15:34)!¹⁴

This idea of the absence of Gxd, as we will see later, is not a new one by any means—the Medieval mystics had formulated what the theologian and Church historian Denys Turner calls The Darkness of God.¹⁵ But in Bonhoeffer, it takes on a particularly urgent quality, where faith is an existential choice demanding action in the face of that apparent desolation; even as the desolation itself is a vital part of his Christology (understanding of Christ) and soteriology (understanding of Christ as Savior):

Before God, and with God, we live without God. God consents to be pushed out of the world and onto the cross; God is weak and powerless in the world and in precisely this way, and only so, is at our side and helps us. Matt.

8

:

17

makes it quite clear that Christ helps us not by virtue of his omnipotence but rather by virtue of his weakness and suffering! This is the crucial distinction between Christianity and all religions. Human religiosity directs people in need to the power of God in the world, God as deus ex machina.¹⁶ The Bible directs people toward the powerlessness and the suffering of God; only the suffering God can help.¹⁷

This is a powerful narrative from a man who is facing his execution in a Concentration Camp, and it is easy to see that his understanding of what it means to follow Christ would be radical. However, his radical commitment is evident even before this, in his 1937 book The Cost of Discipleship. In this theological study, which is also a very practical theology, Bonhoeffer argues that Christianity must mean much more than a formula assented to but not lived through. He calls this cheap grace:

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church . . . [it] means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system . . . an intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins . . . no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin. Cheap grace therefore amounts to a denial of the Incarnation of the Word of Gxd.¹⁸

Bonhoeffer also came to see community-building in very practical ways. He was influenced deeply by time in New York where he saw the depth of both very practical discipleship and community in the black Charismatic churches of Harlem. He also describes the aim of a religion-free Christianity—the Church freed from oppressive traditions.

Paul Tillich

A good autist would approach a literal reading of Scripture and say, but this is nonsense; Gxd didn’t make the world in seven days—the earth formed over billions of years. A good autist would most likely resemble what Paul Tillich calls the honest atheist,¹⁹ and this is, as will be seen, a key to our furnishing of the room which is mythical autism. The German theologian Paul Tillich fled World War II Germany but his conscience called him back; eventually he was persuaded by friends to leave again, and emigrate to the USA. A radical transcendence of Gxd is central to his theology, in order to preserve its integrity. Atheism can be an alluring response to theology when, as Tillich writes,

In making Gxd an object beside other objects, the existence and nature of which are matters of argument, theology supports the escape to atheism . . . the first step to atheism is always a theology which drags Gxd down to the level of doubtful things. The game of the atheist is then very easy. For he is perfectly justified in destroying such a phantom and all its ghostly qualities.²⁰

If Bonhoeffer writes a religion-less Christianity from the shock of the existential threat of Nazism, Tillich, like Barth, also writes from the existential threat of the World Wars, so that he can write of The Shaking of the Foundations.²¹ He is also writing within a theological context where Existentialist thought has raised questions of what he terms threatenedness. He has read Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and other Existentialists, and his theology responds to the weight of their challenge to a traditional Christendom. Tillich’s theology of culture is a response to threatenedness which listens to Existentialist thought and argues that

the human condition always raises fundamental questions which human cultures express in various ways in the dominant styles of their works of art, and to which religious traditions offer answers expressed in religious symbols.²²

The correlation between art as fundamental question and religion as symbolic answer moves religious discourse into an existential tension where the arts are taken very seriously as an expression of meaning, and religion must answer authentically. This agenda which lifts art beyond a mimetic (representative) function, into something to which religion must answer, is a secularizing one, but by no means a dilution of religious thought. Tillich has been called an atheist, but his atheism is not the rejection of powerful Gxd-language, in fact the very opposite. Tillich’s atheism is the expression of the majesty of Gxd conceived beyond theism. The theologian David Kelsey comments that for Tillich, Gxd cannot "be a ‘supreme being’ for, by definition, any entity, any being, is finite. Hence, Tillich refuses to speak of the ‘existence’ of Gxd."²³ To do so would only make Gxd an object among other objects.

David H. Kelsey expresses Tillich’s thinking of the personal authenticity of faith as the question about our ‘ultimate concern.’ Whatever concerns us ultimately, says Tillich, is our ‘God.’²⁴ Religion can easily displace our Ultimate Concern—Gxd—so that

. . . religious ritual, myth or institutions are ambiguous, functioning religiously to express the unconditioned . . . [but] they invite for themselves the ultimate concern appropriate only to the unconditioned. Thereby they become demonic, powerfully destructive of the life trying to transcend itself.²⁵

Tillich provides a thinking of theology as a/theist Existentialist authenticity, also in the light of the artistic revolution of Modernism. The death of Gxd movement (which we will consider imminently) can be seen, in a very real way, to rely on this.

Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton was an American twentieth-century Trappist monk who converted to Christianity after what the official Merton.org website calls a rambunctious adolescence and youth.²⁶ Merton was concerned with social and political issues, particularly the peace and civil rights movements of the American 1960s. He also went on to become deeply engaged with Buddhism, and Eastern religions more generally, establishing dialogue and what we might call a Christian-Buddhist (and more generally Eastern) syncretism (fusion).

Merton was a prolific writer on these issues; he is, however, probably best remembered for his writing on contemplative practice, which is poetic and thought-provoking. He issued a caveat about how to read his work:

One of the things that was misleading about the earlier version of (New Seeds of Contemplation) is that it seemed to teach the reader How to become a contemplative. This was not the author’s intention, because it is impossible for one man to teach another how to become a contemplative. One might as well write a book: how to be an angel.²⁷

Merton is best known for his spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, and his contemplative practice as he explains it in his writing has inspired countless readers within and beyond his own Catholicism.

Apophatic Theology: Dionysius and John of the Cross

We will be focusing a great deal on apophatic theology, but a good place to start is by distinguishing it from its opposite, kataphatic theology. In both cases, the Greek term phasis means speech, but apo- and kata- are opposites.

Translations of the Greek preposition kata include Down from, through, out, according to, toward, along.²⁸ These are all prepositions of material, spatial or conceptual relation. According to is a prepositional phrase which functions as a metaphor of physical connection, to indicate the object partaking in the quality of its subject. So kataphatic discourse expresses a direct connection between subject and object which we can affirm; Tom is a boy, for example. It can be used to develop systematic theology, which is constructed by using these kinds of predicative statements

The Greek preposition apo is translated as follows: Of separation, distance physical, of distance of place; temporal, of distance of time or origin of the place whence anything is, comes, befalls, is taken of origin or cause.²⁹ Again, the metaphor is of spatial relation, but a relation which is interrupted. Apophatic theology, then, is discourse which acknowledges the distance of language from Gxd; speaking of that which cannot be spoken. So apophatic theology is also termed negative theology.

Two famous apophatic theologians will be discussed in this book; Dionysius the Areopagite and Saint John of the Cross. (We will also see elements of apophatic theology in the work of Saint Teresa of Àvila, in a slightly different way). Dionysius is thought to have written his works around the sixth century, and John in sixteenth-century Spain. Both share a conviction that in all their language, they can only speak of Gxd as an absence; and yet, paradoxically, absence is the only place where presence ultimately can be found. In his introduction to Dionysius, the Areopagite’s The Mystical Theology and The Divine Names, C E Rolt encapsulates the need for apophatic discourse very simply; apophatic discourse arises as "merely a bold way of stating the orthodox truism that the Ultimate Godhead is incomprehensible: a truism which Theology accepts as an axiom and then is prone to ignore."³⁰ This is so in Christian theology because the various Names of God are . . . mere inadequate symbols of That Which transcends all thought and existence.³¹ This means that, far from annulling or contradicting orthodox theology, apophatic theology expresses what is implicit in orthodox theology. Therefore, negative theology is best understood not as the negation of theology, but the theology of negation.³²

Teresa of Àvila

Saint Teresa of Àvila was a sixteenth-century Spanish reformer and writer within the Carmelite order of nuns. She is most famous for her inspirational book, The Interior Castle. In it, and in the Life of Saint Teresa by Herself, are accounts of mystical union with Gxd, the Beloved. These are often read as supernatural events, but it is impossible to verify this. Our approach is to disregard the question of the reality or otherwise of these phenomena, and concentrate on her writing strategies as poetry and theology.

John Duns Scotus

In the Western civilization of the Middle Ages, a huge event occurred which would lay the foundations for the following period, the Renaissance. Most of the ancient Greek philosophers’ writing had been lost in the West. However, a number of their works had been preserved in the Islamic world, translated from ancient Greek into Arabic. When these works of philosophy were translated from Arabic into Latin in the thirteenth century, their influence created a shock in the Latin-speaking Western world of Christian philosopher-theologians.

Although these Greek philosophers, particularly Plato and Aristotle, were seen as a threat to Christian belief, two theologians, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus did engage with them in fruitful ways. Their work is complex and profound. To some extent, their debate about how to speak about Gxd hinges on two concepts—analogy and univocity. In analogical language, we speak figuratively of something as like something else; in univocal language, we are straightforwardly saying that something is something else. For example, analogy would say the sun is like a dazzling ball in the sky, while univocal language might say the sun is a dazzling ball of burning gases. This matters when speaking about Gxd, as this language corresponds to the very different philosophies of Aristotle and Plato.

Aristotle, although he did not have access to the kind of experimental techniques we have today, used scientific reasoning to classify different concepts and modes of being which he termed categories; primarily, the category of substance, but also general realities such as quality, quantity, and relation. However, he recognized that there were places where the physical properties he had classified did not work; how can we speak of the color of Gxd, the Universal Being and Prime Mover of the universe? Aristotle reasoned that the Universal was present in the physical world, but was not the physical world itself.

By contrast, Plato taught that the Universal, or the spiritual, was totally different to the physical world; the physical world was merely an illusion. In his famous myth of the cave, people chained inside a cave see shadows projected onto the wall. Because the shadows are all that they can see, they assume that those shadows are reality. In this way, Plato taught a form of dualism (two opposing levels or phenomena) where the physical world is only a shadow of the real, and meditation would lead to the ultimate reality.

The Christian thinker Aquinas responded to these issues by stating that language about Gxd was only ever analogy. Duns Scotus responded by insisting that our language about Gxd is true just as it is; when we say Gxd is love, we mean exactly what our purest love means in our actual existence, although Gxd’s love is infinite and perfect, as ours is not. In contrast, Aquinas would teach that our human version of love was a poor imitation of a spiritual property of Love, which existed beyond and could only be spoken of by analogy.

In keeping with his teaching about this univocity, Scotus develops the concept he terms haecceitas. This is in direct contrast to Aquinas’ thinking. Following Aristotle, Aquinas develops a natural philosophy—what we could now call the science of physics. Aristotle has specified the properties of physical objects according to their properties—form, material, potential, and other ways of considering matter. Underlying all is Being, the Prime Mover, who (as we have seen) can only be described by analogy.

Aquinas, following Aristotle, names these properties by the Latin term quidditas, which can be translated as that-ness. However, Scotus looks at the qualities of physical objects and describes them as them as possessing haecceitas, a Latin word which can be translated as this-ness. This instead of that might seem simply a matter of grammar, but to these Medieval logicians it meant much more. That is a physical quality of this-worldly matter, but this is something more immediate—a non-categorical individuation which means that, although this pear belongs to the category of pears along with other ones, its non-categorical individuation (haecceitas) makes it its own self, distinct from any other. For Scotus, as a Christian thinker, this is something, in fact, imbued with Spirit. This might seem a huge leap for us, but for Scotus, Gxd within us is an immediacy, a this, a Gxd-given identity, and to apply the same haec—this—to matter in our material