Abstract
The absolute immutability of God, as it was expounded by many ancient and medieval thinkers such as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, contends that God has no real relation with the world, but only a relation of reason. This view lingered until contemporary scholars like the process thinkers such as Alfred North Whitehead and his disciple, Charles Hartshorne, argued that God has a dipolar meaning that God influences the world and that the world also influences him. While protecting God's intrinsic Being, some contemporary thinkers like Clarke, Grant, and others also tried to formulate his real relationship with the world. But the problem remains on how to posit this real relation with the world without insinuating two natures in God. I wish to state in this paper that God has real relation with his creatures which is rooted in what I call “creational relation" that was made manifest at creation and continues after it.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
It is good to note that my discussion in this paper has to do with God's immutability as different from God's impassibility which concerns his being affected by an external agent.
David Schindler described this ontological relation as esse-ab, esse-in, and esse-ad (being-from, being-in, and being-towards), which is meant not only to demonstrate that relation is primordial in the first act but, more importantly, to emphasize that relation flowed at the point of coming into being from the creator to the created beings of which the finite beings are indebted to the creator for that generous act of creation. Specifically, esse-ab reflects this creational "relation" which flowed from God to created beings, and in as far as such relation brought real beings into existence, it must be a real relation itself from God, not just a relation of reason (1993).
Miccoli sees the human person as essere da, essere-in, stare tra, and essere con e essere per altri (being from, being in, being among, and being with and for others). The creational relation in Miccoli could be seen in his essere da (being from), even though Miccoli never used it in this sense, which is the relation from God toward the creation that was real at the point of creation (2014).
St. Augustine described God as having no accident or potency but only substance and relation (On the Trinity 5, 5, 6). Also, Joseph Ratzinger wrote: “[…] the sole dominion of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality. […]. It is probably true to say that the task imposed on philosophy as a result of these facts is far from being completed […] (1970: 184).” W. Norris Clarke described being or human person as not just substance but as substance-in-relation having the dyadic structure of substance and relation as equal primordial modes (Clarke, 2004). Aristotle (1963) has described relation as one of the nine accidents (Categories I, 25).
However, against the stance that a pure act is immutable, Steven Duby argued that God's doctrine of pure actuality (actus purus) is coherent with his formally and temporally diverse actions. For him, the fact that essence or first act (actus primus) and second act (actus secundus) are identical in God, he relates to us by outwardly excising what he eternally is as God in order to accomplish his plan in us (Duby, 2017).
Aristotle believes that thinking about the changing world would imply potentiality or change in God and that since change implies imperfection, then imperfection would become part of God. So, God cannot know the world (Metaphysics XII, 9). Also, Parmenides (b. 510 B.C.) had before Aristotle used his principle of non-contradiction to argue that being is One, unchangeable and permanent (Parmenides 1991, Fragments II, 7–8). Leonardo Tarán argues that such an argument of Parmenides excludes duration also (Taran, 1965). However, some scholars have argued that Parmenides never argued explicitly that non-being cannot come into being but rather for the identity of non-being and that it was Plato who made him look like he excluded non-being (O’Brien, 2013).
This immutability of the God of Aristotle had perturbed the Middle-Platonists, such as Albinus, of the first and second century A.D., who decided to make a synthesis of the Demiurge of Plato in Timaeus (35a) and the God in Aristotle’s Metaphysics in order to arrive at the idea of a personal God who is also the moving cause of the universe, hence with somewhat real relation with the world (Plato, 2000). The God of Aristotle has the feature of a moving cause, but does not generate the form or the essence of the universe as an artist with the exemplary idea of the form in his mind. So, this idea of a God who produces the world with the exemplary idea in his mind is Plato's God (Demiurge). But the Demiurge was a secondary importance producer because the Forms he used to produce the visible things did not come from him. Based on this, the Middle Platonists contended that the personal God who lives in heaven is the God of Aristotle, whose mind could be filled with the Forms of Plato so that he could produce the universe in his own image like an artist (Demiurge) (Cornford et al., 1937; Dillon, 1996; Flannery, 2000). So, by merging the God of Aristotle and the Demiurge of Plato, the Middle Platonists have arrived at a personal God who is the producer of the universe. But later, Plotinus (204/5–270 A.D.), in his Ennead, went back to the One in Plato's Parmenides, where Plato discussed the idea of the One who is static and impersonal. This One in Plato becomes, for Plotinus (1988), the highest principle, beyond the Aristotelian God, having his ideas in his mind. The Aristotelian God became the second God of Plotinus, which is the Nous. But the God of Plotinus produced the world through emanation and out of necessity through intermediaries without having direct effect with the creature (Enneads VI,2,11–12).
This communication of God to creatures in His likeness is not actually a communication of His substance.
Ebrahim Azadegan used his concept of emancipation project to "emancipate" divine immutability by arguing that God who knows particulars is more worthy of worship than the traditional Hellenistic notion of God understood by Avicenna and some of his contemporaries as immutable and having no knowledge of the changing world. For him, Shiite theology and philosophy support this emancipation project of freeing God from the constraint of immutability imposed on him by the Hellenistic tradition. This is because the God who knows the particular existing things in the universe is the God who has real relation with the world, not the traditional immutable God (Azadegan, 2022).
Aristotle had taught about the teleological nature of things to aim towards their natural destiny or end (Metaphysics 2,1013a23-35; Parts of animals I,642a32-b4).
In this teleological course of God's plan, Michael Gorman tried to answer whether the doctrine of the incarnation of Jesus Christ as a divine person implies that God or the divinity was made mutable since the divine person Christ took human nature. He weighed two possibilities of the divine person becoming mutable in Christ's incarnation, which stems from the fact that Christ has two natures: human nature and divine nature. Gorman employs St. Thomas Aquinas' argument that something is mutable only if it has the potency to be actualized or when something is coming to exist in a new way. He adopted Aquinas' argument that the assumed nature of Christ is related to the divine person (Son) only by mixed relation, which ensures that the Son was not actualized by the relation with which he was assumed. Because the divine person is not assumed then, the incarnation of Christ is not a case of mutation. But he accepted that with the incarnation, Christ came to exist in a new way; otherwise, the incarnation would be nothing different from creation. For him, Christ came to exist in a new way, not because he wanted to actualize a perfection he did not have before, but rather because he came to have a particular type of being in a created existence. He concludes that Christ is both mutable and divine and that there is no inconsistency here since he has not only a divine nature (Gorman, 2018). In his other work, he tried to reconcile the idea that the Word took flesh and is fully human with the idea that the Word is divine, immutable, and impassible. That is, for him, Christ's incarnation is in harmony with divine simplicity, immutability, and impassibility (Gorman, 2017).
Some even contend that God’s immutability vitiates his freedom. For instance, Swinburne argued that free action and immutability are incompatible, so if God is immutable, he cannot act freely (Swinburne, 1993). But Jared Michelson tried to defend divine immutability against the attack by Richard Swinburne by agreeing with St. Augustine that when we speak of divine relation, we must keep in mind, just like every other attribute of him, the utter distinction between God and his creatures, allowing room for God's ineffable reality as the context within which our theological reason of him unfolds. The theological reason for Michelson could be traced to creation, providence, reconciliation, and redemption. For him, the notion that an immutable God has no real relation with the world does not allow God-creature distinction to inform our process of theological reason (Michelson, 2019).
The human person is in the middle between the spirit and matter. Plato narrated a story of a charioteer riding two horses, one (reason) looking upward to the Forms, the other (appetite) looking downward to earthly beauty. On seeing an earthly beauty, the appetite (horse) loses control and plunges the reason (other horse) and the charioteer into the earth, where the soul is imprisoned in the body (Plato, Phaedrus, 246a-254e). He again cited Plotinus and the Neoplatonic tradition, which described the soul as living on the edge between time and eternity, matter and spirit (Plotinus, Enneads VI,2,11–12; Stumpf, 1994; Bussanich, 2006, O’Meara, 2006).
References
Aquinas, T. (2014). Summa Theologica: Complete Edition. The Fathers of English Dominican Province (trans.). Catholic Way Publishing, Totowa (NJ).
Aquinas, T. (2023). De Potentia [On the power]. Retrieved July 22, 2023, from www.corpusthomisticum.org/qdp7.html
Al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid (1963). Tahafut al-falasifah - The incoherence of the philosophers. Sabih Ahmad Kamali (trans.). Pakistan Philosophical Congress, Lahor.
Aristotle. (2003). Metaphysics: Books Z and H. In J. L. Ackrill- Lindsay Judson (Eds.), Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Aristotle. (1963). Categories and interpretation. J. Ackrill (trans.). Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Augustine. (2000). The City of God. D.D. Marcus Dods (trans.). The Modern Library, New York.
Augustine. (2012). De trinitiate [On the Trinity]. Edmund Hills O.P. (trans.). New City Press, New York.
Azadegan, E. (2022). On the incompatibility of God’s knowledge of particulars and the doctrine of divine immutability: Towards a reform in Islamic theology. Religious Studies, 58(2), 327–344.
Bussanich, J. (2006). Plotinus’ metaphysics of the One. In L. P. Gerson (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Plotinus (pp. 46–55). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Clark, M. T. (2001). De trinitate. In E. Stump & N. Kretzmann (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to Augustine (pp. 91–102). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Clarke, W. N. (1990). Charles Hartshorne’s philosophy of God: A Thomistic critique. In S. I. A. Santiego (Ed.), Charles Hartshorne’s concept of God: Philosophical and theological responses (pp. 103–123). Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.
Clarke, W. N. (2004). Person and being. Marquette University Press, Milwaukee (WI).
Clarke, W. N. (2007). God’s real relatedness to the world, mutability, enrichment by the world. The philosophical approach to God: A new Thomistic perspective, 2nd ed. (pp. 131–150). Fordham University Press, New York.
Clarke, W. N. (20072, 19791). Christian theism and Whiteheadian process philosophy: Are they compatible? The philosophical approach to God: A new Thomistic perspective, 2nd ed. (pp. 91–92). Fordham University Press, New York (NY).
Clarke, W. N. (2008). A new look at the immutability of God. Exploration in metaphysics: Being, God, person (pp. 183–210). University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame.
Clarke, W. N. (2009). Causality and time. The creative retrieval of St. Thomas Aquinas: Essay in Thomistic philosophy, new and old (pp. 27–38). Fordham University Press, New York.
Copleston, F. (2006). A history of philosophy: Greece and Rome. Continuum, London.
Cornford, F. M., Robertson, R. D. S., & Adcock, F. E. (Eds.). (1937). Albinus and the history of Middle Platonism. The Cambridge Philosophical Society, Cambridge.
Dillon, J. M. (1996). The Middle Platonists 80 B.C. to A.D. 220. Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
Dodds, M. J. (2008). The unchanging God of love: Thomas Aquinas and contemporary theology on divine immutability (2nd ed.). Catholic University of America Press, Washington.
Duby, S. J. (2017). Divine immutability, divine action and the God-world relation. International Journal of Systematic Theology, 19(2), 144–162.
Eriugena, J. S. (1987). Periphyseon, The division of nature. John J. O’Maera (trans.), Dumbarton Oaks, Washington.
Fichte, G. (2005). The science of knowing, W. E. Wright (trans.). State University of New York Press, New York.
Flannery, K. L. (2000). Plato and platonism. In A. Hastings, A. Mason, & H. Pyper (Eds.), The Oxford companion to Christian thought (pp. 542–544). Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Gilson, E. (2011). The spirit of mediaeval philosophy. A. H. C. Downes (trans.). University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame.
Gorman, M. (2017). Aquinas on the metaphysics of the hypostatic union. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Gorman, M. (2018). Two problems concerning divine immutability and the incarnation. Nova Et Vetera, 16(3), 899–912.
Grant, W. M. (2012). Divine simplicity, contingent truths, and extrinsic models of divine knowing. Faith Philos, 29(3), 254–274.
Harold, G. (2021). The doctrine of God’s immutability: A literary investigation. Pharos Journal of Theology, 102, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.46222/10216
Hartshorne, C. (1967). A natural theology for our time. Open Court, LaSalle.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1989). Phänomenologie des Geistes. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt.
Helm, P. (2002, 1998). Eternal God: A study of God without time. Oxford University Press, New York.
Idziak, J. (2010). Michael J. Dodds, O.P., The unchanging God of love: Thomas Aquinas and contemporary theology on divine immutability, 2nd edition, Catholic University of America Press, Washington 2008. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 67 (1), 49–53.
Klima, G. (1993). The changing role of entia rationis in Mediaeval semantics and ontology: A comparative study with a reconstruction. Synthese, 96(1), 25–58.
Kretzmann, N. (1966). Omniscience and Immutability. The Journal of Philosophy, 63(14), 409–421.
Luther, M. (1961). Luther's Works Genesis 15–20. Vol. III. In J. Pelikan and H.T. Lehmann (Eds.). Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis.
Miccoli, P. (2014). Persona relazionale. Urbaniana University Press, Roma.
Michelson, J. (2019). Contemplating the one who remain the same: Augustine, Swinburne, and Psalm 102 on the relation between divine immutability and theological reason. Theological Reason, 36(4), 803–825.
Miller, B. (1996). A most unlikely God. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame.
O’Brien, D. (2013). Does Plato refute Parmenides? In B. Bossi & T. M. Robinson (Eds.), Plato’s Sophist revisited (pp. 117–155). De Gruyter, Berlin.
O’Meara, D. J. (2006). The hierarchical ordering of reality in Plotinus. In L. P. Gerson (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Plotinus (pp. 66–81). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Parmenides. (1991). Fragments. G. David (trans.). University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
Plato. (2000). Timaeus. Donald J. Zeyl (trans.). Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis (ND).
Plotinus. (1988). Enneads VI. A. H. Armstrong (trans.), Cambridge, Massachusetts (MA).
Ratzinger, J. (1970). Introduction to Christianity. Herder & Herder, New York.
Richard of St. Victor. De Trinitate I, 4, 22. Cf. Ratzinger, J. (1990). Concerning the notion of person in theology. Communio 17, 439-454
Russell, B. (2008). The problems of philosophy. Wilder Publications, New York.
Swinburne, R. (1993). The Coherence of Theism (rev). Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1978). System of transcendental idealism (1800). P. Heath (trans.). University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville.
Schindler, D. L. (1993). Norris Clarke on person, being and St. Thomas. Communio: International Catholic Review, 20, 581–582.
Sharples, R. W. (1996). Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics: An Introduction to Hellenistic Philosophy. Routledge, London.
Stumpf, S. E. (1994). Philosophy, history and problems (5th ed.). McGraw-Hill Inc, New York.
Tarán, L. (1965). Parmenides: A text with translation, commentary, and critical essays. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Wierenga, E. R. (1989). The Nature of God: An Inquiry into divine attributes. Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and reality: An essay in cosmology. D. R. Griffin, D. W. Sherburne (Eds.). The Free Press, New York.
Wolfson, H. A. (1956). The Muslim attributes and the Christian Trinity. The HarVard Theological Review, 49(1), 1–18.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Ezeoba, A.N. God’s absolute immutability vis-a-vis his real relation with the world. Int J Philos Relig 95, 29–47 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-023-09889-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-023-09889-8