Is The Creator Limited By Creation?

With reference to Feuerbach and Dostoevsky

The word 'Creation' in this question could equally mean 'the act of creation' or 'that which is created'. For ease I will refer to the former as creation with a small 'c', and the latter as Creation with a capital 'C'. Feuerbach and Dostoevsky deal with Creation limiting the Creator, so I will concentrate on that definition. Feuerbach's main argument is that Creation (in this case Humanity) creates God as the projection of our 'highest ideals', and thus the Creator is completely limited by our definition of him. Dostoevsky infers that God cannot cope with Creation, and so must be limited in some way. I will begin by arguing, using the texts by Feuerbach and Dostoevsky, that the Creator is limited by Creation. Then I will use part of the Christian doctrine of Creation to present my conclusions.

Feuerbach

The assumption the essay title makes is that there is an active Creator God who created the world. For this reason it is more proper to use the term God rather than Creator when discussing Feuerbach, since he denies the existence of a God external to humanity, let alone one who has created the world. This denial clearly limits God, making him, as Feuerbach does, created and defined by Creation; therefore non-existent in any real sense. Instead of God at the centre of human existence, he would have rational thought, will and affection, the most important of which is rational thought,¹

Thinking is existence in self... Existence out of self is the world; existence in self is God. To think is to be God. The act of thought, as such, is the freedom of the immortal gods from all external limitations and necessities of life.²

In other words, by thinking, limited human beings can be set free from all things which would otherwise hinder them. Feuerbach sees this as ultimate freedom; to think whatever one will. He qualifies this by saying that there are two ways of thinking; generating objects from thought, and generating thought from objects. He calls the second realism and a kind of materialism, the first religion. Feuerbach says that he thinks in the second way, and the object he uses to generate his thought in this text is mankind.

In my view, the most important part of Feuerbach's thinking is that of subject, object and predicate. I have already mentioned the three predicates, or attributes of beings, he thinks most important, and he uses these and others to decide what objects truly are,

[where] the predicates are not accidents, but express the essence of the subject, there is no distinction between subject and predicate, [and] the one can be put in the place of the other...³

In other words, the nature of something can be determined by looking at the predicates which describe it. His argument is that men 'invented' God by thinking about their 'highest ideals', thought, will and affection, or love, and projecting them to infinity onto a Being other than themselves, calling this being God. Using Feuerbach's definition of subject and predicate, it follows that as humans project their own predicates onto God, and as two things which have the same predicates must be the same thing, God is mankind, mankind is God,

.. the true sense of Theology is Anthropology... there is no distinction between the predicates of the divine and human nature, and, consequently, no distinction between the divine and human subject.⁴

It is appropriate to define the God Feuerbach seeks to destroy as 'a being external to mankind', for Feuerbach does not deny the existence of God as such; he says that to deny God is to deny the predicates which created God and which are the predicates of mankind, so to deny God is to deny ourselves. He is shifting the emphasis away from an external God to ourselves,

The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or rather, the human being purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective...⁵

The new way Feuerbach defines objects is in my mind the most important aspect of this text, and where my answer to Feuerbach begins: object, subject and predicate. Feuerbach himself says that if one doubts the objective truth of a predicate, one therefore doubts the truth of the subject as well; if predicates are abstract, then their subject must be abstract also. Therefore if God has abstract qualities, he cannot be real because he cannot be described. But abstract predicates are part of the definition of God; he is separated from matter, he is not concrete, he cannot be classified. What Feuerbach is doing, in effect, is to say that something can only be real if we can describe it, that something cannot have any qualities beyond description,

If thy predicates are anthropomorphisms, the subject of them is an anthropomorphism too.⁶

Is not infinitude an abstract predicate though? How can human language express the essence of infinity? Does this mean that mankind is abstract, since one of its predicates is infinity? Feuerbach says, "it is necessary to man to have a definite conception of God, and since he is man can form no other than a human conception of him."⁷ Therefore, by definition, man can only describe God with anthropomorphisms, since that is all we know as humans. Feuerbach's argument rests on the premise that a description of something's predicates exactly describes what it is, and that if we cannot describe one or more of the predicates, the object must be unreal. I argue that this is not the case.

If we say that our tool for describing God is language, as there is no other way we can describe things, we can see that our finite description of God does not rule out the possibility that there is more to God than we think. Language is not an infinite medium; there are things we cannot properly describe without their names, like colours. More importantly, we cannot describe predicates like love, or wisdom, we don't even know what consciousness really is. Feuerbach is right - God does have the predicates we have, but that doesn't mean he can't have abstract ones as well, like transcendence or omnipotence, and the presence of these abstract predicates does not mean that God doesn't exist, merely that we cannot say what he is. How is it that finite creatures could directly limit, in any way, a being we cannot even fully describe?

Dostoevsky

The Dostoevsky text has a different, more subtle approach to the subject of the limitation of God. It is that God cannot 'cope' with Creation - that it is going wrong and it is his fault because of the way he made it. Therefore he has to be limited in some way, or else Creation would be perfect. In Mutiny, the chapter before The Grand Inquisitor, Ivan talks of the suffering of small children (under the age of about seven) as his reason not to believe in God. He talks of them as innocent and unspoilt because they haven't "eaten of the apple" - they do not understand right and wrong.⁸ Why should they suffer? Ivan says that the "offer of eternal harmony" is not worth,

..one single small tear of even one tortured little child that beat its breast with its little fist and prayed in its foul-smelling dog-hole with its unredeemed tears addressed to 'dear Father God'!⁹

The last quotation contains the clue to an answer - 'unredeemed tears'. Vengeance is not the answer, for it achieves nothing, and the only way to redeem those tears is forgiveness, but who has the right to forgive other than the child who has suffered? As such, Ivan hands his "entry ticket" to the eternal kingdom back to God, for he doesn't want happiness earned by the suffering of small children.¹⁰ The chapter concludes with Alyosha saying that there is a Being who "can forgive everything, everyone, man and woman alike, and for everything, because It gave its innocent blood for all things and all men."¹¹ This Being is God in Christ. The answer Alyosha gives is essentially that God suffered too, in Christ, on the cross, and so bears our suffering with us, giving us the strength to cope with it, and forgives us when we inflict suffering on others, redeeming the tears of the weeping child.

In The Grand Inquisitor, Ivan essentially says that God has made two mistakes. The first is that he sent the wrong Messiah and the second is that he made men too weak for the Messiah he sent. My argument is that if God made such mistakes, he cannot be omnipotent or omniscient, or he wouldn't have made them, and therefore must be limited somehow by the burden of humanity. These two mistakes are linked, for if God had realised how low men were he would have sent the correct Messiah or if he had made men stronger the Messiah he sent would have been the right one.

Ivan, using the voice of the Grand Inquisitor, bases his argument against Christ in the weakness of mankind.¹² From this supposition, he uses the three temptations of Christ in the wilderness to show how he could have been a more appropriate Messiah. The Grand Inquisitor does this by saying that he shouldn't have offered them freedom but security based on facts, for freedom makes men unhappy.¹³ If Jesus had given in to the first temptation, that he turn stones into bread to feed himself, he could have had mankind "trotting after [him] like a flock, grateful and obedient, though ever fearful that [he] may take away [his] hand and that [his] loaves may cease to come their way."¹⁴¹⁵ If the second, if Jesus had leapt from the temple and been rescued by angels, the Grand Inquisitor asks "..could you really have supposed, even for a moment, that people would have the strength to resist such a temptation?" He could have held sway over the people with miracles and mystery. If Jesus had bowed down to worship the devil, he could have unified the world under him, and given men security in their existence. But he didn't - he left commands which men could not hope to carry out - how can weak men 'take up their crosses'?

What the passage does, and what the Grand Inquisitor does, is to put himself and the Church in the role of Christ, "We corrected your great deed." People come to the Grand Inquisitor to be fed, with the promise that they will be obedient if he does so. The Catholic Church has control over the miracles and the mysteries in the lives of men, and, at the time the story was set, it was universal, unifying all Christians. The Grand Inquisitor says early on, "It was all told by you to the Pope and so it is now all of it in the Pope's possession, and now we should appreciate it if you would stay away altogether and refrain from interfering for the time being, at any rate."¹⁶ The Grand Inquisitor and others like him, out of their love for men in their weakness, take upon themselves the burden of mankind's ignorant sin, as a necessary price for the happiness of mankind,

..we shall permit them sin, too, they are weak and powerless, and they will love us like children for letting them sin. We shall tell them that every sin can be redeemed as long as it is committed with out leave; we are allowing them to sin because we love them, and as for the punishment for those sins, very well, we shall take it upon ourselves.¹⁷

In other words, the Grand Inquisitor does not simply oppose the truth of Christ, "he is the truth Christ failed to erect."¹⁸ This failure of God in Christ can be seen as a limitation of God, for surely if he were not limited he would not have failed? Wasiolek says that the Grand Inquisitor is only wrong if the way he sees human nature is wrong. History shows that he is right - seen human nature certainly is weak and base, but Christ never looked at the outward appearance of men.¹⁹ He looks at that which is unseen, "..the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak."²⁰ Men desperately want to rise above their mediocrity, but the only way to do this is by Christ's freedom, and freedom for Dostoevsky meant free choice based on nothing else. If a man decides to follow Jesus because of assurance from a miracle before, or the surety of authority, that is not free choice according to Dostoevsky, "A free faith for Dostoevsky is a faith without conditions; it is a faith that knows only the free movement of the heart."²¹ For faith in Christ is hard, and goes against all historical proofs of human nature, but this is necessary for the choice to follow Christ to be a truly free one, as it is intended to be by God. So therefore God did not make a mistake, but rather allowed us the freedom to choose.

Creation

Last of all, I come to the Christian Doctrine of Creation. This is a huge subject and I don't have the space or the knowledge to explain it fully, but I will summarise it in such a way as to provide an answer to the challenges of the set texts, most especially Mutiny and The Grand Inquisitor.

First of all, the Bible teaches "absolute divine sovereignty"; in creating the world, God had no difficulties, no constraints as in Greek myths where the gods' limitations mirrored human limitations.²² There was also no sexual act involved, God needed no partner to create, he needed nothing except himself. This means that he was free to create according to his nature, which is love, and that therefore what he created was good - as Genesis 1 says. But how did he create? Gunton uses the word 'mediation' to describe the way God creates something which is not God. First of all, he mediates by his Word. "Let there be light..." God spoke and it was so. His word of command is the,

giving of space to be to a reality that is other than God. The world is not simply a function of God's action... but that action creates something that has its own particular freedom to be.²³

Also, God creates by craftsmanship - he allows the world time to be itself, and to create itself. This 'sub-creation', as Gunton calls it, is one of the ways God allows Creation to be itself, "Let the earth put forth...", yet it is still God who ultimately creates.

The creation of the world in seven days shows two things. First, that God is emphasising that the world is not infinite, or else it wouldn't have had a beginning, and therefore it has an end. Second, time is that which God gives to Creation so that it may come to fulfilment, in other words Creation has "a direction and destiny". Jesus' resurrection has been seen to be the beginning of the eighth day of creation - God setting the world back on track for its salvation.²⁴ Finally, God creates as the Trinity. According to John 1, Jesus was with God in the beginning and through him, for him and to him all things were made. Jesus is God's involvement in creation, he is "God's freedom of action within the material world."²⁵ The Spirit is "shown to be the mediator not only of God's creation, but also of his recreating and transforming action"; the Spirit is the Spirit of life "in all its dimensions."²⁶ Thus God creates the world yet doesn't abandon it. Through the Spirit and Jesus Christ he acts on and in the whole of creation. Irenaeus said that they were God's two hands, "by who and in whom, freely and spontaneously he made all things."²⁷

Through his power God created the world to be itself, and as such his divine power is exercised with this in mind. His power is both non-coercive, through the Cross and the power of the gospel, but also coercive, as seen in the resurrection where God defeated death. As he acts on and in the world, the world is not God, so therefore is not an emanation from God, but rather the result of his divine will to create through his 'two hands'.²⁸ His demonstration of ultimate power in raising Jesus from the dead, and his willingness to suffer for our sin, shows that his ultimate power is ordered in such a way that the world is able to be truly itself and thus in the end able to praise God. This is why God demonstrated his power over death, to show that humans have a purpose - to be perfected like Jesus and thus to glorify God - and that he created the world to be valuable in itself, as a means through which God is glorified.²⁹

This then is an answer to Ivan; that God created the world in such a way that it could be itself, and therefore it must include suffering. His death on a cross shows that God does not abandon us to our suffering, but rather endures it with us, for he knows what it is to suffer pain and die. In answer to (and part agreement with) Feuerbach, God is defined by his nature, but we can never truly understand that nature as it is in part abstract. God is "utterly sovereign, utterly unconstricted by anything other than being the kind of God that he is."³⁰ So God is neither limited by Creation nor creation, but simply through his own nature, which is love, and which determines the way he exercises his divine power.

Notes

1 "To a complete man belong the power of thought, the power of will, the power of affection." These are "absolute perfections of being". Feuerbach, Ch.1, p.3. It is interesting to note the parallel with 1 Corinthians 13.13.
2 Feuerbach, Ch. 2, p.41.
3 Feuerbach, Preface, p.xviii.
4 Feuerbach, Preface, p.xvii.
5 Feuerbach, Ch.1, p.14.
6 Feuerbach, Ch.1, p.20.
7 Feuerbach, Ch.1, p.17.
8 Dostoevsky, Mutiny, p.273.
9 Dostoevsky, Mutiny, p.281.
10 Dostoevsky, Mutiny, p.282.
11 Dostoevsky, Mutiny, p.282.
12 "Upon my word, man is created weaker and more base than you supposed!" - Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor, p.292. This in itself suggests that God is limited, for he does not know what he is supposed to have created!
13 "For fifteen centuries we have struggled with that freedom, but now it is all over, and over for good." - Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor, p.289. Also, "Or did you forget that peace of mind and even death are dearer to man than free choice and the cognition of good and evil? There is nothing more seductive for man than the freedom of his conscience, but there is nothing more tormenting for him, either." - Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor, p.293.
14 Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor, p.290.
15 Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor, p.294.
16 Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor, p.288.
17 Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor, p.298.
18 Wasiolek, The Brothers Karamazov, p.166.
19 Wasiolek, The Brothers Karamazov, p.169.
20 Matthew 26.41 (NRSV).
21 Wasiolek, The Brothers Karamazov, p.170.
22 Gunton, The Doctrine of Creation, p.4.
23 Gunton, The Doctrine of Creation, p.5.
24 Gunton, The Doctrine of Creation, p.7.
25 Gunton, The Doctrine of Creation, p.10.
26 Gunton, The Doctrine of Creation, p.9.
27 Irenaeus, quoted in Gunton, The Doctrine of Creation, p.10.
28 Gunton, The Doctrine of Creation, p.18.
29 Gunton, The Doctrine of Creation, p.19.
30 Gunton, The Doctrine of Creation, p.17.

Bibliography

SET TEXTS:
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Part Two, Book V, Chapter 4 pp.271-283: Mutiny) (not part of set text but used)
Part Two, Book V, Chapter 5 pp.283-303: The Grand Inquisitor
London: Penguin Classics 1993 (trans. David McDuff)

The Essence of Christianity
Ludwig Feuerbach
Preface to the Second Edition pp.xiii-xxiv
Chapter I pp.1-32: Introduction
Chapter II pp.33-49: The true or Anthropological Essence of Religion
New York: Prometheus Books (trans. George Eliot)

The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine
ed. Colin Gunton
Chapter 8 pp.141-157: The doctrine of creation (Colin Gunton)
Cambridge: CUP 1997 9 GUN

The Christian Faith
Colin Gunton
Chapter 1 pp.3-19: Establishing: The Doctrine of Creation
Oxford: Blackwells 2002

The Gifford Lectures 1984-1985: God in Creation
Jürgen Moltmann
Chapter 1 pp.1-19: God in Creation
Chapter 4 pp.72-103: God as Creator
London: SCM Press 1985 9 MOL

Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction
Edward Wasiolek
Chapter 9 pp.149-187: The Brothers Karamazov
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1964

Bibles: New Revised Standard Version (Cambridge: CUP 1993) and
New International Version (London: Hodder and Stoughton 1983)

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