Institutes of Divine Jurisprudence, with Selections from Foundations of the Law of Nature and Nations. Christian Thomasius
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those who regarded humans or beasts or inferior sublunary creatures as God, not those who worshipped the sun or celestial bodies.34
§52. Thus, at the same time, the wisdom of God is to be admired: among the nations that had ignored his most holy revelation, he allowed those who wanted to be considered the most rational to lapse into more absurd forms of idolatry than the barbarian nations. For these usually worshipped celestial bodies or invisible powers. But what is more absurd than the idolatry of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans?
§53. There will be the same difficulty if you want to argue on the basis of natural reason alone with those who say that nature or a soul of the world is God, or who defend the error that the world is eternal. For I do not believe that a pagan can be firmly held in check, even if you reply to him that he who asserts an eternal world denies that there is any cause of it, and so denies God. I can easily predict what he will say, namely, that this inference does not follow necessarily, for he who denies a cause of the world can declare that the world itself is God, or certainly that the world is coeternal with God since it is known that the pagans asserted two coeternal principles, God and prime matter.35
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§54. Thus I dislike the plan of the scholastic philosophers, who devote great efforts to investigating the divine attributes with the light of reason by two means, which they call those of perfection and of negation: the perfection which is in man they say is present eminently in God, and the imperfection which is in man is absent in God. For this is subject to infinite perplexities and qualifications. It is certainly not really suitable to be a proof, which is what they aim for, or at least should be aiming for in a theoretical discipline.
§55. To argue on the basis of perfection will be misleading if human perfection presupposes some imperfection; negation will also be misleading if the perfection opposed to human imperfection is at the same time joined with the imperfection, or if human moral imperfection is held to be such because of the physical imperfection of man.
§56. Thus, it is an imperfection of man that he cannot fly, but should you, like the pagans, invent a winged Mercury because of that?36 I do not think so. For this perfection of birds is combined with the imperfection that they are corporeal.
§57. How would you know that this imperfection (of a bodily nature) does not apply to God, if Scripture had not revealed that God is a spirit? For if among those who acknowledge sacred Scripture there are wise men who imagine that God is corporeal, it is not surprising that the Stoics, the wisest philosophers among the pagans, defended the same doctrine.
§58. So it is a moral imperfection in man if he rejoices over the pain of another, even if this person suffers deservedly, for he who rejoices in this fashion is called cruel. But God himself testifies that he wants to laugh at the misfortune of the godless. Do you, therefore, believe that God is cruel? Far from it! So what is the difference? It is that this moral imperfection in man presupposes a physical imperfection, and that even
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a human being distinguished by the greatest dignity is equal in essence to the lowest beggar. Yet in comparison to God all humans are only dust and shadows.
§59. Thus virtue is not the smallest among the human perfections, and among the virtues justice is preeminent. These virtues, however, cannot be conceived without imperfection. For virtue is the habit of living according to laws; justice is the habit of rendering everyone their due. I will not insist here that the term habit is not applicable to God, for there might be objections to that, but I do say that there is no law that is prescribed to God and that man has nothing which he could also attribute to God.
§60. Therefore, I would not dare to apply the title virtuous and just to divine majesty if I did not see that his infinite wisdom in the revealed word had not rejected these terms for our imperfect perfections. When I see this, however, I am filled with humble veneration because God decides to speak to me in human terms, and at the same time I confess most willingly that the genuine and most exact sense of these expressions exceeds my intellect and so pertains to the mysteries of faith.
§61. And so I believe I do better by freely confessing my ignorance than by concealing it, like the Scholastics, and pretending some sort of great wisdom and trying to cover my ignorance with a cloak of hollow clichés. For what, I ask, is this term eminently which they use? It is either the same as primarily, or they use it to describe that which is the case improperly. The first meaning pertains to what is analogous, the latter to what is equivocal.
§62. If, for example, they claim that virtue and justice are in God eminently, as in the most noble analogous case, they may be providing me with a definition of virtue and justice which can be applied primarily to divine justice and secondarily to human justice. Yet we will expect this in vain, for these two forms of justice do not differ in degree but, properly speaking, fundamentally and are as distant from each other as heaven and earth.
§63. And if they decide that divine and human perfections cannot be comprehended in a common definition, they thereby confess that they
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predicate these improperly of God. That is, they do not know how these properties can be predicated of God.
§64. What does philosophy gain from these trifles? Who would not laugh if someone tried to demonstrate the perfections of man from the perfections of the flea and asserted nothing other than that the perfections of the flea were present to an eminent degree in man. Yet the distance between man and God is greater than that between the flea and man.
§65. But those are the fruits of Gentile philosophy, or rather their abuse, that the Scholastics set about deriving mysteries of faith from philosophy and turned philosophy into the norm of theology, contrary to the precept of the Apostle, who warned the Colossians not to allow themselves to be deceived by philosophy and vain fallacy and, contrary to the aim of the Fathers, who sometimes used philosophy in theological matters, to reveal the absurdities of the pagan philosophers.37
§66. Among this abuse I reckon almost all of the Scholastics’ pneumatics, or their philosophy of spirits, such as God, angels, and the soul of man separate from the body. For everything they have taught on this matter and the arguments they have laboriously assembled will never convince a pagan, if revelation is set aside (with the exception of a few points concerning the existence and providence of God). But once you acknowledge Scripture, there is no need for all their ridiculous little books.
§67. Yet we believe there is a difference between God and the other classes of spirits in that the existence of God, as we have shown, can be investigated with the light of reason, but we cannot know (I say, “know”) anything about angels and the soul separate from the body, not even that they exist, without the word of God.
§68. This absurd plan of the Scholastics, however, bred all the more absurdities, so that they even applied place and time, which are used as physical
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measures of bodies, to spirits, although they cannot be measured, at least not in the way bodies can. The result is this golden, priceless mystery that, for example, the entire soul is in the entire body and is present in every part of the body in its entirety. If someone can prove this to me conclusively within a hundred years, may he carry away the prize of victory!
§69. Thus, you say, does reason show me nothing about God other than his existence and that he is the first being? It does certainly, but for the most part in a confused fashion: that he is independent, that he is omnipotent, etc. For he who calls God an independent being does not so much affirm something particular as deny his dependence. But he who calls God omnipotent does say that God can do everything, which does not involve a contradiction. Yet on the basis of the light of reason man only knows what is contradictory in an absolute sense, but not everything that implies a contradiction with respect to God, that is, that conflicts with his attributes as they are revealed in Scripture.
§70. Yet reason informs us clearly that God holds power over man and that God