033. III. Divine Sensibility.
III. Divine Sensibility.
1. Sense of Divine Sensibility.—As previously noticed, sensibility is in philosophic use for even the highest forms of human feeling; for the rational and moral as for the lower appetences and impulses. Theology has no better term for substitution, and must still use the same, even in application to the divine feelings. There is an emotional nature in God. This nature is active in various forms of feeling respecting the objects of his conception. There may be feelings of approval or aversion, of pleasure or displeasure, of reprehension or love. There is the reality of such emotional states in the mind of God, as in the mind of man. This is the sense of divine sensibility. There are certain differences between the human and the divine which may be noted in the proper place.
2. Truth of Divine Sensibility.—An emotional nature is necessary to the divine omniscience; that is, there are forms of knowledge which would be impossible even to the divine mind if totally without sensibility. It has not been properly considered how much the sensibilities have to do with human knowledge. In empirical knowledge our conception or notion of things could not be what it is without the element furnished by sensation. In the higher spheres of truth the feelings are necessary to knowledge. Without the correlative emotions we could have no true notion of friendship, or country, or kindred, or home. Without the moral feelings there could be no proper knowledge of a moral system; no true conception of moral obligation, of right or rights, of the ethical quality of free moral action. There must be such a law even for the divine knowledge. Certainly there is no apparent reason to the contrary. Without an emotional nature in God, his omniscience, in the truer, deeper sense of the term, would be impossible. The Scriptures freely ascribe to God various forms of feeling—abhorrence, anger, hatred, love, patience, compassion, clemency. It is very easy to pronounce all this pure anthropopathism, carried into the Scriptures in accommodation to the modes of human thought and feeling. If these forms of feeling are not such a reality in God as to have a truthful reflection in our own, these terms of Scripture are but empty or deceiving words. Then divine holiness, justice, goodness, mercy, faithfulness, are meaningless or misleading. Why this perversion of the deepest truth of the divine nature? Too long has theology, in its deeper speculative form, arrayed the living God of the Scriptures in the apathetic bleakness of deism or pantheism. The endeavor to represent God as pure intellect or pure action may be reverent in aim, but is no less a sacrifice of the most vital truth. Without emotion God cannot be a person; cannot be the living God for the religious consciousness of humanity. No longer could we, in the profound exigencies of life, look up to him as the heavenly Father. There is no heavenly Father without an emotional love. There is the truth of an emotional love of the Father in the deep words of the Son: “For thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24); and also in those other deep and gracious words: “God so loved the world” (John 3:16). If there is reality in one form of divine sensibility there is reality in other forms. In the revelations of God by word and deed there is as clear and full a manifestation of sensibility as of intelligence or will. One knows his own emotional states in his own consciousness. Another’s he can know only through the modes of their expression; but his knowledge is greatly aided by reading these expressions, as he can, in the light of his own experience. Hence he is quite as sure, though in a different mode, of emotional states in other minds as in his own. He is just as sure of their sensibilities as of their intelligence or voluntary power. We thus know the mind of God, and as surely in its emotions as in its intellections and volitions. His words and deeds which express emotions are the sign of divine realities. Otherwise they have for us no meaning and serve only to delude.
There are certain differences between the human and the divine sensibilities which may be noted, though seemingly open to the common view. We have forms of sensibility, as arising through our physical organism or in the circle of our peculiar relationships in life, which can have no analogies in the divine mind. Also our higher motive-states which arise with our rational and moral cognitions may have an intensity of excitement and a passionate impulsiveness which can have no place in the divine emotions.
3. Distinctions of Divine Sensibility.—There is not an absolute unity or oneness of feeling in God. His sensibilities are active in forms answering to the distinctions of their objects. The activities of our own higher sensibilities are conditioned on the mental apprehension of their appropriate objects, either as actual existences or as ideal conceptions. This must be a law for the divine sensibilities. It is no sign of limitation in God that for knowledge he requires the objects of his cognitions, or that for the activities of his sensibilities he requires their appropriate objects. It follows that his sensibilities must differ according to the distinctions of their objects. The law which requires an object for an affection must determine the quality of the affection according to the character of the object. Objects of the divine affection are very different. There is the profound distinction between the physical and the moral realms; in the former, between the chaotic and the cosmic states; in the latter, between the ethically evil and the ethically good. It is impossible that God should regard these profoundly diverse objects with the same affection. It is in the Scriptures, as in the philosophy of the facts, that he does regard them with distinctions of affection answering to their own profound distinctions. We might enter more largely into details; but, while the ground would be valid, the method might prove an unseemly attempt at a divine psychology. We may with propriety note some general distinctions.
There is in God a rational sensibility. We mean by this a conscious interest in the rational order and constitution of existences. The world is a cosmos, a world of order. This is the possibility of a rational cosmology. For science and philosophy, we require not only rational faculties, but also an order and constitution of existences which render them susceptible of scientific and philosophic treatment. There is such an order of existences. Both in reality and for rational thought law reigns in the realms of nature. Physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, astronomy are possible because the rational order of existences places them in correlation with rational mind. For the reason of this correlation the rational order and constitution of existences elicit an interest in all who have any proper notion of them. Gifted minds study them with a profound interest. That interest ever deepens with the clearer insight into this rational order. Thus in the spheres of study usually regarded as purely intellectual there is an intense conscious interest which can arise only from a profound rational sensibility. From this view we rise to the notion of God as the original of our own minds, and also of the forms of existence which constitute the subjects of our scientific study. He is the author of their rational correlation; the author of the rational constitution of existences in all the realms of nature. That orderly constitution must have been with him, not merely an intellectual conception, but also an end of conscious interest and eligibility. These facts evince a profound rational sensibility in God. While he pronounces the successive orders of the newly rising world “very good,” his words no more express the conception of a divine thought than the pleasure of a divine emotion.
There is a divine aesthetic sensibility. The world, the universe, is as richly wrought in the forms of beauty as in the forms of rational order. The beautiful is so lavished upon the earth and the heavens that all are recipients of its grateful ministries. It is the fruitage of the divine constitution of the soul within us and the divine formation of existences without and above us. Such a correlation of the forms of nature to the constitution of the mind could not have been a mere coincidence, but must have been the divinely instituted means to a divinely chosen end, just as in the case of a master in the science and art of music, who through the harmonious combination of parts reaches the chosen end of a great symphony. The beautiful in its manifold forms was with God a chosen end in the work of creation. Therefore it was with him more than a mere mental conception. There is no eligibility for pure intellection, not even for the divine. The eligibility of the beautiful could arise in the mind of God only with the activity of an aesthetic sensibility. God loves the beautiful. In the following citation we have really the presentation of both a rational and an aesthetic sensibility in God, but especially the latter. “I must hold that we receive the true explanation of the man-like character of the Creator’s workings ere man was, in the remarkable text in which we are told that ‘God made man in his own image and likeness.’ There is no restriction here to moral quality: the moral image man had, and in large measure lost; but the intellectual image he still retains. As a geometrician, as an arithmetician, as a chemist, as an astronomer—in short, in all the departments of what are known as the strict sciences—man differs from his Maker, not in kind, but in degree—not as matter differs from mind, or darkness from light, but simply as a mere portion of space or time differs from all space or all time. I have already referred to mechanical contrivances as identically the same as the divine and human productions; nor can I doubt that, not only in the pervading sense of the beautiful in form and color which it is our privilege as men in some degree to experience and possess, but also in the perception of harmony which constitutes the musical sense, and in that poetic feeling of which Scripture furnishes us with at once the earliest and the highest examples, and which we may term thepoetic sense, we bear the stamp and impress of the divine image.”[230] Thus in the aesthetic element of our mental constitution, the source of pleasure in music and poetry and art, in all forms of the beautiful, we see the likeness of an aesthetic sensibility in God, who created man in his own image.[231] [230]
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We have thus presented the divine sensibility in three distinctions. The moral, however, must receive further treatment. Pure thought, pure intuition, pure intellection does not give the complete view of the divine mind. Infinite feeling completes the view. “We hold, therefore, that God is not only pure thought, but he is also absolute intuition and absolute sensibility. He not only grasps reality in his absolute thought, but he sees it in his absolute intuition, and enjoys it in his absolute sensibility. We cannot without contradiction allow that there is any thing in the world of the thinkable which is excluded from the source of all thought and knowledge. Our notion of God as pure thought only would exclude the harmonies of light, sound, and form from his knowledge; and limit him to a knowledge of the skeleton of the universe instead of its living beauty. The notion of God as sensitive appears as anthropomorphic only because of mental confusion. To the thoughtless, sensibility implies a body; but in truth it is as purely spiritual an affection as the most abstract thought. All the body does for us is to call forth sensibility; but it in no sense produces it, and it is entirely conceivable that it should exist in a purely spiritual being apart from any body. There can hardly be a more irrational conception of the divine knowledge than that which assumes that it grasps reality only as it exists for pure thought, and misses altogether the look and the life of things. On the contrary, just as we regard our reason as the faint type of the infinite reason, so we regard our intuitions of things as a faint type of the absolute intuition; and so also we regard the harmonies of sensibility and feeling as the faintest echoes of the absolute sensibility, stray notes wandering off from the source of feeling and life and beauty.”[232] [232]