Aristotle's God

No chiddush just getting my thoughts together (yes this is what I think about on my free time)

Aristotle's God (AG from now on) is pretty boring. It is actually surprising that any Jewish philosophers agreed to accept Aristotle's notion of God at all. AG has about as much theological significance as the theory of gravity and it's interesting how the completely "scientific" AG was adopted by philosophers of all 3 monotheistic religions.

AG is the first cause but only in sense of being"the ultimate goal of nature." AG by it's mere existence attracts nature sort of like gravity. All of nature "want to imitate" the perfection of AG and strives to "become like AG". It is only in this sense that AG is a cause by causing nature to gravitate towards it.

Aristotle's philosophy is focused on becoming. Everything is in a constant state of moving from potentiality into actuality. Aristotle needed some sort of unifying principle to explain this general trend. Why does nature move in the direction it does? Why do things move from potentiality into actuality. The principle to explain this is AG. A completely impersonal and overly scientific force of nature. This God is not a creator because the world was never created. The world has for all eternity been imitating AG who is not the source of being but rather it's inspiration and teleological principle.

AG is defined as "thought thinking about itself". To the philosopher Aristotle this was the ultimate being. It is ultimate in that it is pure actuality with no potentiality involved. (As opposed to pure matter without form which in theory would be pure potentiality) Because of the need to be pure act AG can never change. He (or more appropriately it) can only be a source of "movement" by being the perfect actuality thus attracting all potentiality in the world to BECOME more "actual".

Another qualification for AG to be a source of pure actuality is AG in not at all physical. In the Aristotelian world all being consists of matter which is roughly equivalent to physical existence, and form which is of a more "spiritual" nature. Matter is pure potentiality and only changes through it's accompanying form. Therefore if AG were to be at all made out of matter he/it would no longer be pure actuality but would be by definition potential. One has to wonder how much of the Rambam's insistence on an incorporeal God was Jewish and how much of it was Aristotelian.

Another consequence of AG's unchanging role is that he/it can know nothing besides himself. If AG were to know of the happenings in our little corporeal world that would mean that he has changed by finding out something that he did not know before. A transition from potentiality to actuality. All AG knows is his unchanging self. This is one of THE biggest problems with trying to reconcile AG with the Monotheistic God who is said to be involved with the deeds of mankind.

Now things start to get interesting when the scientific AG gets imported into Monotheistic theology. In the Middle Ages all three of the big Monotheistic religions at some point accepted Aristotle and his baggage i.e. AG. The ingenious methods used to reconcile a personal God with a "scientific" God are of course fascinating but that's not what I want to talk about right now.

The problem with AG is he is really not "religious". He is but a force of nature a pedantic philosophical abstraction used to explain order in the world. Some will argue that religion originally stemmed from just that - an attempt to explain the world. But perhaps there is a deeper dimension to religion that AG just could not provide.

Monotheistic religion is stuck in a paradox. On the one hand it wants to create a transcendent un-human God. A God who is unlike this world and is beyond nature in contradistinction to the pagan gods who were very much part of this world and were ruled to a certain extent by the laws of nature. This is the common ground Monotheism has with AG. On the other hand this Monotheistic God is interested in humans. He bothers to reveal himself at various points in history to mere mortal men. He is deeply concerned with man and takes a personal interest in man's various affairs here on earth. Hence the big tension in Monotheism in the one hand a pull to abstraction and on the other hand a pull to "personability" to closeness.

Classical Jewish philosophy (as well as Islamic and Christian) by adopting AG swung the pendulum to the one extreme of Monotheism i.e. the abstract facet. The consequence of this is much of the other facet had to give way. Maimonide's obsessive requirement to not describe God with positive attributes reflects this attitude. Can one love Maimonide's God? Can one "have a relationship" with him? The God of Aristotle is definitely similar to Monotheistic abstraction but perhaps takes it too far by eliminating a God of personality. A God who is merciful a God who goes to Galut with his children - Israel. Perhaps because it at little too far - rationalism did not ultimately survive the onslaught of Kabbalah which was largely victorious in the battle for the Jewish soul.

(thoughts and opinions on new blog format appreciated)