In the first of the Ten Commandments
given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, God commands his people “I, the LORD, am
your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery, you
shall not have other gods besides me.”[1]
There appears, however, to be a contradiction because there is only one God,
not many gods.[2]
Clearly God is saying something
intelligent through the use of his term gods in the first commandment, but how
can God intended a meaning behind something that does not exist in actuality?
It is not possible for God, who is perfect, to make a misleading claim because
this would imply a contradiction in God for nothing can be perfect and make a mistake,
because if he did He would not be perfect, so there must be some way in which god
is signifying a meaning by his term gods. [3]
This paper intends to make sense of the term gods by drawing a distinction
between and clarifying what is meant by real beings and beings of reason.
There is an obvious distinction
between simply blabbering, what the Stoics and Aristotelians called scindapsos
and saying something meaningful.[4] A
baby who is putting syllables together is not saying anything of meaning, he is
not signifying anything, he is simply making noises. A parent, however, who is
telling her baby to be quiet, is speaking with meaning because she is
signifying something through the use of her sounds, her sounds have meaning.
Even when a person speaks coherently
they can speak in a manner that at first glance appears to be nonsense. A
person, for example, can speak of a square circle, a clear impossible object.
An impossible object is one which cannot exist in reality in anyway because it
would contradict the essence of the individual things. For example a square
circle cannot exist in reality because a square is “a
rectangle with all four sides equal” [5] and a circle is “a closed plane curve
every point of which is equidistant from a fixed point within the curve”[6] It is simply
impossible for these two shapes to exist together because their essences
contradict each other. “ A square can never exist as a circle and a circle can
never exist as a square.”[7] What
it means for a square to be a square cannot take on the definition of a circle
without ceasing to become a square and become a circle. Yet even though
impossible objects like square circles are impossible objects it is possible to
speak in some way about them with truth and meaning. It is possible to give a
definition of what a square circle would be even if it can not exist in
reality.
The term gods is an impossible
object, does not exist in reality, but it appears to exist in some way because
we are able to talk about it. It is “an object with enough density to be the
completing correlate of true judgments.”[8]
While gods may not exist in reality, judgments of truth and falsity can be made
about them.
A distinction can then be made of beings.
This distinction can be divided into beings in actuality, real beings, and beings
in the mind, beings of reason. This distinction of being is not a categorical
distinction but rather a division between transcendental being and super-transcendental
being.
The Latin Medievals tracing their roots
to the Arabic philosopher Averroes believed that being was divided into beings
in the mind and beings outside the mind. Francisco Suarez, a late sixteenth to
early seventeenth Jesuit scholastic, draws out and explains an important
distinction of being in the last of his 54 metaphysical disputations. In the 54th
disputation he “passed from being insofar as it is real being or being insofar
as it is actual or possible to consider beings which do not or even cannot
exist despite the fact that we can think and speak of them with truth and
meaning.”[9] In
this disputation Suarez addresses the idea of impossible objects. He draws out
and explains this distinction between real beings and beings of reason.
Real beings are those beings that
exist in actuality, actual beings.[10] The
study of real being is the study of being as being. They are the beings that
are discussed by Aristotle in his work on metaphysics and are the proper
subject matter for all metaphysics. They are a being “as that which can exist
independent of the human mind.”[11]
Real beings have a real essence that is
found in its actual physical existence. The truth about the term dog is based
on the dog existing independently of the mind, which in reality exists, barks, and
wags its tail etc.. Statements made about the dog are said to be true to the
extent that they relate to how it is that the dog really is.
While real beings and beings of reason
share the term being there is little in common between them. “Instead, between
beings of reason and real beings, Suarez will only allow an extrinsic analogy
of proportionality. Another name for an extrinsic analogy of proportionality is
metaphor.”[12]
While real beings and beings of reason only share the metaphorical term being
the term being applied to beings of reason is appropriate because beings of
reason do exist in some way.
Beings of reason are beings, “which do not or
even cannot exist despite the fact that we can think and speak of them with truth
and meaning.”[13]
Beings of reason do not and cannot exist in reality yet they do signify
something. A being of reason “has being only objectively in the intellect.”[14] They are “items which are completely
mind-dependent inasmuch as they exist only objectively in the intellect.”[15]
The fact, however that beings of reason do exist in the mind demonstrates that
they must be in some regard.
Since beings of reason exist in some
way but do not exist in reality they cannot exist apart from the mind. “The one
way in fact in which beings of reason could be known was if the intellect
itself were to render it knowable.”[16]
Since they have no intelligibility in themselves they can only be understood
indirectly through the means of other things. It is impossible to understand a
goat-stag without understanding a goat and a stag.
The fact that beings of reason exist
dependent of the mind should not make one think that they are fake or arbitrary.
Many of the ancient philosophers speak of the fictional term goat-stag, a
combination of a goat and a stag. The first known mention of the goat-stag in a
philosophical context comes in Plato’s Republic
where no question is raised about its, existence seeming to imply that Plato
believed they did exist.[17] While
the Latin Medievals have debated the existence of goat-stags the fact that
Plato can speak with meaning about the goat-stag implies that it must have existence
in some manner.
Clearly, a goat stag could not exist in
reality, however it is possible to describe all of the properties of a
goat-stag. If the goat-stag did not exist in some way it would not be possible
to say anything about it because either something is or something is not.[18]
Since nothing comes from nothingit is simply not possible to talk about
something that doesn’t exist except to say that it does not exist. [19]
The term gods is a being of reason
because while it does not exist in reality it does exist in some way in the
mind. One is able to say what is meant by the term gods. It has being which is
grounded not in reality, but rather, in the intellect. When God speaks with the
term god’s he intends some meaning behind it. Through the use of the term gods
one comes to understand what God means by his commandment as many biblical exegesis
have been able to demonstrate.
There are two types of beings of reason,
they can be classified either as beings of reason that have some foundation in
reality but are completed through reason and those that are total creations of
the intellect.[20]
The goat stage would be an example of a being of reason because both goats and
stags exist in reality but it is the mind that puts the two together. The term
gods on the other hand would be a complete creation of the mind. No component
of the term gods exists in reality and as such the term is a complete
fabrication of the mind, yet this fabrication has meaning.
Simply because gods do not exist in
reality does not imply that God is simply putting syllables together, making
sounds without meaning. Without recognizing the distinction between beings of
reason and real beings it instantly appears that God is simply blabbering in
his first commandment. While the Jewish people of Moses’ age were not able to
explain this distinction they clearly knew it existed because they were able to
understand what God was commanding of them. Since the term gods is a being of
reason it is possible for theologians to speak with meaning about the term and
come to understand God’s meaning in his first commandment.
By understanding the distinction
between real beings and beings of reason one understands that God is not
speaking about a real being, but rather, he is speaking about a being of
reason. He is not claiming that gods
exist actually in the world but is rather using the term gods analogously. If
the term gods was not a being it would have to be nothing and nothing can be
said of nothing. It is important for theologians to understand the
philosophical distinction between real beings and beings of reason in order to
understand God’s first commandment given to Moses on Mount Sinai.
[1]
Exodus 20:2-3 The New American Bible. Catholic Biblical Association of
America, ed. New York: P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1970.
[2] For an explanation of only one God see Aristotle’s
proof of the unmoved mover. Aristotle, Metaphysics
Book 12 trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1966. 197-212.
[3]
For proof of the perfection
of God see: Thomas
Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, q. 4, a.
1, in Summa theologica: Complete English
Edition in Five Volumes, vol. 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican
Province (Notre Dame, IN: Christian Classics, 1981), 20-21.
[4] Doyle, John. "Another God,
Chimerae, Goat-Stags, and Man-Lions: A Seventeenth-Century Debate About
Impossible Objects." The Review of Metaphysics XLVIII (1995):
771-808.
[8] Doyle, "Another God, Chimerae,
Goat-Stags, and Man-Lions: A Seventeenth-Century Debate About Impossible
Objects."
[11] Doyle, John. “Beings of Reason and Imagniation in 17th-Century
Jesuit Thought” Imagination-Fiktion-Kreation:
Das Kulturschaffende Vermogen Der Phantasie (2003): 213.
[12] Suarez, Francisco. On Beings of
Reason. Translated by John Doyle. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press,
1995.23.
[17] Doyle, "Another God, Chimerae,
Goat-Stags, and Man-Lions: A Seventeenth-Century Debate About Impossible
Objects."
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