Thinking the Unknowable: Is a Natural Desire of God Possible?
To the modern mind, the idea of a natural “desire of seeing God”—a common expression in the modern age—appears highly problematic. When I first heard the question at the head of this essay, I did not even know what it meant. How could philosophy justify what by modern definition falls outside its field of knowledge? The religious idea of God, the alleged source of this desire, originates not in philosophy but in what believers refer to as a “revelation” of some sort. Nonetheless, until the fifteenth century, most Christian, Jewish, and Muslim believers accepted the existence of such a desire. Why has what once appeared so obvious become so questionable? The difference is due to a different conception of philosophy than the one that prevails today.
Thinkers of the late antiquity would have found it hard to conceive of nature without a transcendent first cause supporting it. Even the ancients had rarely done so. This dependence did not include a divine act of creation: the cosmos had no beginning; just like the gods, it was everlasting. Nor did Plato conceive this causal dependence as being merely efficient. The dependence of changing appearances on a foundation of unchangeable ideal forms consisted in what was later to be called a formal causality.
Christian philosophers, however, accepted the Hebrew representation of a divine Creator who created the world by his word. They may have considered their interpretation confirmed by the fact that also for Aristotle the dependence of the lower spheres upon the Prime Mover was unquestionably one of efficient causality. Hence the turn of the created mind to God came to be conceived in terms of an effect of the Prime Mover, who by a universal Eros attracts all beings to himself without ever moving. If we possessed only this one presentation of Aristotle’s thought in the Physics, we might still mistake his “theology” as being no more than a figurative representation of celestial mechanics. Yet in his treatise De anima, Aristotle describes the principle active in all thinking as “divine”: The mind is able to move to actual cognition only under the impact of an always active principle of cognition. W. D. Ross, the translator of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, wonders with Aristotle: “Does not this transition from potential to actual knowledge imply that there is something in us that actually knows already, some element that is cut off from ordinary consciousness, so that we are not aware of this pre-existing knowledge, but which is nevertheless in some sort of communication with the ordinary consciousness or passive reason and leads this on to knowledge?”
In the Nicomachean Ethics 10.7, 1177b, Aristotle even claims more directly that in the present life the highest state of existence is the contemplative one—which surpasses a merely human capacity:
Such a life would be too high for man; for it is not insofar as he is a human person that he will achieve it, but insofar as something divine is present in him; and by so much as this is superior to our composite nature is its activity superior to that which is the exercise of the other kind of virtue. If reason is divine, then the life lived by contemplative principles is divine in comparison with human life.
This consideration also affected the natural end of man. If that end had been no more than the effect of an efficient causality, it would have been finite, whereas early Christian thought had conceived of the person’s ultimate end as a permanent life in the immediate presence of God.
A natural desire of God is possible only if the mind is in some respect connatural with the divine. It presupposes, as Augustine wrote, that the mind had already found God before seeking him. Nature cannot desire what lies totally beyond its capacity. In the same vein, Thomas Aquinas continued that the highest knowledge consists in knowing what God knows, namely, God’s own Being: Intelligere deum est finis omnis intellectualis substantiae (“To know God is the purpose of each intelligent being”) (Summa contra Gentiles 3.25; cf. also 3.52). In his analysis of this question in St. Thomas, Georges Cottier, O.P., writes,
The natural desire has its source in the metaphysical nature of the intellect: its object is Being in its full extent, however much a knowledge that attains the first Being only through inferior analogates may fall short of this ideal; by nature it spontaneously moves toward the perfect knowledge of its object, namely, the knowledge of the cause of being.
By the same token, Thomas and his medieval followers believed that humans may also pursue a natural, finite end. In the Summa contra Gentiles 3.25, Aquinas treats the theme from two different, yet related, points of view. On the one hand, he posits that each being seeks to realize the full potential of its nature. Truth and goodness are perfections that a spiritual being naturally desires, even though its limited capacity prohibits it from ever fully attaining them. The desire (appetitus), then, is natural, even though its full realization lies beyond the potential of human nature. The natural ideal of intellectual creatures consists in acquiring the highest knowledge. In the same article, St. Thomas claims that all creatures seek the kind of similitude with the Creator that corresponds to their nature.
In the ethical domain also, Aquinas agreed with Aristotle’s natural virtues: he considered them subordinate to theological virtues, yet indispensable for attaining man’s ultimate end as revealed in the Gospels. Beyond each limited good or object of knowledge, the mind implicitly pursues an unlimited one. He likewise considered all natural pursuits to be accompanied by a natural desire of the infinite good. This desire cannot remain unfulfilled, even though the human mind is incapable of satisfying it by its own force. Still, the mind cannot demand the satisfaction of a desire the fulfillment of which lies entirely beyond its capacity. The desire for seeing God, then, may be called “natural” only to the extent that it seeks its fulfillment in a general, not in a theologically specific, way. The transcendent goal inherent in all spiritual activity anticipates that this goal is attainable, even though its full attainment may exceed the capacities of human nature. The desire in some way anticipates an attainment of what never ceases to surpass our capacity of fully attaining it. To the extent that the person remains conscious of the dynamism that drives this desire, he or she experiences some measure of fulfillment. Hence, for Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Scotus, philosophy and theology had a mystical dimension, insofar as the desire for spiritual knowledge is driven by a transcendent dynamism. The natural desire of God becomes intrinsically transformed into a “supernatural one” of divine origin. Yet it is only in striving for the realization of this desire that humans become conscious of the supernatural impulse that impelled it.
In 1270, the theologians of the University of Paris declared Thomas’s synthesis unorthodox. They regarded the Aristotelian concept of nature as being fundamentally estranged from God. Divine ordinations surpass reason and are unrelated to human expectations. If this Nominalist theology of the late Middle Ages had prevailed, it would have permanently separated the natural from the “supernatural” and eliminated any natural support of religious mysticism. However, there were exceptions to the Nominalist trend: Nicholas of Cusa, the fifteenth-century philosopher and theologian, reunited what Nominalism had divided. He did so by means of an entirely new synthesis of philosophy and theology. Human nature shared some divine qualities. Even after the Fall, the human mind had remained an imago Dei, forever longing and looking for its divine prototype. Thus, the goal of all intellectual acts consists in the mind’s attempts to rejoin its divine origin. All desire to know is a desire to know oneself and hence includes a desire to know one’s divine model. In De filiatione dei (On the Sonship of God), Nicholas describes the road of knowledge as naturally headed toward a union with God: “Therein is that supreme intellectual joy, when the intellect beholds that its beginning, middle, and end surpass even the highest power of conception although it beholds them in the proper object of the intellect, that is, in pure truth.”
Thus, all search of understanding, according to Cusanus, is motivated by an implicit desire to comprehend God. Finite objects are no more than “symbolic signs” of the true. No genuine knowledge is ever intrinsically secular. Human nature can be understood only as a dynamic tendency toward theosis (deification): “God, who is in all things, shines forth in mind when the mind, as a living image of God, turns to its own Exemplar and assimilates itself thereto with all its effort.” In Idiota de sapientia (The Layman on Wisdom), Cusanus argues that God’s eternal wisdom attracts the mind by granting it a foretaste (praegustatio) of what she (wisdom) will achieve and thereby arouses a marvelous desire for her. Since this wisdom constitutes the very life of spiritual understanding, she incites us to seek the source of this life. Without that foretaste, the mind would not seek its source. It might not even know that it had received it, if indeed it had done so. The mind is moved to it as to its own life. While seeking its own unity (the norm by which it measures all things), the mind finds it in that Principle in which all things are one. In its search for unity and self-identity, the mind expresses a fundamental desire for union with God. Only against the mystery of God’s perfect Being does the mind grasp both its unity and its distinctness. In God’s mirror, the mind recognizes itself. The drive toward union with God propels the entire progress of thought. The intellect reaches its destination only when it becomes divinized.
Later thinkers in the Platonic tradition, including Ficino, Malebranche, Berkeley, Rosmini, and to some extent also such non-Platonists as Newman and Maine de Biran, continued to conceive of the intellect as moved by an implicit desire of God, while Scholasticism increasingly separated nature from the supernatural as if it were a wholly distinct domain of being. This led to the well-known controversies about the existence of a desiderium naturale (natural desire).
Most commentators agree that a natural desire may be aroused (elicited) by some knowledge of God’s existence. Yet a strong disagreement divides them about the vision of God as object of that “natural desire.” Some propose that an innate natural desire is formally directed at a vision of God as God is in himself. They rule out the existence of a state of “pure nature” independent of man’s supernatural destiny. Such has been the position of Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and John Milbank. Others, among whom Sylvester of Ferrara comes closest to Aquinas, argue that even an innate desire can be no more than a desire to know the ultimate cause of reality. Such a desire stems from the mind’s natural desire to extend its knowledge as far as possible. The position assumes a state of pure nature at the root of this (purely) natural desire of God. The alleged foundational desire of seeing God consists in the desire of an intellect that cannot be satisfied before resting in the infinite, but in a manner totally proportionate to its nature.
Most of the Scholastic commentaries, whatever their internal differences, end up with a dualism of two states and two natures. Aquinas’s position is ambiguous. The idea of a natural desire has mostly disappeared from modern philosophy. The main cause is the gradual narrowing of the field. Philosophy has come to define itself as reflection on reality as it presents itself to our observation or calculation. The idea of religious transcendence thereby withdrew to a field to which philosophy claims to have no access. Recently, however, it appears that it may be regaining its former place in modern thought, and with it the legitimacy of the idea of a natural desire. Several philosophers have accepted that no philosophical discourse about reality can succeed without a discussion of what defines its limits and hence also its efforts to surpass them. According to Heidegger, philosophy’s first task consists in exploring the transcendent horizon of the known. At times he even compared the philosophical investigation with Eckhart’s mystical explorations. Also in Jaspers’s philosophy, the notion of Transzendenz occupies a central position. Existence, for him, must be defined through its relation to what surpasses it. Neither Heidegger nor Balthasar gave the term transcendence an overtly religious meaning.
Contemporary Christian philosophers, especially Maurice Blondel and Karl Rahner, have attached a religious significance to this horizon. Still, aware of other, nonreligious interpretations of the term, they abstained from asserting that it forms the basis of a philosophical desire of seeing God. Is an equation of a transcendent moment in all cognition with the God of religion still philosophically justified? The answer depends on the answer to the question of whether philosophy has any authority in passing judgment about religious truth. If it does, then “a natural desire of seeing God” is possible. Yet only experience can inform us about its actual existence.
The German phenomenologist Max Scheler did argue that such a desire actually exists since, in his judgment, it lies at the ground of the affirmation of God’s existence: “Only a real being with the essential character of divinity can be the cause of man’s religious propensity, which is the propensity to execute in a real sense acts of that class whose acts, though finite experience cannot fulfill them, nevertheless demand fulfillment.” Note that Scheler does not claim that God exists because the desire for God has to be satisfied, but because the very existence of that desire presupposes a divine reality. Nevertheless, Scheler’s argument, in my opinion, still goes too far. The fact that the mind’s intellectual dynamism surpasses the immediate object of knowledge and desire does not necessarily lead to any conclusion about the nature of its transcendent object.
Karl Rahner is more cautious in establishing the religious nature of the idea of transcendence. For him, all knowledge presupposes a “pre-apprehension” (Vorgriff) of absolute being: “The pre-apprehension of this being is not an a priori knowledge of an object, but the a priori horizon against which the perception of an object appears. It constitutes the very condition for an a posteriori appearance.” The idea of infinite Being that functions as the horizon against which we know all beings, cannot but be transcendent. To the objection that a purely negative concept of the infinite might suffice for functioning as a horizon, Rahner responds that the priority of the infinite horizon with respect to the cognition of the finite requires that the horizon actually exists. Already Descartes had responded in a somewhat similar way to the objections leveled against his claim that in all real affirmations of a finite reality, the infinite has a priority over the finite (Third Meditation). For Descartes, the background of an existing infinity is a necessary condition for the mind to recognize the finite as finite.
The question remains, however, whether an infinite horizon implies that an infinite being corresponding to the idea of God exists. In itself the idea of being is neither finite nor infinite: it is indefinite. Logically, a pantheistic or a panentheistic answer would be equally possible. In my opinion, the metaphor of a transcendent horizon establishes no more than that a desire of God is possible. The purpose of this discussion was merely to provide a foundation for the existence of a religious mysticism.
Many of our contemporaries would not know what to make of a desire of what has become totally alien to them. Even religious men and women living in secular cultures might find the idea of a personal God genuinely puzzling. At the time when the idea of a natural desire of God was formulated, the West recognized monotheism as the only philosophically legitimate form of deity. That condition has ceased to exist today. Equally vanished, however, is the rationalist a priori opposition to the idea of God, on the ground that what cannot be strictly proven by reason or direct experience deserves no place in philosophy. Nothing entitles philosophy to restrict its investigation to what can be established by scientific truth or logical argument. Philosophy has ceased to be the science of “reason alone.” Philosophy now consists primarily in a reflection upon experience, from whatever sources experience may draw its content. In a secular atmosphere of modern culture, the mind’s religious desire would seldom be explicit, as it may have been in the past. Only mystically gifted, committed religious individuals appear to have a full awareness of what I have described here in abstract philosophical terms. Others will have to be satisfied with what Aquinas formulated as a desire of a beatitudo in communi, a general idea of beatitude.
Where does this leave us with respect to the possibility and nature of religious mysticism? It shows that the mind is open to the highest object of human desire and that the most intimate union with it may be strongly desired.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Thinking the Unknowable: The Essential Louis Dupré (University of Notre Dame Press, 2024). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.