What Sort of Deity Does the Cosmos Require?
“Something Divine Mingled Among Them”: Countercultural Holiness as Apologetic in the Second Century: Part 2 of 5
Click here to read part 1 of this article.
Aristides of Athens begins his Apology by appealing first to the beauty of creation before moving to an argument from motion that seems to echo a portion of book 12 in Aristotle’s Metaphysics:
When I had considered the sky and the earth and the seas and had surveyed the sun and the rest of creation, I marveled at the beauty. I perceived the world and all that is therein are moved by the power of another: God who is hidden in them and veiled by them. (Apology 1)
Although Aristides does appeal to a line of reasoning that later apologists might classify under the heading of classical arguments, his usage of these arguments seems intended more to raise a question than to provide an answer. His goal is not to demonstrate the existence of a generic deity but to define what attributes would need to characterize the deity that the beauty and order of the cosmos requires. According to Aristides, the cosmos calls for a deity who is “immortal, perfect, incomprehensible,” and self-existent: “He stands in need of nothing”—Aristides declares—“but all things stand in need of him” (Apology 1).
Who Worships the Right God?
This declaration of the necessary nature of God brings Aristides to the undergirding questions on which he structures the bulk of his argument: Which of the four types of people in the world—barbarians, Greeks, Jews, or Christians—is devoted to a deity that meets these requirements, and what manner of life does the worship of each genus of people produce?
To answer these questions, Aristides first recounts the identities of each of the four people groups: barbarians, Greeks, Jews, and Christians. He then shows how the objects of each group’s worship shape their ethics. The tetrad of human races or genuses (γένη) in this taxonomy reveals a porousness between categories that, today, would be separately classified in terms of “religion” and “ethnicity.” Aristides provides an origin story for each genus, but these origin stories are as much religious as they are historical or genealogical. According to Aristides, the barbarians trace their origins to Kronos, the Greeks to Zeus, Jews to Abraham, and Christians to Jesus who was born—Aristides is careful to point out—from the Hebrew people (Apology 2).
Defective Theologies Produce Defective Ethics
As he considers the barbarians and the Greeks, Aristides highlights how each one’s theology and liturgy falls short of the deity revealed through the order and beauty of the cosmos. For Aristides, defective theologies and liturgies produce defective ethics, because human beings inevitably imitate what they adore. When he turns to the Jews, Aristides admits that they confess “one God, Creator of all” and that this right confession results in some right actions (Apology 14). Nevertheless, in their keeping of the Mosaic law, the Jewish people are not—according to Aristides—serving God; instead, they are serving angels.
Click here to read part 3 of this article.
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