Speakers and writers of German,
English, and other Germanic languages have long been fond of the etymological explanation
of the name “God” on the basis of the adjective “good,” but it seems clear from
Indo-Germanic linguistics that this derivation was mistaken and that, as Skeat’s
Etymological Dictionary of the English Language has put it, the name God
was “in no way allied to good.”(Skeat 1858, 244) Even without such an
etymology, however, the Cappadocians, who did not agree among themselves about
the etymological derivation of the word “God,” (Gr. Naz. Or. 30.18 [SC
250:262-64]; Gr. Nyss. Tres dii [Jaeger 3-I:44]) identified God as “a nature
surpassing every possible idea of the good,” a nature “lacking in nothing good,”
(Macr. ap. Gr. Nyss. Anim. res. [PG 46:92]) and therefore “in
itself the plenitude of every good [tōn agathōn to plērōma].” In one sense it
could be said that every good, even a related good, was “by its very nature
unlimited.” (Gr. Nyss. V. Mos. I [Jaeger 7-I:3]) But that principal
applied in a unique way to this “the first good, visible beyond any other good
[to proton agathon kai epekeina pantos agathou theōreitai].” (Gr. Nyss. Virg.
10 [Jaeger 8-I:289]) Therefore, the affirmation that “everything sublime in
thought and word” was concerned with God and that “every noble thought and word”
was related to God had to be prefaced by the apophatic qualifier: “What
human thought can search out the nature of what we seek? What names or expressions
can we invent to produce in us a worthy conception of the light beyond?” (Gr.
Nyss. Beat. 3 [PG 44:1225]) What names or expressions can we
invent to produce in us a worthy conception of the light beyond?” And the
apparently affirmative statement,” The divine nature is at all times filled
with all good, or rather is itself the fullness of all good,” really meant that
no good was adventitious to the divine nature, that it needed no addition for
its perfecting, and that such negative language had to be proliferated in order
to do justice to the divine nature. (Gr Nyss. Eun. 3.7.19-20 [Jaeger
2:221-22]) (Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The
Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism [New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993], 137-38)
