Thursday, April 18, 2024

Jaroslav Pelikan on the Cappadocian Conception of "God"

  

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)