God and personality

Heythrop Journal - Quarterly Review of Philosophy and Theology

Volumn 38, Issue 4, 1997, Pages 401-412

  Mander, William J ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 61149360134     PISSN: 00181196     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2265.00056     Document Type: Article

References (14)

1. I am, of course, speaking here primarily of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
2. Boethius, De Persona et Duabus Naturis, ch. II;
3. John Locke, Essay on Human Understanding, Bk II, ch. 27, sect. 9;
4. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), ch. III.
5. Psychologists on the other hand have paid very great attention to it. There remains, however, much dispute among them regarding how best to understand it.
6. The doctrine of the Trinity might be thought to complicate matters here, challenging the ideas that there is a single 'divine personality'. Whether or not that is so I shall not consider here, for even if it is, the argument I offer would, I think, be as effective against three divine personalities as against one.
7. Isaiah Berlin, 'The Hedgehog and the Fox' in his Russian Thinkers (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), pp. 22-81.
8. H. Lotze, Microcosmus, Vol. ii, p. 688.
9. Though associated particularly with Kant, universalizability is not the exclusive property of the Kantian theory of ethics, but is arguably essential to any adequate ethical system.
10. We need not go so far as Kant and say that a good person must always act out of duty rather than personal inclination. Actions stemming from personal inclinations but in accordance with duty can still be good, indeed it could be said that such inclinations mark the very best kind of person there can be. But this concession does not introduce any real character or individuality into moral action. It no more makes an individual of the moral agent than does 'love of truth' make an individual of the scientist or philosopher, for whether he follows the dictates of morality or the dictates of his heart, the path he follows is not specifically 'his' but the goal of all moral agents.
11. At this point it might be suggested that even if God is not a person, could we not say that he is personal, or like a person? But against this it must be stressed that this way of speaking does nothing whatever to solve our original problem. For the arguments which show that God cannot have personality show just as effectively that he cannot have anything like personality. (For example, if he cannot have purely personal preferences, it is no easier for him to have anything like personal preferences.)
12. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd ed., 1897), p. 488.
13. See, for example, J. M. E. McTaggart's 'The Individualism of Value' in his Philosophical Studies (London: Edward Arnold, 1934), pp. 97-109.
14. It might be objected that all are equally valuable because all have equal potential to be good, but this cannot be correct for then they would have only potential not actual value.