Is God More Like a Rock or the idea of a rock?

Is God more like a rock or the idea
of a rock? If you had to choose one or the other, which would it be? On its
face, the answer seems obvious. Rocks represent matter at its most obdurate
state, while ideas transcend matter altogether. Ideas are the proper activity
of the intellect. They live in minds, while rocks don’t live at all. Isn’t God
infinitely closer to an idea—indeed, the idea of just about anything, let alone
a rock—than he is to anything that is, well, any kind of
thing?

We could answer that God is
infinitely dissimilar to both an idea and a thing. That move, however, would
leave us with very little idea of what God is. And it would go against the
grain of classical theism, a formidable consensus that includes Plato, Origen,
Augustine, and Aquinas. They contend that God is absolutely simple, immaterial,
and indivisible. God is pure being, not a being in the world. That makes God
much more like an idea of a rock than a rock.

Following this train of thought
gives you an immaterial God outside of time and space—much closer to an idea
than a rock. This God thinks, and beings appear. Created things can be this or
that, which means that they have a mutable nature. God, as their source, cannot
be among these things. When classical theists state that God is the being of
all things, they could just as easily say that God is the thinker of all
things, the eternal knower whose thinking is what we perceive as reality.

We might eventually end up at
hylomorphism, the idea that all beings except Being itself are composed of form
and matter. (Angels remain an ambiguous limit case of this idea.) Matter is the
potential for something to be, while form is what anything actually is. It
follows that when we know something, we know its form. Matter itself is not only
unknowable, but non-existent for practical purposes. God did not first create
matter and then form it. Instead, he brought matter into being by thinking of a
variety of things, which are distinguished by how close they are to his own
thinking.

How we think about the world is
thus our best clue to the nature of God. Indeed, God created us to share in his
thinking, which makes our intellect infinitely closer to God than our physical bodies
(which do not even have the material continuity of rocks). This insight into
the nature of our intellect is near the very origins of Greek philosophy. Plato
believes we can know the forms because our souls are immortal and were once
contemplatively united with the divine. Aristotle builds on Plato: We have an
active intellect (nous) that gives us the power to identify with the truth of
all things and thus participate in God’s thinking of his eternal thoughts. The
truth we find through this contemplation is unchanging, which means true ideas
cannot be conditioned by the vagaries of time. Knowing the truth (and thus
knowing God) requires the purging of our sensory limitations.

This intellectual contemplation is
self-reflection of a very specific kind. We must know ourselves as transcending
space and time so that we can identify with God’s eternally true knowledge of
us (and of everything else). Classical theism sees all true spiritual
pilgrimage as a purely interior movement. We cannot leave our bodies in this
world, but we can rise above them in our minds.

No philosophical method can induce this
experience. It comes, as even Plotinus believed, as a gift or grace. Beauty
typically is the form of this gift, but it manifests itself in the physical
world without becoming a part of it. The beautiful is how the transcendent
draws our desire for pleasure away from the mutable and toward the eternal. Objects
are beautiful when their parts are so finely integrated that their unifying
principle makes them appear to be as one as the truth is. Our sensible
apprehension of material things can thus be the basis for an experience of unity
with the absolute that defies description. Rocks are too thick with matter, too
bound to their own implacable objectivity, to be windows that open to the divine.

All physical things, according to
classical theism, will come to an end when God is all in all, because matter,
being formless, is the absence of the divine. Our unification with the
indivisible divine will not add to or alter God’s simple oneness. We will be
like a dreamer who has forgotten that she is dreaming and thus thinks she is
alive in her dream. Or we will be like a thinker who thinks without being
limited by a body. Being with God will mean thinking God’s thoughts, and since
we are thoughts of God, our self-reflection will be nothing other than God’s
own thinking. We will arrive in eternity to find ourselves in the mind of God. There
will be no bodies, or persons, since persons are bodies with their own
individual thoughts. Needless to say, God will no longer think about rocks, or
even the idea of a rock, since God’s thinking is identical to his creating.
Will God even, in the end, think about us?

Classical theism is a beautiful way
of thinking about thinking, and for those who are passionate about pure
thought, there is no idea more beautiful than the idea that God is like our
ideas. This beautiful idea is not a
good
idea, however, because it reduces God to the idea that intellectuals have about
themselves. Classical theism thus demonstrates that something does not have to
be material to be an idol. Personally, I think that God is as much like a rock as
an idea of a rock: Like a rock, God is an entity, with its own specific nature,
and like the idea of a rock, God is the mind that makes everything what it is. To
answer our initial question, we could say that God is like a rock that thinks. Or
we could just say that God is a person, like us.

Stephen H. Webb is a columnist for First Things. He is the author of Jesus Christ, Eternal God and, forthcoming, Mormon Christianity. His book on Bob Dylan is Dylan Redeemed.

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