Christian August Crusius: Draft of necessary truths of reason, in so far as they are set opposite to contingent ones - What God is

It is one thing to say that something is, another to say what it is. Thus, it is no wonder that Crusius considers the question on the attributes of God, in addition to attempting to prove their existence. Yet, he also has to at first argue that we can speak reasonably about God. After all, as he himself admits, God should be so far above all finite things that we cannot ever really comprehend their essence.

One common way to describe God is through metaphors taken from human life, for instance, when we say that God hears or sees all things. Crusius accepts such anthropopathies, assuming that they are not understood in a too literal manner that would imply God's finity - this would be anthropomorphism.

Yet, Crusius is also keen to find out more literal attributes of God, in order to alleviate all accusations of humanising God. He notes that anthropathies can still provide an inkling of such literal attributes, if one can just remove the metaphorical element from them.

In fact, Crusius adds, all things can provide hints of what God is like. Firstly one can concentrate on how things are perfect and then assume that God is eminently more perfect. Secondly, one can pay attention to the fact that God must be able to create everything in the world. Beyond these two roads, Crusius suggests we have only a third route of describing God - negative one.

Well, Crusius does admit also a fourth, that of revelation. He especially refers to the notion of God as a Trinity, which he considers as the closest we come to knowing God's essence - or at least knowing an attribute that is not either an infinitised attribute of finite things or a relation. Indeed, Trinity - that of being a substance composed of three individuals - is something completely unique to God.

The other, non-revelatory attributes of God Crusius divides into non-active and active attributes, depending on whether the attributes involve any action or a capacity to an action. Foremost of the non-active attributes is infinity. This means, Crusius says, that God cannot have any imperfections. Furthermore, it implies that God has majestity, that is, that he is infinitely removed from all finite beings and inconceivable to them.

Although Trinity, Crusius insists, God is still simple. That is, the three persons of Godhead are in themselves incomplete, although they can e.g. have different actions. Furthermore, the simplicity of God implies that God is not material and that human souls are not a part of God.

Crusius is also convinced of the uniqueness of God, although he is not satisfied with many of the proofs suggested for this position. For instance, Crusius does not think that one could prove the uniqueness of God from the supposed impossibility of distinguishing infinite things, which would have all the same attributes - he points out that this distinction could still happen through relations or spatio-temporal characteristics. Neither does he approve the attempt to prove the uniqueness from the necessity of God, since there is nothing to show that there are only necessary things. Instead, Crusius favours a rather idiosyncratic proof: gods exist in space, and if there are several gods, they must exist in the same or different space, but in the latter case they would be finite, while the former is impossible.

In addition to these rather general attributes, Crusius’ non-active attributes for God contain also attributes related to what he calls the abstractions of existence or space and time. Here the case of time is perhaps easier to understand, since it just means that God is eternal or exists at all times (he does make the interesting suggestion that Trinity explains what God did before creation of the world: the three persons interacted with one another somehow).

The case of space is quite analogous, although Crusius’ result seems unusual: God is immense or they cannot be limited by anything. Crusius notes that this does not mean that God would consist of parts - the usual objection against God’s spatiality. Crusius explains himself by saying that the space of God is a mere abstraction and mere abstractions cannot be really broken into parts.

The active attributes of God refer, then, to those attributes of God that involve an action or a capacity for an action. On a general level, these attributes include that of God having an infinite force, that is, a force that can do everything that just happens to be possible. Some of the actions resulting from God using this force are a necessary part of their essence. Yet, all of them cannot be necessary, Crusius insists, and must be such that God can begin and stop doing them, because otherwise God would be less perfect than humans, who can do this.

Crusius also divides God’s actions into immanent actions that belong merely to the inner state of God’s essence and transient actions that either create a new substance or change the condition of a substance different from God. But can God create something different from itself, if God exists everywhere? Yes, Crusius asserts, as although two gods cannot occupy space, apparently God and a finite creature can.

Crusius notes that there are three kinds of actions: movement, understanding and will. Of these, God really cannot move, because as has been noted, God is everywhere. Then again, Crusius notes, God can definitely understand or think things - denying this would be implicit atheism, because otherwise God would be just a blind mechanism.

God’s understanding, Crusius says, should be infinite. This means, firstly, that God knows all there is and all there could be. Secondly, it means that God’s knowledge of actualities and possibilities must be perfect. For instance, God cannot take impossibilities as possibilities, God must know everything as distinctly as possible and therefore God definitely cannot know anything through sensations or deductions.

Crusius points out that God knows different things in a different manner. Some things, like possibilities and God’s own existence, God would know even if the world did not exist. God also has an encompassing vision of the world: its past, present and future. This vision includes, Crusius insists, also the actions of free creatures - we cannot understand how God can know them, but it is not contradictory. Between the two types of knowledge, Crusius states, God has also a third type: knowledge of what would happen, if a free person chose to do something.

In addition to understanding, Crusius assures us, God also has a will. Just like with divine actions, some of God’s volitions are necessary - these are God’s fundamental desires. With humans, Crusius recounts, fundamental desires include drive toward perfection, drive to share perfection to others, drive of conscience and bodily drive. The two latter cannot really be divine drives, but the two others can. God thus always desires to be perfect, and because they are, God is always infinitely happy or blessed.

God also desires perfection in things created, Crusius says, and this means that the world, if such exists, must form a moral system, where choices of free creatures can reflect divine perfection and all the other things can serve free creatures in fulfilling this purpose. Acting in accordance with divine perfection, Crusius suggests, means especially that free creatures must understand their dependence on God. God must thus give the free creatures laws that must be obeyed, and if the laws are not obeyed, God must punish the sinner. Crusius goes even further and insists that God can never really end the punishment, because this would mean that transgression would ultimately be forgotten and justice would not be served. He does concede that this might not mean that God would put sinners in an eternal torture, but only that a sinner is prevented from reaching the highest state of happiness possible.

Why did God then allow sinners to exist in the first place? Crusius’ first line of defence is that sinners were not created as sinners, but they freely chose to be such. Yet, this line of defence seems inadequate, since God still knew that the sinners would sin. Crusius’ second and rather cruel defence is that God had to be shown as a stern and righteous judge, since righteous punishment of sinners is a perfection.

In addition to punishing the sinners, God’s righteousness demands also rewarding the virtuous. Yet, God has also further reasons for this, since the second fundamental drive of God, Crusius says, is a desire to do good and show love to free creatures. Thus, God’s dice are loaded toward mercy and charity. Still, Crusius says, God won’t just hand out maximal amount of goodness to every creature, since this is ultimately impossible: there is no maximal goodness for finite creatures, since their goodness can always be increased.

In addition to these fundamental desires, God also has freedom, Crusius insists, that is, God can begin actions that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. This does not mean that even God’s free actions would be completely against their fundamental desires, in other words, that they wouldn’t satisfy God's desire for perfection and goodness. It is more that God has a complete freedom of not creating such a world at all, but has freely chosen to create it. Furthermore, Crusius emphasises, world could also have been otherwise, since God could have chosen many different means to fulfill the perfection of the world.

Christian August Crusius: Draft of necessary truths of reason, in so far as they are set opposite to contingent ones - Proving God’s existence

Diverging clearly from the Wolffian order of metaphysics, Crusius proceeds after ontology to natural theology. His justification is that while knowing the properties of things in the world requires knowing the properties of their creator, natural theology presupposes only a general concept of the world as a sum of all things, of which we we perceive a part and of which we ourselves are a part, and additionally some individual truths about souls.

Crusius’ first task in natural theology is to prove the existence of God, that is, an intelligent and necessary substance, which differs from the world and is the effective cause of the world. Crusius’ strategy is to throw everything at the wall and see what happens to stick, as he is willing to provide a whole bunch of different proofs, deeming the topic so important that it must be decided by any means necessary - the various proofs convince different people and corroborate one another. Crusius doesn’t even provide any other systematisation of this hodgepodge of proofs, except a classification based on the supposed strength of them.

The most certain proofs, Crusius says, are demonstrations that are ultimately based on the three principles of human cognition and of course principles derivable from them, such as the principle of sufficient reason and the principle of contingency (things that can be thought not to exist are contingent). Crusius presents altogether five of these demonstrations, all of which can be regarded as modifications of the cosmological proof in the Kantian classification. I will not go in detail to these proofs, but merely note their prominent features:

• Crusius bases the existence of complex things on the existence of simple things, which they consist of. Then he uses the principle of contingency to show that simple things in the world are contingent and so require God for their existence.
• Crusius argues, as we have seen, that there are no infinite series of changes. This means, he insists, that the world must have been created by a substance that has existed eternally before creation.
• Crusius notes that all series of movements must be ultimately derived from an action of an infinite force.
• Crusius also uses the principle of contingency to directly conclude that the world is contingent.
• Crusius insists that plant and animal species must have originated from single individuals, which due to their well ordered nature must have been created by God.

The last of the demonstrations provides also a sort of link to what Crusius calls an infinitely probable proof of God’s existence. This proof is basically the old argument from the order in the world to someone creating it in an orderly fashion. Crusius insists that it is not just a question of teleology - it is a question of plants, animals and other things having a well ordered structure and not just them being mere means for human purposes.

Crusius admits that it is possible that this order would have been fashioned from blind chaos by pure chance, or as Crusius suggests some atheists said, by a revolution in the structure of the world. Yet, Crusius instantly counters, such a revolution would have required an infinite number of coincidences, making the only option or the existence of God thus infinitely probable. Indeed, he argues, this proof shows clearest why God would have to be an intelligent substance and not mere force of nature.

The final or the lowest level of the proofs in Crusius scheme consists of such that result in finite probability. First two of those involve history. Crusius argues that the oldest history books (by which Crusius refers especially to the Bible and other myths) assume that the humankind has not existed forever and it is not probable that the first humans would have been created with natural means that do not work nowadays (e.g. humans being generated in the bowels of the earth). Furthermore, Crusius emphasises that during human history all nations have believed in some divine being or beings and asserts the improbability of a so widely spread deception.

Third of the merely probable proofs is based on the supposition that all humans have a conscience or a natural propensity to know what is right and what is wrong. Crusius argues that the universal existence of such a propensity cannot be a mere coincidence, generated by lucky circumstances, but must have been planned by the creator of humankind to help humans to decide what to do and what to avoid doing.

There is a conspicuous absence in Crusius’ battery of proofs - the ontological, or as it was then often called, the Cartesian proof. I noticed in an earlier post that Crusius would have accepted the proof in his ontology, but his theology clarifies that this is not the case - no proof of God’s existence can be based on a mere principle of contradiction, but some consideration of causality must happen. Crusius’ justification is evidently inherited from Hoffmann: although we cannot think the most perfect being without accepting its existence in our thoughts, this does not tell whether the most perfect being has existence outside our thoughts. If it would be a valid, Crusius adds, we might as well prove that the most perfect man and woman must exist, although the existence of men and women altogether is contingent.

What the Cartesian proof does say, according to Crusius, is that if God’s existence has been guaranteed otherwise, we can say this existence is necessary. This strategy is not that far from Wolff’s, who first proved God’s existence through a cosmological argument and then proceeded to show through an ontological argument why God must exist (because God is the most perfect being).

The main target of Crusius’ proofs are atheists. Crusius includes under atheists also people who doubt God’s existence. Such doubting atheists attack only the supposed weaknesses in the proofs of God’s existence, for instance, they might reject proof from the order in the world by pointing out imperfections in the world. Crusius’ answer to this particular objection is that what is imperfection from a limited point of view can actually contribute to the perfection of the whole world.

Another point the doubting atheists make, Crusius says, is that humans cannot really have a perfect conception of God and therefore it is as reasonable to deny as to accept God’s existence. Crusius insists that we do not need such a fully adequate concept of God to speak about their existence, but we have to just be able to distinguish God from other things. God is no empty word, Crusius assures, although we as finite things can know God mostly through negations or through God’s relations to other entities.

The more strict atheists, Crusius says, deny outright the existence of God. Some of these atheists are materialists, like ancient atomists, who consider even thinking and willing to be mere movement of matter and who do deny the existence of all simple intelligent substances. Other atheists Crusius groups under the title of universalists. Universalists he divides into those like Anaximander, who suppose that the final cause of the world can lie in the simple substances of the world, which may be intelligent, and those like Spinoza, who think of world as a unified simple substance, with things in it as mere properties of the substance. All of these forms of atheism, Crusius thinks, fall short in that they have to assume an infinite series of causes.

Crusius ends the discussion of the existence of God by noting that atheism is not the only erroneous view on theological matters. There are also deists, or as he also calls them, virtual atheists, who do not deny the existence of God, but only that of God being a moral lawgiver and judge. This is a topic he leaves for the next chapter on the attributes of God.