On perfect-being theology

[Jayhawker Soule]

I found Yoram Hazony's article The Question of God's Perfection overly long but interesting nonetheless. See, for example, the following excerpts:

The fact is that the God of Hebrew Scripture is not presented as the “perfect being” of classical perfect-being theology. He appears to be neither eternally unchanging nor impassable (that is, unaffected by human behavior), neither all-powerful (in the sense that all that he wishes comes true) nor all-knowing (in the sense that he always has knowledge of what human beings will do before they do it).

Which raises the question of why we should think that the God of the Bible is “perfect being” in the first place. After all, the source of the equation of God with perfect being is quite clear in Greek thought: We find it in Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Plato. For example, the realm of immutable and perfect forms is at the center of Plato’s philosophy, providing relief from the realm of ceaseless change in which we live, which for Plato is but an arena of illusion and tragedy. In Platonic philosophy, it is quite natural to place an immutable and perfect being at the center of a realm of immutable and perfect forms. Even Aristotle identifies the heavens with eternal and unchanging perfection, and so has a fitting place in the structure of his cosmos for an eternal and unchangingly perfect being.

In Scripture, however, it is difficult to locate sources supporting the existence of a comparable realm of eternally unchanging being. In Genesis, for example, all things—including the heavens—emerge from God’s wind blowing upon chaotic waters at the creation. This means that in the Bible, all things emerge from movement and change, without any reference to a static source of being such as the Greek philosophers proposed. Even God himself is described as possessing no static nature, responding to Moses’ questions about his name with “I will be what I will be.” And the great four-letter name of God, YHVH, is likewise couched in the imperfect tense, again suggesting incompleteness and change. An immutable perfect being is a Greek conception of what God must be like, not a biblical one.

and

The most obvious source for this bias toward perfect-being metaphors is in Plato, whose entire theological effort can be seen as being directed to stripping the pagan gods of their human qualities, and recreating them as perfect, eternal, static forms: Thus Aphrodite is transformed into the eternal form of the beautiful, Apollo into the eternal form of truth, Zeus into the eternal form of justice, and so forth. Plato’s theology must therefore be seen as a systematic attempt to eradicate metaphors and analogies for the gods drawn from the world of living things, and to replace them with immutable, perfect beings.

This Platonic theology draws its inspiration, as we are told explicitly in the Republic, from mathematics. This is for Plato the highest discipline, precisely because it turns the human mind from the world of change and contingency and trains it to enter into a realm of immutable and necessary things. It is through this discipline that we understand that there is a realm of immutable and necessary things—which Plato refers to as the realm of “true being,” because only unchanging and necessary things are things that truly are. Once this is accepted, it is only fitting that one should wish to find God in the realm of the things that truly are, rather than in our own realm of illusion.

Perhaps, perhaps not, but I often wonder what 'Judaism' might look like stripped of Persian and Greek influence.