79. nance', 'a marvellously composed hymn to the power of the almighty', as St.

Gregory of Nyssa says" (Vladimir Lossky, op. cit., pp.93,95). You write, "now if God is the greatest possible being, then the individual who is God will not only exemplify a consistent set of perfections; according to Anselm, he will also possess each of his perfections in the right sort of way. Each of them will express an essential element of his nature" (II, p. 4), and "Anselm's idea, then, was that each of the divine perfections must be an essential property of the individual who is God otherwise it would be possible for a being greater than that individual to exist, which is absurd" (II, p.5). You speak of "the God of the philosophers, or more specifically the God of Saint Anselm" (II, p.9), and "the individual to which Anselm's philosophical conception of God applies" (II, p.12), and you "find it curious that so many who look to the biblical tradition for inspiration have so spoken so disparagingly of the so-called God of the philosophers, as if the object of Christian faith could not also be an object of philosophical reflection" (II, p.8). I have already commented on this problem on pages 30-33 of this letter, but suppose we do remain at the level of concepts and within the framework of the "Scale of Being ". Even at this level, the traditional distinction remains, in the form of the vast gulf placed between the God of the theologians and the God of the philosophers, and Anselm's God is considered to to be of the former sort, not the latter. Bavinck describes this interesting situation very nicely: "To be sure, there have been some who have tried to make it appear as if theology, proceeding from the description of God as the highest essence, were in perfect agreement with philosophy, which regards God as the Absolute and is satisfied with an abstraction. But there is a great difference between the theological and the philosophical description of God, a difference which must not be overlooked. When the church-fathers in their attempt to define the character of God's being chose as their starting-point the name Yhwh, they were not thinking of God's being apart from his attributes but of its being in all its fulness as it exists and is revealed in the attributes. Accordingly, the essence which was ascribed to God was no abstraction but a living, infinitely rich, concrete essence, a "supreme essence" at once identical with "supreme life, supreme truth, supreme wisdom, supreme love", etc., as Augustine constantly asserted; in other words, "an infinite and unbounded ocean of essence"... It certainly did not mean that he was abstract, contentless essence, the Absolute in the philosophical sense of the word. Although it is very well possible that in the

description of God as essence theology is influenced by philosophy; nevertheless, theology and philosophy do not mean the same thing when they speak of God's absolute essence. Philosophy arrives at this concept by means of subtraction or elimination; i.e., by subtracting from existing objects whatever pertains to them distinctively, so that only essence, bare existence, common to all things, remains... It is immediately evident... that this concept of being or essence, which is the result of a process of continued subtraction or elimination, is nothing else and nothing more than an empty concept. It lacks all content and has no objective, independent reality. On the other hand, when theology speaks of God as essence, it arrives at this concept not by way of subtraction or elimination but by the opposite process, namely, by addition, i.e., by ascribing to God all creaturely perfections in an absolute sense and by viewing him as an absolute reality, the sum-total of all essence, "most pure and simple actuality" (Herman Bavinck, op.cit., p.123). The same is very much true of the modern, scientific concept of function, for example, the mathematical concept, as distinguished from the mere philosophical concept. As Ernst Cassirer describes it, "If we merely follow the traditional rule for passing from the particular to the universal, we reach the paradoxical result that thought, in so far as it mounts from lower to higher and more inclusive concepts, moves in mere negations... What enables the mind to form concepts is just its fortunate gift of forgetfulness, its inability to grasp the individual differences everywhere present in the particular cases... Only the inexactness of reproduction, which never retains the whole of the earlier impression but merely its hazy outline, renders possible the unification of elements that are in themselves dissimilar... If we adhere strictly to this conception, we reach the strange result that all the logical labor which we apply to a given sensuous intuition serves only to separate us more and more from it. Instead of reaching a deeper comprehension of its import and structure, we reach only a superficial schema from which all peculiar traits of the particular case have vanished... But from any such conclusion we are once more safeguarded by consideration of that science in which conceptual definiteness and clarity have reached their highest level. It is at this point, indeed, that the mathematical concept appears most sharply distinguished from the ontological concept... when a mathematician makes his formula more general, this means not only that he is to retain all the more special cases, but also be able to deduce them from the universal formula. The possibility of deduction is not found in the case of the scholastic concepts... Thus abstraction is very easy for the "philosopher", but on the other hand, the determination of the particular from the universal so much the more

difficult; for in the process of abstraction he leaves behind all the particularities in such a way that he cannot recover them, much less reckon the transformations of which they are capable... The ideal of a scientific concept here appears in opposition to the schematic general presentation which is expressed by a mere word. The genuine concept does not disregard the peculiarities and particularities which it holds under it, but seeks to show the necessity of the occurrence and connection of just these particularities... Here the more universal concept shows itself also the more rich in content; whoever has it can deduce from it all the mathematical relations which concern the special problems, while, on the other hand, he takes these problems not as isolated but as in continuous connection with each other, thus in their deeper systematic connections... It is evident anew that the characteristic feature of the concept is not the "universality" of a presentation , but the universal validity of a principle of serial order... In opposition to the logic of the generic concept, which... represents the point of view and influence of the concept of substance, there now appears the logic of the mathematical concept of function. However, the field of application of this form of logic is not confined to mathematics alone. On the contrary, it extends over into the field of the knowledge of nature; for the concept of function constitutes the general schema and model according to which the modern concept of nature has been molded in its progressive historical development... Everywhere a new motive is apparent, which, if systematically developed and carried through, will raise logical questions that will extend well beyond the traditional point of view... As long as we believe that all determinateness consists in constant "marks" in things and their attributes, every process of logical generalization must indeed appear an impoverishment of the conceptual content. But precisely to the extent that the concept is freed of all thing-like being, its peculiar functional character is revealed. Fixed properties are replaced by universal rules that permit us to survey a total series of possible determinations at a single glance. This transformation, this change into a new form of logical being, constitutes the real positive achievement of abstraction... In general, as the purely logical aspect of the concepts of relation and of the manifold becomes clearer, a greater need is felt for a new psychological foundation... By the side of what the content is in its material sensuous structure, there appears what it means in the system of knowledge; and thus, its meaning develops out of the various logical "acts" which can be attached to the content. These "acts", which differentiate the sensuously unitary content by imprinting upon it different objectively directed "intentions", are psychologically completely underived; they are peculiar forms of consciousness, such as cannot be

reduced to the consciousness of sensation or perception. If we are still to speak of abstraction as that to which the concept owes its being, nevertheless its meaning is now totally different from that of the customary sensationalistic doctrine; for abstraction is no longer a uniform and undifferentiated attention to a given content, but the intelligent accomplishment of the most diversified and mutually independent acts of thought, each of which involves a particular sort of meaning of the content, a special direction of objective reference" (Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1923 / Dover Publications Inc., 1953, pp.18-25). Feb. 22, 1989 "Modern expositions of logic have attempted to take account of this circumstance by opposing , in accordance with a well-known distinction of Hegel's , the abstract universality of the concept to the concrete universality of the mathematical formula. Abstract universality belongs to the genus in so far as, considered in and for itself, it neglects all specific differences; concrete universality, on the contrary, belongs to the systematic whole (Gesamtbegriff) which takes up into itself the peculiarities of all the species and develops them according to a rule" (Ernst Cassirer, op.cit., p. 20). I like to speak the shift from abstract-substantial to concretefunctional reasoning, and the effect is dramatic, for example, in reading the Bible according to the manner of typological pattern linkage operative in Biblical Theology. Created reality "has no ontological foundation", as Vladimir Lossky points out (See the reference on page 78 of this letter), and the Aristotelian-Scholastic concept of substance is to be thoroughly rejected, as Dooyeweerd consistently emphasizes as he carries the modern concept of function in a Reformational direction, without, of course, letting go of concrete persons, things, and events (New Critique II, pp.11-12): "It is very important to choose the right terms in this inquiry, because many readers appear to experience great difficulty in distinguishing accurately between the modal aspects of meaning and the typical structures of individuality embracing and and individualizing them. They have a natural inclination to identify the modal aspects with concrete phenomena which function in them. The fundamental difference between the modal 'how' and the concrete 'what' is easily lost sight of... In theoretical scientific thought the modal concept of function discloses the logical object-side of reality. Analysis is no longer content with a sensorily founded distinction of things whose modal aspects have not been analysed, but it proceeds to the theoretical disjunction of these aspects themselves... Our transcendental basic Idea does not allow of any

arbitrary theoretical delimitation of these modal aspects. This implies finding a new method of concept-formation, since the current methods neglect the modal meaning-structures... The modal meaning-aspects of reality, enclosed in law-spheres, are not scattered about arbitrarily in a sort of chaotic disorder. On the contrary, they are arranged in the order of cosmic time, in a cosmic succession of prior and posterior. And this order of succession must be detected by a careful examination of the functionalmodal structures of the law-spheres themselves" (H. Dooyeweerd, New Critique, II, pp.68, 471- 472, 50-51). What I would like to suggest is that your process of clarification leads to such a shifting of consciousness too, from reasoning in terms of static abstract-substantial concepts to reasoning in terms of the time-dynamic concrete-functional concepts or "time-