To be a personal agent, God must be capable of acting in the world. A fuller exploration of how God acts will be taken up in the following chapter. But first we need to establish the metaphysical conditions necessary for God to be an agent while also being the source of the agency and being of all other agents. If Edward Pols is correct, the reality of God as agent must not conflict with the notion that God must also be what Pols calls an Apex Being or Being Absolute, in whom the power of agency for all other agents must be found and from whom that power emanates or derives. For Pols, God must be both Being and the power of Being. And, if power is always in the form of agency, then God must be the supreme agent from whose power of agency all other agents exist and in whose power of agency they participate. Unfortunately, Pols does not make this point with as much clarity as I think he should have. He seems reluctant to draw the conclusion that God is not only Absolute Being but also Absolute Agent. I want to argue that God is both the power of agency for all other agents and the primordial agent otherwise known as, to use Pols’s term, Being Absolute. Or to put it the other way around, the absoluteness of Being is meaningful only when fully exemplified in an Absolute Being who is a primordial personal agent. Absolute Being can only be exemplified in an Absolute Agent.
In this respect, I accept A. N. Whitehead’s notion that God is the chief exemplification of the basic metaphysical principles of reality. As such, God exemplifies agency and, by so doing, underwrites and empowers the agency of all other beings.
Pols believes that a full explanation of reality must go beyond what he calls a “radical pluralism of distinct actual beings.”[1] Taken solely on their own, all fundamental entities form a multiplicity of discrete units. And yet each unit, by exemplifying the power of an agent, is a participant power in a more universal power of agency. The question will be whether this power can be conceived any more basically or primordially than as the power of agency exemplified in a supreme and primordial agent. Pols rejects any notion of originative acts “springing from the radical fatality of a wholly discrete and particular ‘thisness,’ or haecceitas.”[2] This is the move to a notion of Being or Absolute Being that pushes Pols beyond an explanation consisting solely of reference to individual agents. It is not clear, however, whether Pols understands “individual agents” to be finite agents only or if he is avoiding the question of whether God is something other or more than an agent. In this context, his argument seems to suggest that he is referring only to finite agents. Just as an act has no grounding unless it originates from an agent, so agents must originate from some power greater than themselves. He calls this power the U-factor (U for “universal”). It is a “universal source of order of which the laws of nature . . . give us a partial expression.”[3] Any scrutiny of the agent as a source of originative acts commits us to the view that all such “act-sources” have a common source. “And this we recognize as that ultimate metaphysical scandal, Being Absolute.”[4] The self-identity of a particular agent “is never absolute.”[5] The power of particular agents is never entirely self-sufficient or self-explaining. To be a power-center, as it were, requires that the power-bearer, the agent, participate in a power greater than herself, the power of being (or, as I would prefer to call it, the power of agency itself). The human being is “as fundamental as any finite entity in the universe: its continuity massive, though not absolute; its unity a participation in unity and always vulnerable at that, but never merely that of a series of discretes; its self-integration fragile and uncertain . . .”[6] There must be an ultimate source for the self-identity of each particular human agent. This source, or Being, “does not exercise power in the sense in which [the finite agent] may exercise power yet is nonetheless the source of its power. It is precisely what confers upon any particular primary being the character of not being fully determined by the other members of a context of particular primary beings, however wide. It is what makes a rational agent capable of acts that are not fully explicable by explanatory procedures that dismiss the categories of agent and act. . . . [I]t is what makes radical pluralisms ultimately unacceptable, since it is what all these primary beings share.”[7] A radical pluralism is, presumably, a set or context of discrete beings possessing no common source of their being or agency and thus pluralistically separate and distinct from each other.
This Being Absolute, the source of their being and power, is compresent with all the finite agents and makes possible their action in the world. Thus, “if there are particular primary [finite?] beings that exercise power in action, then they do so by virtue of their status as participant powers . . .” The “primary being or one of its acts is the bearer of a Being that transcends it.” [8] Pols admits a certain “ontological mystery” here: it is the mystery of the “concrete particular whose very particularity includes a union with and dependence upon a general, common, or universal power.”[9] But the question is whether this general, common, or universal power is itself a primordial agent from which the power of agency flows or in which it is fully instantiated or exemplified, or is it something other, something that is not primordially an agent? Is this the mystery we have been looking for in the primordiality of agency, act, and agent or is it a conceptual confusion unnecessary to the completion of Pols’s project? Can we simply think of the Absolute Being as Absolute Agent? What is to be gained by dropping or excluding the primordiality of agency from the meaning of Absolute Being?
The individual or fundamental (finite?) agent, Pols insists, “comes out of Being.” The agent’s unity, power, and order is a “shared one: it participates in, [and] is a partial expression of, the unity of Being.”[10] Each fundamental being is a ‘power instance’ of a common One.[11] This One or Being, for Pols, is God. It is a “One whose power ramifies in all multiplicities.”[12] God is the U-factor in our experience, that which transcends each of the particulars that participate in it.[13] Pols insists that this notion of participation is not the Platonic notion of participation in a conceptual form but rather “the participation of a particular entity in a unity/universality.”[14] The relation between the one finite agent and the many acts over which she presides is paralleled by the relation between the One Being that is universal and the many beings that participate in it. This is no radical pluralism of Ones but a “plurality of Ones that share in a universal (thus transcendent) One.”[15] But is this transcendent One also and primordially an agent, and if not, then what is it, and what is its relation to agency?
I believe that the notion of “participation” could be an obstacle to understanding Pols’s intent unless we carefully define it. The mysticism of undifferentiated oneness, strikingly exemplified in Meister Eckhart, understands participation as the ultimate identification of all (only apparently different) entities in one entity or oneness, per se. But if we define participation simply as the receipt of a power of being that originates in the act of an universal agent (or power) then we don’t fall into the trap of non-differentiation and thus leave open the door for conceiving of God as an agent differentiated from all other agents (and beings) by virtue of God’s exercise of ultimate power in bringing them all into existence in the first place and sustaining them. It is not overly difficult to think of my act of swearing an oath as an act that “participates” in and emerges from myself as the agent who swears. The act is an extension of myself and thus participates in my power. My power “includes” the whole of that arena in the world that my power affects.
Pols uses the term “apex being” in this context. An apex being is One “but its self-identity includes the multiplicity of its infrastructure beings and so is also Many.”[16] Pols admits the mystery of trying to articulate with complete precision the notion of the universal One, the apex being who includes all other beings within its enframing universality (but that is presumably not identical with, in an undifferentiated oneness, all the beings that participate in its power of being or agency). It is a mystery because we cannot say why it is so, but we “must simply acknowledge our dependence [on the apex being] and acknowledge also that dependence does not exonerate us from the obligation to act as though everything depended on us as particulars.”[17] Pols is less than fully clear here about how an apex being can “include” a multiplicity of other beings that participate in it without becoming identical with them or without retaining an identity that is in some primordial sense distinct from them.
Pols address the question of God directly in his article “Knowing God Directly.” He recalls that his first serious reference to God was under the rubric “common formative power.”[18] This power is then described as the U-factor, the factor of unity and universality, limited only by “its immanence in a particular being or particular situation.”[19] This immanence is another way of saying that each P-factor (each particular being) “shares in the U-factor, not its U-factor, and the union of particular and U-factor is seamless in the sense that we cannot separate the two without producing abstractions—mere (particular) universals on the one hand, mere particulars on the other.”[20] The U-factor is a “unifying causal power” and is immanent in each P-factor. This means that the U-factor transcends the particular but is present in all of them in the form of power. In short, we find in each act or agent a “union of U-factor and P-factor that is essential to our rational awareness of act or agent and essential also to the functioning of such things.” The U-factor “possesses the agent in the course of the act.”[21] The U-factor grounds both knower and known, the agent and that upon which the agent acts, because both participate in it as the common formative power that enables them to be and act in the first place.
Pols says that the U-factor that manifests itself in all primary beings “is not itself a finite primary being.”[22] That would make it just one particular alongside other particulars. And it wouldn’t explain the universal power that enables particulars to be and to act. So the question is whether the U-factor or God is a non-finite primary being that is nonetheless an agent or if it is something entirely beyond the categories of agent and agency. And here again Pols is less than clear. The U-factor is “something that is at once universal and a causal power that is creative of primary finite beings in the sense that in its union with the infrastructure of the primary being it is intrinsic to their causal power.”[23] But can a causal power (presumably a vertical causal power exercising “real causality”) be anything other than an agent? Can God be both universal and immanent without being an agent? If Pols denies that this is the case, has he thereby abandoned his initial claim that “the most fundamental and concrete sense of power accessible to our intelligence is power in the sense of agency”?[24] Is God an agent or not? Given everything that Pols has said about agency, I see no reason to deny that God is the primordial Agent. God, for Pols, is the source of the being and power of action in all agents; the universal power from which proceed all acts and agents and in whose power they are grounded. Such a power need not, I think, be something other than an agent, even though it is the one universal non-finite primordial Agent. In fact, the deployment of power, even the universal power to make possible the existence of all other agents, requires some kind of action on the part of the agent doing the deploying. The reach of God’s power is universal (infinite) but that reach is still the reach of an agent. So God’s universality, and the power that God exercises to give existence and causal power to all other primary beings, is not in conflict with God’s also being essentially an agent. Absolute Being does not, therefore, in my opinion, require that it transcend agency or be anything other than the primordial Absolute Agent. Its primordiality and “divinity” is revealed in the fact that it exercises agency over the whole of reality, deploying its power throughout the entire multiplicity of particular powers or agents that participate in it as the source of their power and agency. It gives the power of agency to all other beings by a primordial act of giving. I see no reason for Pols to withdraw from Absolute Being the core notion of power in the sense of agency. So Absolute Being can be an agent, albeit a universal one whose originative act includes or supervenes upon all other beings that, by virtue of their existence as participant beings, constitute Absolute Being’s primordial act.
This tracks fairly closely with John Macmurray’s notion of God as the infinite personal agent both immanent in existence and transcendent of it.[25] Macmurray reminds us that “transcendent” and “immanent” are terms drawn from the nature of persons as agents and are strictly correlative. All agents are immanent in and yet transcendent of what they do in the sense that their potentiality as agents is not exhausted by what they have done or are doing. For Macmurray, God is immanent in the world because the world is God’s act. And, to use Pols’s language, the world participates in God precisely because it is God’s act. But God is also transcendent because as agent God is always engaged in continual self-transcendence and is not identical to what God transcends. There is no reason not to treat Pols’s God in the same way. God is the only agent whose power is capable of being immanent in all other agents whose existence and perdurance is God’s continuing act (thus justifying a characterization as “infinite”) and by virtue of that fact being transcendent of (and differentiated from) any particular other agents or even the totality of them taken as a whole, at least as long as we understand “transcendence” as relative to the unique ontological status of being-in-relation. This is not the “transcendence” of ontological dualism. As the common source of agential power for all agents, God is more powerful and efficacious than finite agents but not less than an agent. It is the uniqueness of God’s agency that gives them the power to be agents as well, though with far more restricted scope for their actions than God’s.
I think Pols’s language about God as “Absolute Being” borders on the unhelpful in this context, but I believe we can extract from his language the point that God is the Apex Being, a non-finite primary being, a fundamental or primordial agent-entity. As such, God’s causal reach (the extent of God’s agential power) is far greater (literally infinitely greater) than that of any finite entity. It would make no sense to understand God as the source of agency or causal power for agency without understanding God as essentially an agent in and of Godself. Only if this is the case do we avoid falling into the trap of radical ontological otherness (the curse of metaphysical dualism) or of radical non-differentiated oneness (the curse of metaphysical monism) both of which the notion of agency as applied univocally to God is meaningless. Whatever God may be in God’s own self—if such a notion is even possible—God manifests whatever God is only through the exercise of power and that requires that God be an agent. If there is a mystery to God in Godself, it lies in a kind of metaphysical black hole on the far side of God’s exercise of any agency and is irrelevant to our responsive engagement with God as the agent who has engaged us through God’s actions to which God is calling us to respond. Some conceptual mysteries, such as what God is when not exercising the power of agency, are perhaps simply impossible to penetrate and, I would argue, have no practical consequences for our relationship with God. Unless solving these mysteries makes our way in the world any easier, perhaps they are best left quite literally to the imagination. There is more than enough mystery in figuring out why agents choose to do what they do, and this mystery is itself more than enough to satisfy the religious curiosity and more than enough to require our full participation in responding to the divine actions with ones of our own.
We have to admit that thinking of God in this way does in fact entail a commitment to a form of anthropomorphism but not of the kind associated with naïve and primitive beliefs in God as an Olympian-like deity. It will be a more sophisticated anthropomorphism in which God is correctly understood as literally an agent in the same basic sense in which we are agents—beings with the power to effect change in the field of action. This is not primitive anthropomorphism because it suggests a view of God as a fuller, less limited, more inclusive, robust being. The full extent, depth, and reach of God’s attributes lie beyond the cognitive and practical range of our capacities, but Gos is not, as a real agent, entirely outside or ontologically transcendent of our ontological space. If God acts upon us and calls us to respond with actions of our own, we have to share some common ontological space with God. But if God is the creator of the world and is able to act within and upon it as the practical field in which God exemplifies divine agency, then God would have capacities and possibilities not available to us because of the severe limitations ingredient in our possession and exercise of (only) finite agential power. God would have the maximal degree of the power of agency whose power enables other agents to be in the first place, but God would still be an agent, not something that is “more” than an agent (whatever that might be). And if God acts, God must be capable of acting in the same ontological space as other agents and beings. Otherwise God’s actions are either illusory or ineffectual, at least as far as we are concerned, since they would not actually “touch” or engage us. Pols’s argument entails that God must at least exercise power as an agent exercises power (in addition to whatever other kind of power God might exercise). And the commonality of the exercise of power by the divine being and human beings, grounded in God as the source of the being and agency of other agents, constitutes the ground of a more mature and developed anthropomorphism.
The concepts of act and being will immediately remind some readers of the language of St. Thomas Aquinas. Despite the similarity of terms, I don’t think his use of them directly corresponds to Pols’s or mine. Aquinas does refer to God as “Pure Act” and as “act-of-being.” Nevertheless, the term “act,” taken from Aristotelian metaphysics by Aquinas, has a distinct meaning, which is not that of “action” or agency or agent as Pols, Macmurray, and Tallis have deployed them. For Aquinas, “act” is the full reality of an existing being. It must be contrasted with “potency,” which is the potential to become act or fully existing determinate or determined being. Act is the cessation of becoming, of potentiality. In act, something no longer becomes, changes, grows, or develops. And thus, according to Aquinas, only God is beyond becoming, only God is fully realized without any potentiality at all. This assumes that change is debility, a “lack” of fullness; and in the classical view of God, that is in fact what is assumed. Thus only God is “pure” or full Act. God is also pure act-of-being because only God can make a substance actually exist or “be.” As Etienne Gilson puts it, “substance itself . . . exists only in virtue of a further . . . supreme determination, its very act of being. In this sense, the act-of-being is act of the form . . . that which makes the substance to be a ‘being,’ as having actual existence.”[26] God’s act-of-being is different from all the rest because only God exists necessarily. Aquinas, however, is reluctant to describe God as “an Agent.” Agency, understood as Pols, Macmurray, and Raymond Tallis do, presupposes a relationship between agent and that upon which, or in harmony with which, the agent acts. This relationship sees agency not as a pure act in which becoming has ceased but rather as an “interaction” between differentiated beings, each of whom “acts” in order to attain something not already present to or included in it. In Aquinas, act comes closer to suggesting the cessation of “acting” as normally understood. God does not act in and upon the world because God is Pure Act and beyond (transcendent of) the reality of other objects with whom God might have a relationship. As Aquinas says, God has no relations with anything outside God’s own self since all relations participate ‘in’ God.
What we can take from Aquinas, which parallels Pols, is that there must be something that gives being to all that exists other than or different from itself, and in whose power of being they participate. But my argument is that it is metaphysically more appropriate and religiously more satisfying to think of God not as “act-of-being” but as the primordial agent whose acts bring beings into existence and with whom God can have ongoing transactional relationships.
One consequence of the mature anthropomorphism I am advocating is understanding God as acting within a world common to God and other agents. Tallis has said that there have to be what he calls “enabling constraints without which the agent would lack an agenda. The things that seem to determine us from outside our agency are also those things that make the notion of exercising agency meaningful.”[27] Action is always action in a context, in a relationship to other agents and beings upon whom one’s action impacts. This requires God’s actions to fall into some context in which there are other agents (as well as non-agents) upon whom God’s actions must have an impact and make a difference if they are to be truly efficacious.
This leads us to Macmurray’s crucial notion of resistance as essential to relationality. To be an agent God would have to have an “other” over-against God constituting, to use Macmurray’s term, the resistance to God’s action. (Resistance does not mean only opposition to but can also encompass cooperating with divine action provided that divine and human actions are not absolutely identical.) But a God who is not differentiated in some way from that upon which God acts could not be a divine agent. These metaphysical conditions rule out absolute ontological transcendence and complete undifferentiated monism. As agent, God is one being alongside other beings—albeit one in whom they participate as the source of their agency. That is the basic, primordial fact of divine existence. But in itself it doesn’t tell us what degree and scope of power God possesses nor what personal qualities God’s exercise of that power reveals.
Moving beyond anything Tallis has said or even would be sympathetic toward, one might suggest that a God who is actually[28] engaged with what is other than Godself is necessarily engaged in a historical narrative, with actions that occur in time and space and which, with the cooperation (or resistance) of other agents, bring about the completion of the divine intentions. Given this fact, and presuming the traditional or classical view of God as not limited (or resisted) by anything “other” than Godself, Tallis observes in passing that this is why “it is difficult to think of God [in the classical view] as free because He has nothing to be free from, nothing to be free about, nothing to free Himself towards. No wonder he has such a dull history: he is little other than a crystal of frozen, abstract attributes.”[29]
If God is to be truly relational and free, God must stand in some “relation to and with” other beings and this means within some kind of common ontological space or structure in which the mode of their interaction is both free within enabling constraints and effective in so far as divine action modifies the other with whom God is in relation. In the spirit of a mature anthropomorphism, this means that God’s actions must occasionally be “alongside” the acts of other agents, even while, as the power of agency itself, God empowers their agency. In this sense God will have to be “limited” in the way any agent-in-relation is limited by the freedom and existence of the other agents with whom it is in relation. God cannot be both relational and, at the same time, completely undifferentiated or absolutely transcendent of those other beings.
This means that God must have a field of objects available to the efficacy of God’s acts but that are not themselves ontologically identical with God. The otherness of objects in this field is essential to any notion of agency and that includes the notion of God as agent. But the otherness is also mutual: God must transcend (be ontologically distinct from) that upon which God acts (otherwise God is acting only upon Godself); and those beings upon which God acts must transcend (be ontologically distinct from) God if they are to stand in relation to each other as agent-object-agent. One can be both agent and object at the same time (though in not the same way) if one is both acting upon and being acted upon by another agent in the relational dynamics of interaction. Action is reciprocal if an agent is acting upon other agents and they upon the agent. This mutual transcendence does not necessarily mean that the “natures” of the agents are radically or wholly different from each other. The nature of the difference is still to be determined if one of those agents is God. But the notion of mutual transcendence seriously qualifies any notion of God as the only transcendent being or the being whose sole characteristic is transcendence, per se. Complete ontological transcendence is central to dualism but, as we saw earlier, if it is truly an ontological dualism then God cannot be the only being since dualism implies difference between two things unless it is a dualism between the real and illusory, in which case it devolves into undifferentiated oneness. Therefore, God’s absolute otherness is qualified by the reality of authentic (finite) “others” who stand in relation to God. Thus they are differentiated from each other. And this differentiation ingredient in dualism leads, as we’ve argued previously, to a desire for an undifferentiated oneness in which all otherness is swallowed up. But in the process, God as agent also disappears and the nexus of Pols-Tallis-Macmurray’s arguments will prove to be of no help in framing a concept of God who is both ontologically efficacious and sufficiently mysterious as to generate worship, devotion, and a hunger for communion and relationship.
We will now take up the question of how a divine agent whose power of agency makes it possible for there to be a world can act in that world and subsequently the question of how uniquely divine acts can be discerned from historical narratives and personal experience as having happened.