Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: Pantokrator, Monarchie; Tertullian: biologische, anthropologische Analogie

Kurzinhalt: Both of Tertullian's imaginative efforts fail precisely because they are imaginative. They transpose the problem to the plane of images,

Textausschnitt: 36b Tertullian resolved the problem in the plastic terms of imagination. He cast two analogies to explain how the Son is Lord and Pantokrator simultaneously as the Monarchy remains one and undivided. Tertullian's first analogy was biological; he took it from Stoic physics, which explained the constitution of the world by analogy to the living body. The Monarchy, he said, is preserved by apprehending it as an organism. The Father and the Son are indeed parts of it, but the organism itself is undivided and its Power is one. The trouble here is that to speak of God as an organism is to use a metaphor, an analogy from the material world, to which God bears no likeness at all. Therefore, the metaphorical solution leaves the problem just as it was. The metaphor of organism serves to restate the problem in an image, but metaphors, here as everywhere else, explain nothing. (Fs)

37a Tertullian's second analogy was anthropological. The Monarchy, he said, is preserved by apprehending Father and Son as united in a complete harmony of mind and will. The trouble here is that this is anthropomorphism, an analogy taken from the world of men. The one God, Father and Son, is utterly unlike two men who are one in spirit, united in some common enterprise. Again, the problem is left intact. Both of Tertullian's imaginative efforts fail precisely because they are imaginative. They transpose the problem to the plane of images, where no solution is available, since the problem exists in the order of thought. (Fs) (notabene)