A modern will naturally ask whether Aristotle’s God is
personal. It does not do to be very dogmatic upon the
point. Aristotle, like Plato, never discusses the question.
No Greek ever did. It is a modern question. What we have
to do, then, is to take the evidence on both sides. The case
for personality is that the language Aristotle uses implies
it. The very word God, used instead of the Absolute, or
form, conveys the idea of personality. And when he goes on
to speak of God living in eternal blessedness, these words,
if taken literally, can mean nothing except that God is a
conscious person. If we say that this language is merely fig-
urative, it may be replied that Aristotle on principle objects
to figurative language, that he frequently censures Plato for
using it, that what he demands and sets out to supply is ex-
act, literal, scientific terminology, and that he is not likely
to have broken his own canons of philosophic expression by
using merely poetical phrases.
To see the other side of the case, we must first ask what
personality means. Now without entering into an intricate
discussion of this most elusive idea, we may answer that
personality at any rate implies anindividualandexistent
consciousness. But, in the first place, God is absolute form,
and form is the universal. What is universal, with no par-
ticular in it, cannot be an individual. {287} God, therefore,
cannot be individual. Secondly, form without matter can-
not exist. And as God is form without matter, he cannot be
called existent, though he is absolutely real. God, there-
fore, is neither existent nor individual. And this means
that he is not a person. To degrade the real to the level of
the existent, to convert the universal into the individual,
is exactly the fault for which Aristotle blames Plato. It is
exactly the fault which it was the whole object of his phi-
losophy to remedy. If he thought that God is a person, he
committed the same fault himself in an aggravated form.We have, then, two hypotheses, both of which involve that
Aristotle was guilty of some inconsistency. If God is not a
person, then Aristotle’s language is figurative, and his use
of such language is inconsistent with his rooted objection to
its use. This, however, is, after all, merely an inconsistency
of language, and not of thought. It does not mean that
Aristotle really contradicted himself. It merely means that,
though he set himself to express his philosophy in technical
scientific terms, and to exclude figurative language, yet he
found himself compelled in a few passages to make use of
it. There are some metaphysical ideas so abstract, so ab-
struse, that it is almost impossible to express them at all
without the use of figures of speech. Language was made
by common men for common purposes, and this fact of-
ten forces the philosopher to use terms which he knows
only figure forth his meaning without accurately express-
ing it. Perhaps every philosophy in the world finds itself
sometimes under this necessity, and, if Aristotle did so, and
was thereby technically inconsistent with himself, it is no
wonder, and involves no serious blame upon him.{288}But the other hypothesis, that God is a person, means that
Aristotle committed a contradiction, not merely in words,
but in thought, and not merely as regards some unimpor-
tant detail, but as regards the central thesis of his system.