knowledge would be without feeling is not something that
our experience makes transparently obvious. Finally, we ani-
mals are not simply finite; each of us is a mere fragment of
the finite. The entire cosmos may be spatially finite; and even
a beginningless past would be in a sense finite compared to
the infinity of all that is conceivable. It is very well arguable
that no knowledge of finite things could, without contradic-
tion, be considered absolutely infinite. Hence an all-knowing
God must be in some sense or respect finite.
Similarly, knowledge of the contingent must be contin-
gent. What we are and what God cannot be is fragmentary.
The divine finitude must encompass at least the world’s fini-
tude and also its infinity in whatever sense the world is infi-
nite. Yes, we are affected by others, but it is just as true that
we affect others. We are cause and effect; the question is,
does it even make sense to view God as the cause of all and
the effect of nothing? As Aristotle said, knowledge of contin-
gent things is conditioned by the reality of the things known.
The all-knowing cannot be simply and in every sense un-
caused, unconditioned.
The alternative to the negative way is the doctrine of
dual transcendence, according to which God in principle ex-
cels over others both in the sense that the divine nature is
uniquely absolute and infinite and in the sense that it is
uniquely relative and finite. If we could not be absolute (in-
dependent) or infinite in the divine sense, neither could we
be relative or finite in the divine sense. Nor need it be contra-
dictory to attribute both of these contrasting properties to
God. Contradiction occurs only if a subject is said to have
a property and a contrary property in the same respect; other-
wise contradiction does not obtain. And if it be said that
since God is simple, God cannot contain a duality, the reply
is ready: the divine simplicity is itself only one side of the du-
ality of transcendence. In Whitehead’s view, God’s “primor-
dial nature” is simple (I would say even simpler than White-
head makes it) but God’s “consequent nature” is the most
complex reality there is. The complex can include the simple.
It was said above that “changeable” is an inadequate or
ambiguous characterization of things other than God. There
are changes for the better, for the worse, and neutral changes.
Animals are open to good changes—growth, enrichment of
experience—but also to bad ones—decay, impoverishment.
To demand that God be, in every respect, immutable is to
imply that there is no form of the capacity to change without
which a being would be defective, or even a mere abstraction,
not a concrete, actual being. The divine excellence requires
immunity to negative change, to loss or degeneration; but
does it require an incapacity for any and every kind of good
change, every kind of increase in value? Plato (not the scrip-
tures) proposed the argument “God must be perfect, hence
any change would have to be either for the worse or without
value, meaningless.” This argument presupposes for its force
that we have a positive idea of a maximum of value such that
no additional value would be possible. Plato’s phrase for such
an unincreasable, unsurpassable value was “absolute beauty.”
What this is neither Plato nor anyone else has told us. An
analysis of aesthetic principles strongly suggests that given
any conceivable beauty there could be a greater beauty. If this
be so, Plato’s argument proves nothing.Another ambiguity or problematic concept in the nega-
tive way was the idea that dependence was necessarily a de-
fect distinguishing ordinary things from God. This excludes
knowledge from God, if indeed Aristotle, or anyone else, can
tell us what “to know” means. In addition there are two
kinds of dependence, only one of which is obviously a weak-
ness, this being dependence for very existence and essential
properties. Denying this radical dependence of God for very
existence leaves quite open the possibility of a dependence
for qualities not necessary to the divine existence. If there is
any genuine freedom in the creatures, they will do things
they might not have done. God will know what they have
done, but (as the Socinians saw long ago) this knowledge
cannot be essential to God’s very existence. Rather, had a
creature done something other than what it did, God would
have had correspondingly different knowledge other than the
knowledge he does have. If the word knowledge is given an
honest meaning, one can consistently assert the compatibility
of creaturely freedom with divine knowledge only if one ad-
mits divine knowledge without which God could and
would—had the world been otherwise—have existed as God,
incapable of error and ignorance. Total independence of oth-
ers entails not knowing these others. Plato did not know us
and was independent of us; we know Plato and therefore are
not wholly independent of Plato.
Step by step, the reasoning of simple or nondual tran-
scendence has been examined by this and other writers. It
seems lacking in cogency. To understand the steady loss of
support by philosophers (beginning with Hume and Kant)
for classical theism (which denies dual transcendence), this
lack of cogency is important. Belief in the divine uniqueness
can survive the admission that it is not change but certain
kinds of change, not dependence but certain kinds of depen-
dence, that are excluded by the divine excellence. That the
issue is worldwide and intercultural is remarkably well illus-
trated by the following coincidences.
In a year—I think the very month or week—in which
I was thinking and writing about how God in some senses
is changing, yet also in other senses unchanging, a man from
India delivered a sermon in the chapel of the University of
Chicago, with which I was connected for twenty-seven years.
He was Radhakamal Mukerji, a leading sociologist of India,
but also a writer on mysticism. He said in his sermon that
God is unchanging in “ethical” goodness but increases in
“aesthetic” value, which I took to mean in the richness or
beauty of the divine experience of the world as new creatures
come into being. This distinction between ethical value as
capable of an absolute maximum and aesthetic value as an
open infinity with no upper maximum was exactly the con-
clusion I had come to before hearing or knowing Mukerji.
Also before this, I had had a somewhat similar intercultural9284 TRANSCENDENCE AND IMMANENCE