As a speculative theologian, Duns Scotus Eriugena concerned himself with the question, why did God have a need to create, or, “why is there something rather than nothing?” This kind of question is, in the order of metaphysical puzzles, prior even to the Ancient Greek’s peering into the hidden causes and operations of nature for a solution to why things work the way they do (i.e., Aristotle’s efficient cause”).
The answer to the question of why God creates constitutes a theodicy that anticipates what must logically follow as the reason d’être of the hidden principles in nature that the natural philosopher seeks to uncover. Eriugena’s answer to the question of why God creates is that, before God created, He Himself had no existence; thus, God and his making, or His creative action, are not distinguishable, but come into being co-constitutively. Whatever is understood in Him is actualized and participates in Him. Creation, in the orthodox sense of an ontological wedge driven between God and nature, is for Eriugena only metaphorical because the creator does not transcend nature, and therefore the creation is not dependent on the creator, nor does the creator depend on the creation — the creator and His creation are of the same indivisible substance.
The metaphysical speculation of Eriugena pre-supposes no radical separation between the creator and the creation; hence, his supposition that the creation is of the same substance as that which is created, as in the case of Plotinus’ order of metaphysical entities emanating from the One. All things, events, and their consequences, are rationally and logically connected. According to Eriugena, there is reason and purpose inscribed in the order of nature because the source of nature is itself rational and purposive. The motives of human beings, then, are the motives of God; furthermore, the rational nature of the human subject allows the rational mind of man to access and become one with the rationally intelligible object. In terms of nature achieving final stability and perfection, the cycle of the return of nature to its divine source crowns Eriugena’s conception of God as the beginning, middle, and end of Himself.
According to the view of Hegel, the act of the World Spirit coming to know itself through human history is a dialectical process that culminates in the manifestation of universal freedom. The Hegelian contribution to the conception of God becoming man plays out in his conception of the progress of world history, which is moved through a series of punctuated events involving what are referred to by Hegel as “world historical individuals.” These individuals, of which such men as Caesar and Napoleon are exemplars, are the tools of the World Spirit, the means by which history is moved forward. Great leaders, while believing themselves to be in command of their own will and actions, are in reality guided by the World Spirit towards the achievement of its necessary end, which is the coming to a knowledge of itself through history.
Because the World Spirit does not act prior to the unraveling of historical events, but rather in conjunction with history itself, the World Spirit, like Eriugena’s God, does not exist outside of the historical conditions that it imposes on itself. For this reason, Hegel postulates a logical order in the material world that reflects the logical operations of the World Spirit within history — human history is the history of the World Spirit. Thus, the “world historical individuals” that are the pawns of the World Spirit are great individuals because they are employed to move history forward towards a greater manifestation of freedom. Leaders that are tyrannical, or butchers, are not, properly speaking, instruments of the World Spirit, insofar as their actions do not accord with the universal principle of freedom.
The unconscious beginning of the World Spirit’s purpose of achieving its own self-realization indicates that the process of history is, in the end, not a mere return of all things to their common origin, as is the case with Eriugena’s conception of the common redemption of nature. Rather, what is true of the World Spirit is also true of history, according to Hegel — the end of history is not the same as the beginning, and thus the nature of the World Spirit acts as a principle of coming-to-be, rather than a static principle standing apart from the material world and the progress of human history.
For Dostoevsky, the question of why man, as God created him, suffers and experiences evil, strikes at the heart of the question concerning what the nature of God is, and how man comes to terms with, or rejects, a God that transcends his primitive “Euclidean mind.”
Dostoevsky maintains that only if God Himself suffers along with mankind, can God be exonerated for having ever allowed even one man to suffer. God, Dostoevsky maintains, has come in the Person of Christ, and has given “His innocent blood for all and everything.” The version of theodicy found in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov provides the answer to the question of how God participates in His creation. Because of the existence of suffering, and humankind’s incapacity to solve the problem of suffering, God must of necessity involve himself in a particular historical moment, manifesting in the person of Christ, the God who suffers and dies just as human beings do.
It must be borne in mind that neither the Promethean efforts of the Grand Inquisitor, nor Ivan’s rejection of God on the grounds that God explains nothing about why man must suffer and experience evil, represent Dostoevsky’s final answer to the question of whether God is necessary for man’s moral life and thought. In fact, his portrait of nihilism serves to implicitly show precisely why God is necessary — man without God is but one step away from cannibalism and brutality.
For Dostoevsky, the possibility of man successfully propping up traditional or conventional morality with “humanistic” atheism, purified of the anthropomorphisms of religion, is an absurdity. That man is “weak, vicious, worthless and rebellious,” is a given to Dostoevsky. Man is no Prometheus; rather, he is in constant need of aid coming from outside of him. If the divine law, or the ever-present eye of god is extinguished, man lives in rebellion from all that has hitherto preserved him. Dostoevsky admits that human nature is guided largely by its own inherent baseness, but the added observation that man is naturally rebellious provides the key to understanding Ivan’s atheism: the instinct towards baseness is the instinct to rebel. However, rebellion, as a valid reaction against the God who allows humankind to suffer needlessly, is cancelled in the free act of God to come in the person of Christ, who suffers and lays down his life for all men.
Philosophy Major 