Reflection upon the Being of God has followed along two paths —the via negativa, and the via eminentiae. The first of these methods turns on the conception of God as the Infinite and works with a negative conception of infinity. God, being infinite, cannot be described by any predicates which would imply limita tion. All positive assertions, however, imply such a limitation. It follows therefore that no positive quality can be affirmed of God, not even goodness or indeed even being, so that if we say that God is Td 51/ we must also say that He is equally r6 Ai 6v. Clearly this method leads to a position which is hardly distinguish able from Agnosticism. The via eminentiae starts with the con ception of God as the Ground and Source of all existence and with the postulate that the Ground must be adequate to the con sequences. All positive qualities, therefore, which occur in created existence must be ascribed to God; but plainly not "simpliciter"; they are, so to speak, raised to infinity. Knowledge is in God Omniscience, Will Omnipotence, Beauty perfect Loveliness. We must observe here that the via eminentiae really implies the view that evil is not positive being but privation or defect of being, a view which was held by Augustine and Aquinas; for if evil were a positive existence or quality of existence the argument of the via eminentiae would lead us to predicate evil of God.
The Divine Attributes have been the subject of much subtle and intricate speculation into which it is impossible to enter here. Brief remarks on two must be made, since they are of great importance in Theistic theory. Omniscience is the perfection of that quality of knowledge which is found imperfectly in some created beings. Evidently the Divine knowledge cannot suffer from the imperfections of human knowing. It is scarcely appro priate to imagine the Divine Intelligence engaged in "discursive" thought and pursuing trains of reasoning. The most adequate human knowledge is that described by Spinoza as scientia intuitive, intuitive knowledge in which grounds and conclusion are apprehended in one intellectual act. Of this kind, it would seem, the Divine knowledge must be. We are brought here to the recognition of one aspect of the Divine Infinity and Eternity. Human knowing is a part of a temporal experience and therefore itself a temporal process. The Divine experience and knowledge cannot be temporal, or at least cannot be "in time." A recogni tion of this truth has important bearing on some of the puzzles of Christian and other Theologies connected with the Divine Foreknowledge. If the Divine Experience is not successive but simultaneous, the expression "foreknowledge" is evidently mis leading and indicates that in presenting to ourselves the Divine Nature and Experience we are compelled to make use of inade quate concepts derived from our own experience, and hence to encounter problems which are insoluble because we have not the terms in which to state them accurately.
The same remarks apply to the attribute of Omnipotence in which we attempt to indicate the nature of the Divine Will. Clearly a supra-temporal will is beyond our powers of adequate conception. This does not prove, as Spinoza held, that will is absent from God's experience, but it certainly shows that we can not transfer ideas derived from our experience of finite acts of will directly to the Divine Will. The conception of Omnipotence gives rise to problems which are, in their nature, not completely soluble by human reason. Two possible meanings of the word have been suggested. It has been held, on the one hand, that omnipotence implies not only the power to do all that is possible but also that the determination of the possible is due to the will of God, so that the fundamental laws of thought and of morality are fiats of the Divine Will and not limitations upon it. On the other hand, it is held that the will of God is determined by the principles of reason and goodness which are inherent in His Nature and that omnipotence means the power to do all that is possible. Of these two views the latter is to be preferred, since the former asks us to conceive of the Divine Will as arbitrary and not in any intelligible sense either rational or good. Even so, however, it cannot be pretended that all difficulty has been re moved from the conception of omnipotence, and we may perhaps be content to say, with Schleiermacher, that both omnipotence and omniscience are ways of expressing the fundamental convic tion of Theism that all things ultimately depend upon God.