Defending Divine Impassibility

Abstract

It is commonly held by classical theists that God is impassible. Some recent critics of this doctrine maintain that it cannot cohere with divine omniscience since it entails that God can have no experience of the world, and some knowledge can only be had via experience. All experience requires the experiencer to undergo an operation on himself and so to be passible. I concede that an impassible God cannot be a subject of experience but argue that this is no barrier to his omniscience or personal involvement in the world. There are good reasons to reject the notion that the most perfect knowledge of experience is necessarily experiential knowledge. Following the thought of Thomas Aquinas, I propose that divine causal knowledge, in its actualizing operation, more intimately penetrates our experiences than our own first-person knowledge of those experiences. As first cause and actualizer of it, God knows our experiential knowledge more perfectly than we ourselves do. This results in a level of intimacy and concern that infinitely outstrips the mediated and acquired knowledge of any passible knower.