Abstract

Anselm said that God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, but he believed that it followed that God is greater than can be conceived. The second formula—essential to sound theology—points to the mystery of God. The usual way of preserving divine mystery is the via negativa, as one finds in Aquinas. I formalize Hartshorne’s central argument against negative theology in the simplest modal system T. I end with a defense of Hartshorne’s way of preserving the mystery of God, which he locates in the actuality of God rather than in the divine existence or essence. This paper was delivered during the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God