For one thing, Christianity seems to be a religion that is concerned with proper behavior.
One must avoid sin and do what is right, good, the will of God. There are the ten commandments ... all those Thou Shalt Nots, and all those exhortations in the New Testament to avoid evil and do good. This is a sin, that is a sin. This would seem to be Confucius dressed in a toga or a robe. As such, Christianity would be subject to the same criticisms leveled by Chuangtse against Confucius. Upon closer examination, this writer believes that Taoism and Christianity have much more in common than one would expect. Furthermore, the things that they have in common are so central to both that this writer was somewhat taken aback.
Non-Being
One of the similarities is found between St. Thomas Aquinas' doctrine of the Simplicity of God, and Tao's non-being. St. Thomas goes to great lengths explaining how God is not "this" and not "that." All of what St. Thomas says about God results from the "way of negation." According to Aquinas God is One, a unity which contains no distinctions. When goodness is predicated of God, it must be understood to be a metaphor. God is goodness itself. God is also Love, Intelligence, Infinity, Truth, etc. All these predicates of God are used by Man in order to understand. In Himself, however, God is totally unknowable. We cannot, in this life, know His substance.
His essence is His being. He does not have attributes that are separate from His being. St. Thomas says so much about God for one simple reason: to illustrate what God is not. St. Thomas points us away from material reality: God is not a body, for to be a body is to be a composite of matter and form. To be a composite is to be potential at some point. God is eternal, always has been and always will be. St. Thomas arrives at this much the same way as the Taoists. For there to be anything, something must have preceded it. This something is really "no-thing." God's mode of existence is different than everything else because He is the First Cause of everything else. His existence is not the same as things, for to be a thing is to be caused. Chuangtse makes the same observation when he talks about non-being. The existence of things demonstrates the "existence" of non-being, and this non-being is necessary.
If there is existence, there must have been non-existence. And if there was a time when nothing existed, then there must have been a time when even nothing did not exist. All of the sudden, nothing came into existence. Could one then really say whether it belongs to the category of existence or non-existence? Even the very words I have just now uttered - I cannot say whether they say something or not (Yutang, pg. 52).
Chuangtse was here demonstrating the futility of language. He is showing how statements about non-being fail to fall into the categories of existence and non-existence. Tao in itself is unknowable. We can talk about Tao but it never communicates the Absolute Tao. It is possible only to speak about Tao by using metaphors. At the same time, he is echoing other passages which argue for the necessary existence of Tao, of non-being. (see Yutang, Sections 6.1, 2.3, 1.4, 37.1 & 16.4)
Continued in “Tao and the Divine Simplicity 5
