... With some exceptions we have felt compelled to rely upon existing translations of non-English sources. ... P]ortions of the ... translations are ... our own; ... the passages from Lequier ... and the admirable Fock paraphrases of Socinus, are here, so far as we know, presented for the first time in English.
(Charles Hartshorne and William L. Reese, Philosophers Speak of God, University of Chicago Press, 1953, p. ix).
* * *
... The following passages are somewhat condensed translations of the account of Socinian doctrine (which closely follows the Latin texts, not accessible to us, of Fausto Socinus and Johannes Crell) to be found in Otto Fock's Der Socinianismus. (In the second clause of the first sentence below, use has been made of a Latin passage quoted by Fock in his footnote to p. 428).
Eternity as Beginningless and
Endless Duration
287. The eternity of God is his being without commencement or terminations; he is eternal inasmuch as he exists and cannot not exist. . . . Our opponents appeal to the definition of Boethius: eternity is the wholly simultaneous and complete possession of an unlimited life. But how, we ask, can the possession of an unlimited life be simultaneous, that is, complete in a moment? An unlimited life can only be one that everlastingly endures, how can it be confined to a moment? Further, how can the indivisible contain in a point or moment all the stretches of time, which are infinitely divisible? For, if the eternity of God exists entire in every moment, then everything must be eternal. For all the moments of eternity must exist in and with the whole. Therewith all distinctions of time must be obliterated.
Omniscience Is Temporal
288. What is the object of the divine knowledge? The immediate answer is, Everything, including everything past, present, and future. . . . But in order to render this answer more precise, we must above all remember the axiom that, just as God's power consists in the ability to do all that is possible, so
his knowledge consists in his knowing all that is knowable. The knowable is what has reality in some form, whether as past, present, or future. . . The future, however, consists either of what necessarily will occur, or of what only possibly, or under certain conditions and contingently may occur. Under the latter come all acts of human freedom. Since God knows all things as they are, accordingly he knows the necessary future as such and the contingent future as such. It it were otherwise, God would not know things as they are, for truth is the congruence of knowledge with its object. . . . So far, then, from implying a restriction upon the divine knowledge, the recognition that future possibles are known by it only as possible, as uncertain, is the only was to preserve the absolute truth of this knowledge.
Criticism of the Classical
View of Omniscience
289. If it were correct that God knows the future as determinate, there would be nothing accidental or contingent. Nor is the distinction here of avail, that the contingent is such only in relation to secondary causes, whereas all is necessary in relation to the primary cause [God]. For ultimately the relation to the primary cause is decisive, and if here everything is necessary, then there is nothing truly contingent. Everything must then be necessary and determined from all eternity, since from all eternity known by God. But then there is no human freedom. There is also [according to the hypothesis] no divine freedom, since from all eternity God could act only as he actually does act. . . . Nor can one escape this consequence by contending that things are necessary only as a result of the divine decision, while the decision itself itself is free. If this is taken to imply that there was a time when God had not yet decided, this would mean, a time when he did not yet know determinately what the decision was to be; . . . and if it implies that the decision is eternal, then nothing is won by contingency, since God would from all eternity have given up his freedom. . . . Furthermore, it would follow that from all eternity God knew that his will [that men should not sin] was to be frustrated.
The usual view appeals to two arguments. The first is . . . that future events will not happen because God knows them, but rather he knows them because they are to happen. . . . The objection is that a knowledge of the future can be determinate only if the future is determinate, if there is some cause implying the happening; but then the thing is necessary. . . . The other argument is that for God's eternity there is neither past nor future, but rather everything is present. Hence God sees events not in their causes, but from all eternity he beholds them in themselves. Very well then, from all eternity the events must have being; for only what is can be known by God.
[Sec. 287, Otto Fock, Der Socinianismus (Kiel: Carl Schröder & Co., 1847), passages from pp. 427-31. Sec. 288, ibid., pp. 438-39. Sec. 289, ibid. pp. 439-42.]
COMMENT
"Although modern Unitarianism acknowledges a debt to Socinus, this has to do with the trinitarian question specifically. No heed seems to have been given in Unitarian circles (except by the English theologian, Martineau) to the metaphysics of time and freedom for which the sixteenth-century movement is interesting."
"In their own century the furor over the Socinians' stand on the Trinity largely nullified what otherwise might have been recognized as their contributions to theistic metaphysics. . . . The present age is less dogmatic (in some parts of the world and of culture) . . . "
(idem, pages 225-6 and 227).