IV. THE IDEA
OF GOD
OF GOD
Our
western idea of God springs from two historical roots: the Bible and Greek
philosophy. When
Jeremiah saw the ruin of everything for which he had worked all his life, when
his country and his
people were lost, when in Egypt the last remnants of his people turned aside
from their faith in Yahweh and
offered sacrifices to Isis, and when his disciple Baruch despaired, "I
fainted in my sighing, and I find no rest,"
Jeremiah answered, "Behold, that which I have built will I break down, and
that which I have planted I will
pluck up, even this whole land. And seekest thou great things for thyself? seek
them not. In such a situation these words
mean: It is
enough that God
is. Do not
ask whether there
is immortality; the
question of whether
God forgives is
no longer important.
Man no longer
matters, his defiance
as well as his concern for his own beatitude and eternity is extinguished. It
is also impossible that the world
should have a purpose susceptible of fulfilment, that it should endure in any
form; for everything has been
created out of nothing by God and is in His hand. When everything is lost, but
one thing remains: God is.
If a life in this world, even with faith in God's guidance, has failed, this
overpowering reality still remains: God
is. If man fully renounces himself and his aims, this reality can be manifested
to him as the only reality. But
it does not manifest itself in advance, it does not manifest itself abstractly,
but descends into the existence of
the world, and only here manifests itself at the limit. Jeremiah's words are
hard words. They are no longer bound
up with any will to historical efficacy in the world, though such a will has
preceded them throughout a lifetime and ultimately, through total failure, made them
possible. They are
simple words, free
from imaginative
flight, and they contain unfathomable truth, precisely because they are without
finite content or any
fixation in the world. The
Greek philosophers expressed a similar thought in different terms. At
about 500 B.C. Xenophanes proclaimed: There is only one God, resembling mortals
neither in his aspect
nor in his thoughts. Plato conceived of the godhead he called it the Good as the
source of all knowledge. Not
only is the knowable known in the light of the godhead; it also derives its
being from the godhead which excels
being both in rank and power.
But what clinches the matter is the imperfectibility of the world. The world is not finished, but in continuous change; our knowledge of the world cannot be completed, the world cannot be apprehended through itself. Far from proving the existence of God, these so-called proofs mislead us into placing God within the
There is, on the other hand, a connection between the belief that there can be freedom without God and the deification of man. This is an illusory, arbitrary freedom, in which man's will is taken to be absolute and independent. I rely in the force of my will and in a defiant acceptance of death. But this delusion that I am
The
Greek philosophers understood that the many gods were decreed merely by custom,
whereas in nature
there was only one God; that God is not seen with our eyes, that he resembles
no one and can be recognized
in no image. God
is conceived as cosmic reason or cosmic law, or as fate and providence, or as
demiurge. But
this God of the Greek thinkers is a God originating in thought, not the living
God of Jeremiah. In essence the
two coincide. From
this twofold root
Western theology and
philosophy have, in
infinite modulations,
reflected that God is and pondered on what He is. The
philosophers of our day seem to evade the question of whether God exists. They
do not say that He
exists nor do they deny His existence. But anyone engaging in philosophical
thought must answer for his opinions.
If a philosopher doubts, he must say why, else he cannot progress beyond the
sceptical philosophy which
asserts nothing at all, which affirms nothing and denies nothing. Or, limiting
himself to determinate object
knowledge, that is to scientific cognition, he ceases to philosophize, saying:
It is best not to talk of what we
do not know. The
question of God is discussed on the basis of conflicting propositions which we
shall examine. The
theological proposition is: We can know of God only because He revealed Himself
to certain men
from the prophets to Jesus. Without revelation God can have no reality for man.
God is accessible not through
thought but through faith and obedience. But
long before and far outside the world of biblical revelation there was
certainty as to the reality of the
godhead. And within the world of the Christian West many men have derived
certainty of God without the guarantee of revelation.
There
is an old philosophical proposition opposed to this theological doctrine: We
know of God because
His existence can be proved. The proofs for the existence of God form an
impressive document. But
if the proofs for the existence of God are construed as scientifically
compelling proofs such as we find
in mathematics or the empirical sciences, they are false. In this light Kant
radically confuted them. Then
came the reverse proposition: Since all proofs of the existence of God can be
refuted, there is no
God. This
inference is false. For the nonexistence of God can be proved no more than his
existence. The proofs
and their confutations show us only that a proved God would be no God but
merely a thing in the world. The
truth, as against all supposed proofs and refutations of the existence of God,
seems to be this: The
so-called proofs of the existence of God are fundamentally no proofs at all,
but methods of achieving certainty
through thought. All the proofs of the existence of God and their variants that
have been devised through
the centuries differ essentially from scientific proofs. They are attempts to
express the experience of man's
ascent to God in terms of thought. There are roads of thought by which we come
to limits at which the consciousness
of God suddenly becomes a natural presence. Let
us consider a few examples: The
oldest of proofs is the cosmological proof. From the existence of the cosmos
(the Greek name for universe)
we infer that God exists; from the world process, in which everything is
effect, we infer a last cause; from
motion the source of all motion; from the accident of the particular the
necessity of the whole. If
by this syllogism we mean to infer the existence of one thing from the
existence of another thing, as we
do for example in inferring from the existence of the side of the moon which
faces us the existence of the other
side which we never see, it is inapplicable. In this manner we can only infer
the existence of things in the
world from the existence of other things.
The world as a whole is not an object, because we are always in it and we never confront the world as a whole. Hence we cannot, from the existence of the world as a whole, infer the existence of something other than the world. But this notion takes on a new meaning when it is no longer regarded as a proof. Then metaphorically, in the form of an inference, it expresses awareness of the mystery inherent in the existence of the the world and of ourselves in it. If we venture the thought that there might be nothing, and ask with Schelling: Why is there something and not nothing? we find that our certainty of existence is such that though we cannot determine the reason for it we are led by it to the Comprehensive, which by this very essence is and cannot not be, and through which everything else is. True, men have looked on the world as eternal and said that it existed out of itself and hence was identical with God. But this is not possible: Everything in the world which is beautiful, appropriate, ordered, and embodies a certain perfection, the vast abundance of things that fill us with emotion in our immediate contemplation of nature, all this cannot be apprehended through any fully knowable worldly thing, through matter, for example. The design of organic life, the beauty of nature in all its forms, the order of the universe in general become increasingly mysterious as our knowledge advances. But if from all this we infer that God, the benevolent creator, exists, we must call to mind all that is ugly, disordered, base in the world. And this gives rise to fundamental attitudes for which the world is alien, frightening, terrible, and it seems as plausible to infer the existence of the devil as of God. The mystery of transcendence is not thereby solved but merely grows deeper.
The world as a whole is not an object, because we are always in it and we never confront the world as a whole. Hence we cannot, from the existence of the world as a whole, infer the existence of something other than the world. But this notion takes on a new meaning when it is no longer regarded as a proof. Then metaphorically, in the form of an inference, it expresses awareness of the mystery inherent in the existence of the the world and of ourselves in it. If we venture the thought that there might be nothing, and ask with Schelling: Why is there something and not nothing? we find that our certainty of existence is such that though we cannot determine the reason for it we are led by it to the Comprehensive, which by this very essence is and cannot not be, and through which everything else is. True, men have looked on the world as eternal and said that it existed out of itself and hence was identical with God. But this is not possible: Everything in the world which is beautiful, appropriate, ordered, and embodies a certain perfection, the vast abundance of things that fill us with emotion in our immediate contemplation of nature, all this cannot be apprehended through any fully knowable worldly thing, through matter, for example. The design of organic life, the beauty of nature in all its forms, the order of the universe in general become increasingly mysterious as our knowledge advances. But if from all this we infer that God, the benevolent creator, exists, we must call to mind all that is ugly, disordered, base in the world. And this gives rise to fundamental attitudes for which the world is alien, frightening, terrible, and it seems as plausible to infer the existence of the devil as of God. The mystery of transcendence is not thereby solved but merely grows deeper.
But what clinches the matter is the imperfectibility of the world. The world is not finished, but in continuous change; our knowledge of the world cannot be completed, the world cannot be apprehended through itself. Far from proving the existence of God, these so-called proofs mislead us into placing God within the
real
world, or second cosmos, which is as it were ascertained at the limits of the
cosmos. Thus they obscure the
idea of God. But they
move us deeply
when, leading through
the concrete phenomena
of the cosmos,
they confront
Nothingness and imperfectibility. For then they seem to admonish us not to
content ourselves with the
world as the sole meaning of our life in the world. Again
and again it is brought home to us that God is not an object of knowledge, of
compelling evidence.
He cannot be experienced by the senses. He is invisible, He cannot be seen but
only believed in. But
whence comes this faith? Its source is not in the limits of worldly experience
but in the freedom of
man. The
man who attains true awareness of his freedom gains certainty of God. Freedom
and God are inseparable.
Why? This
I know: in my freedom I am not through myself, but am given to myself, for I
can fail myself and I
cannot force my freedom. Where I am authentically myself, I am certain that I
am not through myself. The highest freedom
is experienced in
freedom from the
world, and this
freedom is a
profound bond with transcendence. We
also call man's freedom his existence. My certainty of God has the force of my
existence. I can have
certainty of Him not as a content of science but as presence for existence. If certainty
of freedom encompasses
certainty of God's
existence, there must
be a connection between
the negation of freedom and the negation of God. If I do not experience the
miracle of selfhood, I need
no relation to God, I am content with the empirical existence of nature, many
gods, demons.
There is, on the other hand, a connection between the belief that there can be freedom without God and the deification of man. This is an illusory, arbitrary freedom, in which man's will is taken to be absolute and independent. I rely in the force of my will and in a defiant acceptance of death. But this delusion that I am
through
myself alone turns freedom into perplexity and emptiness. A savage drive for
self-assertion turns to a despair,
in which Kierkegaard's ''desperate will to be oneself" and "desperate
will not to be oneself" become one. God exists for me in the
degree to which I in freedom authentically become myself. But the illumination of our existence as freedom does not prove the existence of God; it merely points, one might say, to the area in which certainty of his existence is possible. The thought that strives for compelling certainty cannot realize its aim in any proof of God's existence. But the failure of thought does not result in nothingness. It points to that which resolves into an inexhaustible, forever-questioning, Comprehensive consciousness of God. God never becomes a tangible object in the world and this means that man must not abandon his freedom to the tangibilities, authorities, powers of the world; that he bears responsibility for himself, and must not evade this responsibility by renouncing freedom ostensibly for the sake of freedom. He must owe his decision and the road he chooses to himself.
Kant has said that God's unfathomable wisdom is as admirable in what it gives us as in what it denies us. For if God's wisdom in its majesty were always before our eyes, if it were an absolute authority, speaking unequivocally in the world, we should be puppets of its will. But God in his wisdom wanted us to be free. Instead of the knowledge of God, which is unattainable, we gain through philosophy a Comprehensive consciousness of God. "God is." The essential in this proposition is the reality to which it points. We do not encompass this reality in thinking the proposition; merely to think it leaves us empty. For it means nothing to the understanding and to sensory experience. We apprehend its meaning only as we transcend, as we pass beyond the world of objects and through it discover authentic reality. Hence the climax and goal of our life is
the point at which we ascertain authentic reality, that is, God. This reality is accessible to existence through the orientation toward God that lies at its source.
Hence faith in God, springing as it does from the source, resists any mediation. This faith is not laid down in any definite articles of faith applicable to all men or in any historical reality which mediates between man and God and is the same for all men. The individual, always in his own historicity, stands rather in an immediate, independent relation to God that requires no intermediary.
This historicity, which can be communicated and described, is in this form not absolute truth for all, and yet in its source it is absolutely true. God is reality, absolute, and cannot be encompassed by any of the historical manifestations through which He speaks to men. If He is, man as an individual must be able to apprehend Him directly. The reality of God and the immediacy of our historical relation to God exclude any universally compelling knowledge of God; therefore what matters is not our knowledge of God but our attitude towards God. From time immemorial God has been conceived in empirical forms, including a personification after the image of man. And yet every such conception is at the same time in the nature of a veil. God is not what we may see with our eyes. Our true attitude toward God has found its profoundest expression in a few biblical injunctions:
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or likeness. This meant, to begin with, that because God is invisible man must not worship Him in statues, idols, effigies. Gaining in depth, this tangible prohibition developed into the idea that God is not only invisible but also inconceivable, unthinkable. No symbol or metaphor can describe Him and none may take His place. All metaphorical representations of God without exception are myths, meaningful as such when understood to be mere hints and parallels, but they become superstitions when mistaken for the reality of God Himself. Since every image conceals as much as it discloses, we come closest to God in the negation of images. But even in the Bible this Old Testament commandment was not fulfilled: the image of God's personality remained, His wrath and His love, His justice and His mercy. It is a commandment that cannot be fulfilled. Parmenides and Plato, with their speculative doctrines of being, the Indian Brahman philosophers, the Chinese Taoists attempted to apprehend without images the Suprapersonal, pure, intangible reality of God but in this they did not succeed. Human thought and human vision cannot dispense with the image. And though in philosophical thinking sensation and object almost vanished, perhaps ultimately some wisp of God's presence remains, with power to engender life. Then, even after philosophy has rationally elucidated the deification of nature, the purely demonic, the aesthetic and superstitious, the specifically numinous, the deepest mystery is still not expelled. Perhaps we can give some paraphrase of this presence of God at the end of philosophical endeavour. It is the silence in the face of being. Speech ceases in the presence of that which is lost to us when it becomes object. This ultimate can be attained only in the transcending of all thought. It cannot itself be transcended. Before it lies contentment with one's lot and the extinction of all desire. Here is a haven and yet no fixed home. Here is a repose that can sustain us amid the inevitable unrest of our wanderings in the world. Here thought must dissolve into radiance. Where there is no further question, there is also no answer. In the philosophical transcending of question and answer we arrive at the limit, at the stillness of being. Another biblical injunction runs:
Thou shalt have no other gods before me. At first this commandment implied a rejection of alien gods. Gaining in depth, it became a simple and unfathomable idea: there is only one God. The life of the man who believes in the one and only God rests on a foundation entirely different from that of a life with many gods. Concentration on the One gives to the decision of existence its real foundation. Infinite wealth implies diffusion; God's glory is not absolute unless it is grounded in the One. The quest for the One as the foundation of his life is an enduring problem for man, as actual as it was thousands of years ago.
A third biblical saying: Thy will be done. This fundamental attitude toward God means: Bow down before that which defies understanding, confident that it is situated above and not below the understandable. "Thy thoughts are not our thoughts, thy ways are not our ways." Trust in this basic attitude makes possible an all-encompassing sense of thankfulness, a wordless, impersonal love. Man stands before the godhead as the hidden God and can accept what is most terrible as His decision, fully aware that in whatever finite form he expresses this God it is spoken in human terms and hence false.
To sum up: Our attitude toward the godhead is defined by the commandments "No image and no likeness," "No other god," and by the attitude of acceptance expressed in the words ''Thy will be done." Reflection on God clarifies our faith. But to believe is not to see. God remains in the distance and remains question. To live by God does not mean to base oneself on calculable knowledge but to live as though we staked our existence on the assumption that God is. To believe in God means to live by something which is not in the world, except in the polyvalent language of phenomena, which we call the hieroglyphs or symbols of transcendence. The God of faith is the distant God, the hidden God, the indemonstrable God. Hence I must recognize not only that I do not know God but even that I do not know whether I believe. Faith is no possession. It confers no secure knowledge, but it gives certainty in the practice of life. Thus the believer lives in the enduring ambiguity of the objective, in enduring willingness to hear. He listens patiently and yet he is unswerving in his resolve. In the cloak of weakness he is strong, he is open, though in his real life he is resolute.
Reflection on God is typical of all significant philosophical thought: it does not bring secure knowledge, but to authentic self-hood it gives a free area for decision; the whole emphasis is on love in the world, on the reading of the symbols of transcendence, on the depth and breadth of that which is illumined by reason.
Kant has said that God's unfathomable wisdom is as admirable in what it gives us as in what it denies us. For if God's wisdom in its majesty were always before our eyes, if it were an absolute authority, speaking unequivocally in the world, we should be puppets of its will. But God in his wisdom wanted us to be free. Instead of the knowledge of God, which is unattainable, we gain through philosophy a Comprehensive consciousness of God. "God is." The essential in this proposition is the reality to which it points. We do not encompass this reality in thinking the proposition; merely to think it leaves us empty. For it means nothing to the understanding and to sensory experience. We apprehend its meaning only as we transcend, as we pass beyond the world of objects and through it discover authentic reality. Hence the climax and goal of our life is
the point at which we ascertain authentic reality, that is, God. This reality is accessible to existence through the orientation toward God that lies at its source.
Hence faith in God, springing as it does from the source, resists any mediation. This faith is not laid down in any definite articles of faith applicable to all men or in any historical reality which mediates between man and God and is the same for all men. The individual, always in his own historicity, stands rather in an immediate, independent relation to God that requires no intermediary.
This historicity, which can be communicated and described, is in this form not absolute truth for all, and yet in its source it is absolutely true. God is reality, absolute, and cannot be encompassed by any of the historical manifestations through which He speaks to men. If He is, man as an individual must be able to apprehend Him directly. The reality of God and the immediacy of our historical relation to God exclude any universally compelling knowledge of God; therefore what matters is not our knowledge of God but our attitude towards God. From time immemorial God has been conceived in empirical forms, including a personification after the image of man. And yet every such conception is at the same time in the nature of a veil. God is not what we may see with our eyes. Our true attitude toward God has found its profoundest expression in a few biblical injunctions:
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or likeness. This meant, to begin with, that because God is invisible man must not worship Him in statues, idols, effigies. Gaining in depth, this tangible prohibition developed into the idea that God is not only invisible but also inconceivable, unthinkable. No symbol or metaphor can describe Him and none may take His place. All metaphorical representations of God without exception are myths, meaningful as such when understood to be mere hints and parallels, but they become superstitions when mistaken for the reality of God Himself. Since every image conceals as much as it discloses, we come closest to God in the negation of images. But even in the Bible this Old Testament commandment was not fulfilled: the image of God's personality remained, His wrath and His love, His justice and His mercy. It is a commandment that cannot be fulfilled. Parmenides and Plato, with their speculative doctrines of being, the Indian Brahman philosophers, the Chinese Taoists attempted to apprehend without images the Suprapersonal, pure, intangible reality of God but in this they did not succeed. Human thought and human vision cannot dispense with the image. And though in philosophical thinking sensation and object almost vanished, perhaps ultimately some wisp of God's presence remains, with power to engender life. Then, even after philosophy has rationally elucidated the deification of nature, the purely demonic, the aesthetic and superstitious, the specifically numinous, the deepest mystery is still not expelled. Perhaps we can give some paraphrase of this presence of God at the end of philosophical endeavour. It is the silence in the face of being. Speech ceases in the presence of that which is lost to us when it becomes object. This ultimate can be attained only in the transcending of all thought. It cannot itself be transcended. Before it lies contentment with one's lot and the extinction of all desire. Here is a haven and yet no fixed home. Here is a repose that can sustain us amid the inevitable unrest of our wanderings in the world. Here thought must dissolve into radiance. Where there is no further question, there is also no answer. In the philosophical transcending of question and answer we arrive at the limit, at the stillness of being. Another biblical injunction runs:
Thou shalt have no other gods before me. At first this commandment implied a rejection of alien gods. Gaining in depth, it became a simple and unfathomable idea: there is only one God. The life of the man who believes in the one and only God rests on a foundation entirely different from that of a life with many gods. Concentration on the One gives to the decision of existence its real foundation. Infinite wealth implies diffusion; God's glory is not absolute unless it is grounded in the One. The quest for the One as the foundation of his life is an enduring problem for man, as actual as it was thousands of years ago.
A third biblical saying: Thy will be done. This fundamental attitude toward God means: Bow down before that which defies understanding, confident that it is situated above and not below the understandable. "Thy thoughts are not our thoughts, thy ways are not our ways." Trust in this basic attitude makes possible an all-encompassing sense of thankfulness, a wordless, impersonal love. Man stands before the godhead as the hidden God and can accept what is most terrible as His decision, fully aware that in whatever finite form he expresses this God it is spoken in human terms and hence false.
To sum up: Our attitude toward the godhead is defined by the commandments "No image and no likeness," "No other god," and by the attitude of acceptance expressed in the words ''Thy will be done." Reflection on God clarifies our faith. But to believe is not to see. God remains in the distance and remains question. To live by God does not mean to base oneself on calculable knowledge but to live as though we staked our existence on the assumption that God is. To believe in God means to live by something which is not in the world, except in the polyvalent language of phenomena, which we call the hieroglyphs or symbols of transcendence. The God of faith is the distant God, the hidden God, the indemonstrable God. Hence I must recognize not only that I do not know God but even that I do not know whether I believe. Faith is no possession. It confers no secure knowledge, but it gives certainty in the practice of life. Thus the believer lives in the enduring ambiguity of the objective, in enduring willingness to hear. He listens patiently and yet he is unswerving in his resolve. In the cloak of weakness he is strong, he is open, though in his real life he is resolute.
Reflection on God is typical of all significant philosophical thought: it does not bring secure knowledge, but to authentic self-hood it gives a free area for decision; the whole emphasis is on love in the world, on the reading of the symbols of transcendence, on the depth and breadth of that which is illumined by reason.
Translated by D.W. Ross
Thanks, Ant!
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