Who or What is God?

katachriston.wordpress.com ^ | August 16, 2011 | Bishop Kallistos Ware

[bad company]

“What or who is God? The traveller upon the spiritual Way, the further he advances, becomes increasingly conscious of two contrasting facts—of the otherness and yet the nearness of the Eternal. In the first place, he realizes more and more that God is mystery. God is “the wholly Other”, invisible, inconceivable, radically transcendent, beyond all words, beyond all understanding. “Surely the babe just born”, writes the Roman Catholic George Tyrrell, “knows as much of the world and its ways as the wisest of us can know of the ways of God, whose sway stretches over heaven and earth, time and eternity.” A Christian in the Orthodox tradition will agree with this entirely. As the Greek Fathers insisted, “A God who is comprehensible is not God.” A God, that is to say, whom we claim to understand exhaustively through the resources of our reasoning brain turns out to be no more than an idol, fashioned in our own image. Such a “God” is most emphatically not the true and living God of the Bible and the Church. Man is made in God’s image, but the reverse is not true.

Yet, in the second place, this God of mystery is at the same time uniquely close to us, filling all things, present everywhere around us and within us. And he is present, not merely as an atmosphere or nameless force, but in a personal way. The God who is infinitely beyond our understanding reveals himself to us as person: he calls us each by our name and we answer him. Between ourselves and the transcendent God there is a relationship of love, similar in kind to that between each of us and those other human beings dearest to us. We know other humans through our love for them, and through theirs for us. So it is also with God. In the words of St Nicolas Cabasilas, God our King is

more affectionate than any friend, more just than any ruler, more loving than any father, more a part of us than our own limbs, more necessary to us than our own heart.4

These, then, are the two “poles” in man’s experience of the Divine. God is both further from us, and nearer to us, than anything else. And we find, paradoxically, that these two “poles” do not cancel one another out: on the contrary, the more we are attracted to the one “pole”, the more vividly we become aware of the other at the same time. Advancing on the Way, each finds that God grows ever more intimate and ever more distant, well known and yet unknown—well known to the smallest child, incomprehensible to the most brilliant theologian. God dwells in “light unapproachable”, yet man stands in his presence with loving confidence and addresses him as friend. God is both end-point and starting-point. He is the host who welcomes us at the conclusion of the journey, yet he is also the companion who walks by our side at every step upon the Way. As St Nicolas Cabasilas puts it, “He is both the inn at which we rest for a night and the final end of our journey.”

Mystery, yet person: let us consider these two aspects in turn.

GOD AS MYSTERY Unless we start out with a feeling of awe and astonishment—with what is often called a sense of the numinous—we shall make little progress on the Way. When Samuel Palmer first visited William Blake, the old man asked him how he approached the work of painting. “With fear and trembling”, Palmer replied. “Then you’ll do”, said Blake.

The Greek Fathers liken man’s encounter with God to the experience of someone walking over the mountains in the mist: he takes a step forward and suddenly finds that he is on the edge of a precipice, with no solid ground beneath his foot but only a bottomless abyss. Or else they use the example of a man standing at night in a darkened room: he opens the shutter over a window, and as he looks out there is a sudden flash of lightning, causing him to stagger backwards, momentarily blinded. Such is the effect of coming face to face with the living mystery of God: we are assailed by dizziness; all the familiar footholds vanish, and there seems nothing for us to grasp; our inward eyes are blinded, our normal assumptions shattered.

The Fathers also take, as symbols of the spiritual Way, the two Old Testament figures of Abraham and Moses. Abraham, living still in his ancestral home at Ur of the Chaldees, is told by God: “Go out from your country, and from your kindred, and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you” (Gen. 12:1). Accepting the divine call, he uproots himself from his familiar surroundings and ventures out into the unknown, without any clear conception of his final destination. He is simply commanded, “Go out…”, and in faith he obeys. Moses receives in succession three visions of God: first he sees God in a vision of light at the Burning Bush (Exod. 3:2); next God is revealed to him through mingled light and darkness, in the “pillar of cloud and fire” which accompanies the people of Israel through the desert (Exod. 13:21); and then finally he meets God in a “non-vision”, when he speaks with him in the “thick darkness” at the summit of Mount Sinai (Exod. 20:21).

Abraham journeys from his familiar home into an unknown country; Moses progresses from light into darkness. And so it proves to be for each one who follows the spiritual Way. We go out from the known to the unknown, we advance from light into darkness. We do not simply proceed from the darkness of ignorance into the light of knowledge, but we go forward from the light of partial knowledge into a greater knowledge which is so much more profound that it can only be described as the “darkness of unknowing.” Like Socrates we begin to realize how little we understand. We see that it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder. Quoting Psalm 8:1, “O Lord, our Lord, how wonderful is thy name in all the earth”, St Gregory of Nyssa states: “God’s name is not known; it is wondered at.”5

Recognizing that God is incomparably greater than anything we can say or think about him, we find it necessary to refer to him not just through direct statements but through pictures and images. Our theology is to a large extent symbolic. Yet symbols alone are insufficient to convey the transcendence and the “otherness” of God. To point at the mysterium tremendum, we need to use negative as well as affirmative statements, saying what God is not rather than what he is. Without this use of the way of negation, of what is termed the apophatic approach, our talk about God becomes gravely misleading. All that we affirm concerning God, however correct, falls far short of the living truth. If we say that he is good or just, we must at once add that his goodness or justice are not to be measured by our human standards. If we say that he exists, we must qualify this immediately by adding that he is not one existent object among many, that in his case the word “exist” bears a unique significance. So the way of affirmation is balanced by the way of negation. As Cardinal Newman puts it, we are continually “saying and unsaying to a positive effect.” Having made an assertion about God, we must pass beyond it: the statement is not untrue, yet neither it nor any other form of words can contain the fullness of the transcendent God.

So the spiritual Way proves to be a path of repentance in the most radical sense. Metanoia, the Greek word for repentance, means literally “change of mind.” In approaching God, we are to change our mind, stripping ourselves of all our habitual ways of thinking. We are to be converted not only in our will but in our intellect. We need to reverse our interior perspective, to stand the pyramid on its head.

Yet the “thick darkness” into which we enter with Moses turns out to be a luminous or dazzling darkness. The apophatic way of “unknowing” brings us not to emptiness but to fullness. Our negations are in reality super-affirmations. Destructive in outward form, the apophatic approach is affirmative in its final effects: it helps us to reach out, beyond all statements positive or negative, beyond all language and all thought, towards an imme­diate experience of the living God.

This is implied, indeed, by the very word “mystery.” In the proper religious sense of the term, “mystery” signifies not only hiddenness but disclosure. The Greek noun mysterion is linked with the verb myein, meaning “to close the eyes or mouth.” The candidate for initiation into certain of the pagan mystery religions was first blindfolded and led through a maze of passages; then suddenly his eyes were uncovered and he saw, displayed all round him, the secret emblems of the cult. So, in the Christian context, we do not mean by a “mystery” merely that which is baffling and mysterious, an enigma or insoluble problem. A mystery is, on the contrary, something that is revealed for our understanding, but which we never understand exhaustively because it leads into the depth or the darkness of God. The eyes are closed—but they are also opened.

Thus, in speaking about God as mystery, we are brought to our second “pole.” God is hidden from us, but he is also revealed to us: revealed as person and as love.

[dr_lew]

I always turn to Lucretius, Book 3, for comfort, or at least amusement. cf. 3.830, “Therefore death is nothing to us ...” amidst many interesting, and indeed compelling arguments for the mortality of the soul.

[Prospero]

I deeply appreciated your sharing this with the class. It put a great many things I’ve been tossing around lately in better perspective. Thanks, again.

[D-fendr]

thanks very much for this post..