In one of his sermons, John Chrysostom describes the chasm that separates God from His human worshipers: “Let us call upon him, then, as the ineffable God who is beyond our intelligence, invisible, incomprehensible, who transcends the power of mortal words. Let us call on him as the God who is inscrutable to the angels, unseen by the Seraphim, inconceivable to the Cherubim, invisible to the principalities, to the powers, and to the virtues, in fact, to all creatures without qualification, because he is known only by the Son and the Spirit.”1
Before we turn to the many avatars of the One God and to their distinctive characteristics, we must have a quick look at the source—the unsullied essence of the One God in its immaculate state, before inaccurate words, dangerous metaphors, and His inexplicable love for His creatures made Him flesh. The God of monotheists is omnipotent. That is His most important attribute. As such, He is absolutus—free from all restraint. God’s immateriality and His ineffability are aspects of His omnipotence. He cannot be matter, for matter is the passive element of being that form, the active element of being, shapes. In God there is nothing that is not pure action, pure force. He cannot be fully grasped, for if the limited human mind could understand Him in his entirety, it would mean that He is not unlimited.
In the Zohar, the great masterpiece of medieval Jewish mysticism, he is aptly called Ein Sof, “the one that has no end,” “the indeterminate one.” Anything that might suggest that He is, that He can be, limited by anything external to Him is by definition false and an insult to God. When God commits blatant crimes against this article of faith, as He does, most scandalously, in the Incarnation, for example, that breach of theological contract must be explained away. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, God’s absolute power must be “saved.” This demands of theologians spectacular feats of metaphysical acrobatics, feats that they perform with amazing skill.
It is all the fault of Greek philosophers. Jews did not concern themselves with such elusive terms as “perfection” and “ineffability.” Hebrew is notoriously poor in philosophical terms. Essence? Substance? Metaphysics? The rabbis were not quite sure what they meant. Nor does it matter. The real question is what He, whichever way we define Him, expects His subjects to do. God is the Ruler of the Universe. What exactly does this mean? It means that you don’t want to mess with Him. For His own inscrutable reasons, He has commanded us to do things and we try to comply. One is reminded of a famous story about the Buddha:
Malunkyaputta was meditating thus: “Those views are not explained, set aside and ignored by the lord (Buddha): The world is eternal, the world is not eternal, the world is an ending thing, the world is not an ending thing; the life-principle is the body, the life-principle is one thing, the body another; the Tathagata exists after dying, the Tathagata does not exist after dying, the Tathagata both is and is not after dying, the Tathagata neither is nor is not after dying. … I, having approached the Lord, will question him on the matter.”
When the sage approaches the Buddha with these questions, the Buddha responds by stating that he has never promised to answer questions such as these. A man who refuses to be enlightened before he finds answers to such questions is like a person wounded by a poisoned arrow who refuses to be healed before he is told exactly what type of arrow it was and given a full profile of the man who had shot him.2
“Monks,” [says the Buddha elsewhere], “reason not ill unprofitable things such as: Eternal is the world; finite is the world, infinite is the world etc.” … Such reasoning does not lead to Nirvana. When they reason, monks reason thus: This is suffering (dukkha); that leads to the ceasing of suffering.”3
Jews managed perfectly well without very clear definitions of the Tathagata or systematic theology. Greeks did not. Greeks like definitions and abhor logical contradictions. The history of the three monotheist religions is the history of an impossible encounter between Jewish law, history, and myth and Greek philosophy.
The most significant philosophical school—from the Christian point of view, a point of view that had a deep influence on the two other monotheistic religions—was Platonism. Platonism disdains the material. The platonic soul must not only aspire to a higher, spiritual sphere of existence, but must view materiality as a spiritual infection. While Jews agreed that the spirit is nobler than matter, and that matter, if allowed to become dominant, can hinder man from reaching salvation, they did not see it as something to be rid of. In its proper place, matter is not simply a temporary vehicle of the soul, but a necessary—essential—part of being.
This was not how Plotinus, the great third-century interpreter of Plato, saw it. Plotinus saw matter as metaphysical evil, inescapable for humans, but harmful nonetheless. Plotinus believed in a Supreme Being, the “One.” He also had his own version of the Trinity—the One, The Intellect (or mind), and the Soul. This made him very appealing for Christians.
Neoplatonism had a huge influence on Christian thinking. It turned Jehovah, with His likes and dislikes, with His jealousy and wrath, with His favorites and enemies, with His imperfections and impatience, into the ineffable One. The One is not the Lord of History. He is a philosopher’s Supreme Being: self-sufficient, untouched by anything, totally transcendent, containing no division, multiplicity, or distinction. The One has no will, for he wants nothing. The one does not think, for thinking implies a distinction between thinker and thought. The One does not love, for that would mean needing something other than himself. The One is pure power. Nothing exists that is not dependent on him, but the One is totally independent. Human knowledge is utterly incapable of grasping him in his true, absolute essence. He is unlike anything we know. Words necessarily fail to describe him. The only way that we may do some justice to him is by “apophasis”—” unsaying.” All positive statements about him must be immediately contradicted by opposite statements, thus preventing the mind from the illusion of true denotation. From our limited point of view, the One is Not.4
In the late fifth or early sixth century, a theologian assuming the identity of Dionysius the Areopagite, converted to Christianity by Paul’s preaching (Acts 17:34), wrote a series of influential works that help translate Jehovah into the Neoplatonic One. Dionysus speaks of the ultimate goal of our journey toward God in terms of a gradual emptying of the soul of incorrect ideas about God, until it is left with total unknowing. This is the closest we can get to God. We begin the journey by praising God, attributing to Him every positive attribute, like wisdom and unity and power. These attributes are not descriptions, but expressions of reverence. Soon, however, we run out of words, since no matter how many adulatory adjectives we use, we remain incapable of “covering” His infinite vastness. Instead of trying such an impossibility, Dionysius argues, we should seek, on the contrary, to negate wrong ways of addressing Him:
The Cause of all is above all, and is not inexistent, speechless, mindless. It is not a material body, and hence has neither shape nor form, quality, quantity, or weight. … It suffers neither disorder nor disturbance and is overwhelmed by no earthly passion. It is not powerless and subject to the disturbances caused by sense perception. It endures no deprivation of light. It passes through no change, decay, division, loss, no ebb and flow, nothing of which the senses may be aware. None of all this can either be identified with it or attributed to it.5
God is perfect. He therefore “passes through no change, decay, division, loss, no ebb and flow.” But, not satisfied with negating imperfection and materiality in God, Dionysius proceeds to negate the most sacred divine names and theological articles of faith: “As we climb higher, we say this: It is not soul or mind, nor does it possess imagination, conviction, speech or understanding.” This is stunning enough, but Dionysius does not stop here:
It cannot be spoken of and it cannot be grasped by understanding. It is not number or order, greatness or smallness, equality or inequality, similarity or dissimilarity. It is not immovable, moving, or at rest. It has no power, it is not power, nor is it light. It does not live nor is it life. It is not a substance, nor is it eternity or time. It cannot be grasped by understanding, since it is neither knowledge nor truth. It is not kingship. It is not wisdom. It is neither one nor oneness, divinity nor goodness. Nor is it spirit, in the sense in which we understand the term. It is not sonship or fatherhood and it is nothing known to us or to any other being. It falls neither within the predicate of nonbeing nor of being. Existing things do not know it as it actually is and it does not know them as they are. … It is beyond assertion and denial. We make assertions and denials of what is next to it, but never of it, for it is both beyond every assertion, being the perfect and unique cause of all things, and by virtue of its preeminently simple and absolute nature, free of every limitation, beyond every limitation; it is also beyond every denial.6
Earlier, Dionysius compared negative theology to a sculptor creating a statue. He removes unnecessary material, until he is left with his image. But, of course, Dionysius does not want us to worship an image, an idol. He uses his hammer and chisel to remove all content from our discourse about God. His last act is to get rid of the tools. God “is also beyond every negation.”
Dionysius wishes to convey a sense of the total otherness of God, of His absolute unknowability. He uses apophatic paradox (neither being nor nonbeing, not immovable, moving, or at rest) and deliberately shocking negations (neither one nor oneness, neither divinity nor goodness). As the absolute Other, God is simply beyond words. “Good” is as false as “bad” in relation to Him. And yet, Dionysius is not totally consistent in his negative praise for the otherness of God. You will note that I have emphasized a number of phrases in the text. It seems that the author implies that God can be known and know, though not as He actually is or as creatures are. He also seems reluctant to negate the statement that God is “the perfect and unique cause of all things, and that he is simple and absolute.” Obviously, these are important qualities. One could even suggest that it is those qualities that justify the entire exercise. And yet, Dionysius’s hesitation to take his negative theology to the limit is telling.
A quick look at Ein Sof might suggest an explanation. Ein Sof is the Deus absconditus (the hidden God) of the Zohar. He (it?) is the divine essence, the cause of causes. Like Plotinus’s One, Ein Sof, who defies all definition (as his name suggests), causes the creative process to begin without “doing” or “willing” anything. The ontological explosion that is the beginning of the non-God is the “mystical” outcome of his very “being” (if “being” is the right term to describe him/it). The ten Sephirot—the Jewish version (vehemently denied) of the divine persons of Christianity—come into being by a process of emanation. The Sephirot are sometimes referred to as the lights (Orot in Hebrew) of Ein Sof. They are aspects of the divinity that are present and active in the world (in different degrees), whereas Ein Sof remains totally detached not only from the created world, but also from his own emanations. In fact, it is not quite clear that the term “emanation” conveys properly the aloofness of Ein Sof. The Sephirot emanated from the first real “being”—the Sephira of Keter (crown). How exactly Keter came into being is not clear. Keter itself can be grasped only to a very limited extent (it is often referred to as Ayin, “nothing” or “nonbeing”). The first truly knowable Sephira, Hokhma (wisdom), is called Yesh (being) and it emanated: “yesh me-ayin,” being out of nothing (creation ex nihilo thus takes a very peculiar meaning):
Ein Sof cannot be known and does not have beginning and end … in Ein Sof there are no wills and no lights and no luminaries [that is, the Sephirot are not contained in it though it is their source]. All those lights and luminaries [the Sephirot] depend on him, but have no power to comprehend him. The only one who knows-and-does-not-know is the supreme will, the most hidden of the hidden, Ayin [Keter]. When [the two next Sephirot whose appellations are] “Supreme Point” [Hokhma] and “The World to Come” [Binah] lift themselves up toward him, they only sense his “smell,” like someone who senses the smell of a person’s perfume.7
Ein Sof is unknown, unknowable, beyond words, like Plotinus’s One, like Dionysius’s God. Even the divine emanations grasp only faint traces of him. He is therefore practically ignored in the Zohar. Certainly, he pales in comparison with the wild, ruthlessly creative speculations and fervent devotions dedicated to the Sephirot. What is the point in repeatedly saying that God is beyond human words? Wouldn’t it be simpler to declare once and for all that God is unknowable and then simply forget about him? “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein famously advises in his Tractatus.
There may be two important reasons for speaking about the unspeakable. The first is that the purpose of such speech is not to describe God at all, but to subvert “normal” modes of speech and, more importantly, “normal” modes of thought. It is not unlike the techniques used by Zen masters to shake their disciples out of their conventional thinking patterns.8 The mystic strives to shake himself out of conventional thought patterns, by meditating on the unknowable God in unconventional ways. Our “normal” ways of thought, as Shankara observed, are hopelessly trapped within the duality of subject and object. We divide and distinguish instinctively. For us, things are either-or. God, unfettered by human logic, is also free of the law of contradiction. He is all things and nothing. We can have metaideas of him (that he is not subject to the law of contradiction, for example), but no concrete knowledge, since all positive statements must be immediately negated to retain the total otherness of God.
So we have the mode d’emploi of God, but no description of him as object. As we saw, even Keter, the being closest to Ein Sof, has only an uncertain grasp of him (Keter “knows and does not know” at the same time), but the other Sephirot sense him as a “faint smell”—a fleeting, hard-to-describe sense of presence. This is not knowledge, for Ein Sof is out of reach even for himself (as we said, the term “knowledge” implies duality), but something closer to the unknowledge that Shankara describes as super imposed on the object in order to make knowledge possible.
And yet, when it comes to the ultimate Otherness that we call God, such unknowledge cannot lead to knowledge, but is necessarily a dead end, a dark cul de sac where the mind, suddenly aware of it inadequacy, senses, for a fleeting moment, the possibility of some other “thing,” something indescribable, unheimlich, something utterly different without being the opposite pole in a duality. Plotinus describes the soul’s feeling, as it approaches the One, as a sudden sensation of dread:
The soul or mind reaching towards the formless finds itself incompetent to grasp where nothing bounds it or to take impression where the impinging reality is diffuse; in sheer dread of holding to nothingness, it slips away. The state is painful; often it seeks relief by retreating from all this vagueness to the region of sense, there to rest as on solid ground, just as the sight distressed by the small rests with pleasure on the big.9
If apophasis is successful, its endless string of paradoxes, of contradictions in terms, destabilizes the mind. Instead of slipping, as it normally does, from one pole of the discursive duality to the other, it is suspended momentarily in the middle. Dionysius describes it thus: “Renouncing all that the mind may conceive, wrapped entirely in the intangible and the invisible, he [Moses] belongs completely to him who is beyond everything. Here, being neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united by a completely unknowing inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing.”10 The Dionysian apophasis, then, could be interpreted as a mental game, a manipulation of the mind, aimed at bringing it as close as possible to a temporary (and in this life it can only be temporary) sensation of otherness: “Soul must see in its own way; this is by coalescence, unification; but in seeking thus to know the unity it is prevented by that very unification from recognizing what it has found; it cannot distinguish itself from the object of this intuition.”11 Those brief moments are followed by a return to our normal dualities. The experience can be acknowledged but not described. It has no content. We can, at best, report the faint traces (the perfume) that it has left in our mind.
But there could be another reason for speaking about the unspeakable. Thinkers like Meister Eckhart were not interested in creating temporary short-circuits in the minds of their listeners or readers. What they wanted to create by their notion of the unspeakable God was a symbolic center of gravity that is totally untouched by the failures of human understanding. To some extent, this was suggested by Paul in 1 Corinthians 18–25:
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.” Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
Paul boldly admits the “foolishness” of the Christian message. The foolishness of God ignores the rules of human wisdom, because God’s posited omnipotence implies authority to break all human rules—including the rules of human reason. This is the foundation of Christian mysteries—an authorized defiance of human conventions. The mysterium absolutum of the Trinity, for example (3 = 1), is not an “organic” consequence of primary assumptions as Aristotelian syllogisms are, but a breach. It is a non sequitur, accepted through “faith” in obedience to God’s “will” (or, more accurately, to his particular type of being) as it manifested itself in revelation or in the sacred tradition of the Church.
This submission to God’s ontological freedom is not easy to digest. Theologians are constantly trying to limit its irrational aspects. Philosophers and mystics using negative theology apply a whole array of logical-noise-reduction mechanisms that form part of different theological positions. But there is something they all have in common: appearances notwithstanding, in His “true” essence, God is not a coexistence of contradictions, but beyond contradiction. He is beyond reason and not against reason. Particular saving mechanisms may rise and fall, but these fluctuations do not affect the object of speculation. Secure behind His impenetrable walls, God is the Gordian knot that no argument can untangle or cut.
The metaphysical untouchability of the Almighty—His being “beyond” all understanding—is not just a source of aesthetic and psychological consolations. It has other, more practical aspects as well. For God was obviously not content to remain an ontological statement. At some point, somehow, He broke through His magic circle into the world as we know it and materialized in the most amazing ways. The Plotinian One has miraculously “overflowed” in a series of emanations. Ein Sof has amazingly brought Keter (the first Other) into being. The Hidden God of Dionysius has mysteriously become the Holy Trinity that has created the world in which the Second Person has become flesh.
There is great vagueness about how the passage from total transcendence to immanence actually occurs. Plotinus’s metaphor of overflowing is remarkably unsuitable for describing a being with no limitation, let alone rims. Other metaphors (love exploding, thought materializing, will taking shape) are as problematic. As a last resort, Plotinus could be interpreted as describing a system that has no ontological commitment a system in which the shifts between the One and the many are but “states of mind” or different modes of thinking about the One. But this would not work for monotheists. Believers in the God of Revelation tend to see the world in which that revelation took place as ontologically “real.” The “beyondness” of God in his prelogical state simply releases us from providing explanations for the transition phase. At most, we are to be satisfied with poetic metaphors. How can God suffer the existence of non-God without compromising his oneness? Because nothing is impossible for the Cause of all causes. It is simply beyond our comprehension.
Relying on the principle of the perfect answer-that-cannot-be-explained is not just a logical game. God’s revealed history and His revealed will arouse numerous logical and ethical problems. Why does God behave in this particular way (destroy his creation in a deluge, for example, and then regret it)? Why does He forbid certain morally neutral things (like eating pork and mixing wool and linen) and allow others that are seemingly reprehensible (like sacrificing a goat to Azazel)? Not just because He can (the pre-philosophical Jewish answer), but because He has reasons. What reasons? His ways are mysterious and His wishes incomprehensible. We may find some explanations in the postlogical state, but the prelogical state remains our psychological insurance policy. It is a case of petitio principii (begging the question) in its purest form. Literally, the Latin term means seeking the principle or the first premise. The inexplicable God, who is by definition immune to logical attack, is the rock upon which every church is built. He is there not simply as an insurance policy against effective debunkers, but as the eye of the storm: we may not understand how the divine logic works, but it works and is a logic.
Two brief illustrations might be useful. The first is from twentieth-century Israel, the second from sixteenth-century Germany. Yesha’ayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994) was a Latvian-born Israeli scientist and philosopher. Leibowitz did not have much patience for the poetic expressions of God’s ineffability. Since God is unknowable, there is no point wasting words describing his indescribability. But God has revealed Himself (for reasons that are beyond our comprehension) and has given us a long list of demands (mitzvoth, the commandments). It is our duty to obey these demands without trying to understand them. Indeed, for Leibowitz the highest form of religious devotion is performing the mitzvoth not for any gain or advantage (Leibowitz, like Eckhart, despised cow lovers), but for their own sake (lishman). For Leibowitz, proving God’s existence was futile and trying to understand Him by human reason sacrilegious. God’s authority rested entirely on his inscrutability. With one bold move, numerous difficulties and improbabilities were rendered null and void. The alogical nature of God requires an act of faith. Reason is incapable of comprehending it. But once we have performed this leap (by “deciding” to believe), the rest falls nicely into place and can be handled by means of the system’s inner logic.
Martin Luther (1483–1536) also believed in a Deus Absconditus and he too thought that this ineffable God had the right to command without giving explanations. In The Bondage of the Will, written in response to Erasmus’s treatise on the freedom of the will, Luther writes:
They demand that God should act according to man’s idea of right, and do what seems proper to themselves—or else that He should cease to be God! … Flesh does not deign to give God glory to the extent of believing him to be just and good when He speaks and acts above and beyond the definitions of Justinian’s Code, or the fifth book of Aristotle’s Ethics! No, let the Majesty that created all things give way before a worthless fragment of His own creation! Let the boot be on the other foot, and the Corycian cavern fear those that look into it! So it is “absurd” to condemn one who cannot avoid deserving damnation. And because of this “absurdity” it must be false that God has mercy on whom He will have mercy, and hardens whom He will. He must be brought to order! Rules must be laid down for Him, and He is not to damn any but those who have deserved it by our reckoning!12
God does not demand illogic as a way of approaching existence. Once you accept the basic premise of His perfection per definitionem, all else follows—logically. You may be a social and religious critic (as both Leibowitz and Luther were), but at the core of your religious conviction there remains a call for illogic justified by a hidden logic and an unquestioning obedience.
The hidden has rendered us a great service by being the absolutely pure, perfect source of imperfections and infections. It is to infections and imperfections that we must now turn.