Why Being Rather Than Nothingness? Part X

Dr Martin continues his series on time and reality, discussing how none of us, regardless of our intelligence, shall ever know all that there is to know about God.

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD 

There will never be a time, therefore, when even the best and the brightest bulbs among us shall know all that there is to know concerning God.

"I am not yet so lost in lexicography," writes Dr. Johnson on introducing his acclaimed Dictionary of the English Language, “as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.”

Leaving aside the obvious misogyny of the comparison—at least by today’s progressive standards—the point Dr. Johnson is making is hardly a controversial one. What else is language but an instrument or tool of knowledge whereby words are used to signify certain identifiable things, i.e., realities? Thus are correspondences struck between the daughters of earth and the sons of heaven, with whom harmony and friendship may happily be joined.

Take the word God, for instance. What does it signify? Are there enough daughters of earth around to match the reality behind those three letters? Rather depends on whom you ask, doesn’t it? The authors of the Church’s Catechism, for example, instruct us in the following truth, which applies equally to the world of reason and faith:

God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, image-bound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God.… Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God. (CCC 42)

There will never be a time, therefore, when even the best and the brightest bulbs among us shall know all that there is to know concerning God. Who or what is God exactly? In Himself, that is, never mind the relationship He may have with creation or human history. Indeed, not even the angels have succeeded in penetrating that particular mystery. 

Here is a market no mere creature could ever corner. How could any finite being, however seraphic in beauty or unsurpassed in intelligence, presume to know the Infinite Other? The inner life of God will remain forever beyond the capacity of the created mind to know. Period.

Not only has it never been on reason’s radar to know, it could not ever appear even as the tiniest possible blip. Were reason ever to perfect its native powers, unearthing from its ample tool kit the latest gadgetry available to it, the mind would still fall sadly short. It is the fate of all finite beings, the perennial predicament to which the entire order of created existence is subject, that between ourselves and God no humanly engineered bridge could ever be built to span so infinite a distance. It is among several salient themes of the Bible, later taken up by the three great Cappadocians (Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, along with Gregory of Nazianzus), who never tired of telling us that God is, by definition, Akataleptos, the Incomprehensible One.

Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, along with Gregory of Nazianzus, never tired of telling us that God is, by definition, Akataleptos, the Incomprehensible One.Indeed, if it were deemed possible even in theory to know God as God knows Himself, how then could He remain God, which is to say, transcendent to us? “If all things were in our grasp,” says Gregory of Nyssa, “the Higher Power would not be beyond us.” He would no longer dwell amid the regions of unapproachable light, which is that divinely impenetrable realm we call mystery. Not even the dearest friends of the Deity know Him as He knows Himself. The Cherubic Pilgrim, Angelus Silesius, reminds us of that fact in a lovely little lyric: “The better you know God/ the more you agree / That you are less and less able to express what is he.”

Aquinas surely intuited as much when, in his Commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate, “God is honored by our silence, not because we do not say or inquire into anything about him, but rather because we understand that we are deficient in our understanding of him.”

Here is the note of ineffability we attach to God by dint of who He is. It is the fact that He cannot be, as Gregory of Nyssa neatly puts it, “crowded into a concept.” Another names God’s transcendence, which is both absolute and eternal. Not that He is at all unintelligible, as Henri de Lubac explains in The Discovery of God, which appeared more than 75 years ago and will never go out of print. “He is ineffable in the sense of being above everything that can be said of him…”

Perhaps another analogy may prove helpful. When Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, surmised that by merely putting a monkey before a typewriter and waiting a thousand or more years there would still not have been sufficient time to produce a line from Shakespeare, he captured the problem most admirably. “To be or not to be…”? Forget it. Not even the cleverest chimp in the world could pull off a prodigy of that sort. If the difference between men and monkeys is such that no simian could possibly tap out the letters “To be or not to be,” never mind all the endless eons spent awaiting inspiration from the monkey muse, imagine the infinitely more infinite difference between ourselves and God.

“Either an angel fell from the heavens with a thunderous crash,” comments Chesterton in his usual witty way, “or one of the animals went entirely off its head. There is no third way.” It is only we men who go about wearing sackcloth and ash, beating our breasts in sorrow for our sins. Animals do not do such things. “That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton.”

Throw a frisbee at an ape and he will not return the toss; instead, he will most likely try and eat it. In other words, there is simply no common basis upon which real comparisons may be made. This is true whether it be man and the higher primates or God and the highest primate of all, to wit, man.

“God is honored by our silence, not because we do not say or inquire into anything about him, but rather because we understand that we are deficient in our understanding of him.”

-St. Thomas Aquinas; Commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate

Think of Dante, as he moves through the final canto of the Paradiso, and follow dutifully along. Whereupon we watch, with utter astonishment, while he stands transfixed before Triune God Himself, seeing at once and at the very heart of reality the unmistakably human face of Jesus. That God, the I AM WHO AM of Exodus 3, should suddenly appear in the convincing guise of men, “wearing our effigy,” sends him into a perfect swoon, reducing Dante, the world’s greatest Catholic poet, to a kind of gibbering. 

So stupefied, in fact, is he by the appearance of the human face of God that he is left clueless before a code he can never crack. “Like the geometer whose mind applies / To square the circle, he cannot for all his wit / Find the right formula, howe’er he tries.” Alas, it is not a problem he nor any other creature will ever be given the wit to solve. To reach for the heights of God, to see how the immanent Trinity is put together—that is not a flight, laments Dante, for his or any man’s wings.

Unless, of course, God were Himself to give us what we cannot ourselves get. To ravish the heart with what the head cannot know. Yet, it is true that nature’s ascent will never reach high enough to touch the face of God; but grace can give us far headier stuff than mere nature can hope to have. 

To be sure, Dante now knows this, the last lines of the poem prove it. And, so, there he stands, perched upon the highest pinnacle of reason and the imagination, knowing full well, “my wings were not / Sufficient,” when, all at once, “faith’s flash” comes to him, “to supply

My mind with that sharp blow by which it got

Its wish. Imagination, there on high—

Too high to breathe free, after such a climb—

Had lost its power; but now, just like a wheel

That spins so evenly it measures time

By space, the deepest wish that I could feel

And all my will, were turning with the love

That moves the sun and all the stars above.

Desire and will, given what mind and imagination cannot know, turn now with the love that moves everything, including (O strangest revelation of all!) God Himself, who is absolute and eternal love itself. Only then will all that had heretofore remained hidden and resistant to reason suddenly show itself, unraveling its refulgence in the most dazzling display—an eternal burst of clarity and truth, no less—a Love too bright for created eye to see.