metonymy4u

The story of God is the story of the dance between reason and revelation. Do we know God or does God know us? Is God discovered in reason or revealed in mystery? The Hebrew testament is the first manifestation of disclosed, as opposed to inducted, truth. The stories of Yahweh do not have Abraham and Moses trying to figure out what God is all about. They do not cogitate. They vacate. They travel and they journey. They suffer. They persevere. They see, and return home. They bring nothing at all deduced or built with human hands. Not questions, nor debates, nor critical disquisition. Only a ready-made vocabulary of imperatives. For Abraham brought only the unquestioned covenant and Moses the unquestionable commandments.

On the other side of the dialectic is the philosophical tradition, with its logical proofs of God. This tradition is usually credited to St. Anselm of Canterbury, writing in the 11th century. However classical Greek philosophy contained earlier versions, that went something like this: Plato supposed that for every pattern we are aware of in the world, there must be an occurrent antecedent event (cause). For example, we notice that the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is the same for all circles. Plato supposes that for this to be a real pattern in the world there must be a cause that makes the situation the way it is and not otherwise. There must be something that causes all circles to exhibit a constant circumference to diameter ratio, rather than allowing it to vary from circle to circle. In this way and in various places in his dialogues, Plato reasons from particular data to a general statement about what must be true for our observations to have the reliability that they do. Following this paradigm, one can of course abstract from all possible patterns in the world (number, extension, time, angle, color, utility, etc.) and arrive at the most general pattern of all: existence itself. Which Plato called “the form of the good.”

This is the ontological proof. Noticing that things are, that things exist following a pattern of being we call “existence,” we can come up with a hypothetical cause of all existence (God). And in order to be a real cause of all that exists, God must of course exist, because to talk of a non-existent cause of something that exists would be utter nonsense. ¹ Thus the existence of God is guaranteed by the fact that we clearly perceive our own existence and this, conveniently, also guarantees the immortality of the knowing mind (the soul). Proofs of this sort crop up throughout the literature of Europe, from the middle ages until the 18th century. Some of them affirm the immortality of the soul (Plato, Descartes, Leibniz) while others concentrate on proving just the existence of God (Anselm, Aquinas).

In this way we have the Abrahamic tradition in which God simply is, and appears to his chosen prophets on earth, and on the other hand the philosophical tradition in which God is a necessary product of reason.

So what’s the problem?

Well, the problem for us is that in 1781, Immanuel Kant pretty much killed the ontological proof by showing that it leads to mutually exclusive conclusions. Which is exactly what Nietzsche meant when he said that God is dead. This led to a strange situation: the loss of all meaning in the west.

Oops.

Because if God as an object of knowledge is dead, and knowledge is meant to be the arbiter of truth and meaning in the world, well…then what? …. Is this the ghastly conclusion of two thousand years of rational inquiry? Does reason lead to unreason? Rationality to irrationality? Order to chaos?

Of course the question does not seem so remarkable to us, 200 years later. What the early existentialists found so astounding, namely, that the entire western world could suddenly find itself foundering on the cold hard rocks of (so called) scientific nihilism, that “enlightenment” could lead to despair, is not quite so surprising to the children of the atom bomb, the car bomb, the plane bomb, the cyber-attack, and the razor blade.

God as object was dead. In its place was: Enlightenment. Reason. Hierarchy. Obedience. Immanence. Tradition. And habit.

But what about the other side of things?

If rationality could not secure the divine essence through deduction or logical prescription, what about divine visitation? If reason of logic was untrustworthy could we not still have recourse to an alternative reason of wonder? Of seeing? Of discovery? Of unfounded delight?

After all, everyone has had the experience of going on a journey and finding something unexpected along the way…right? That’s not so strange to contemplate…is it? So perhaps God is not to be calculated, but found….Perhaps when God dies in “objectivity,” she is yet reborn in “subjectivity?” What I think remains unanswered, even today, is whether there is yet still a way to dis-cover…revelation…?…carried for a moment in the winds of memory…?….Is it…pure courage? … Or poetry?

¹ Actually, it was Anselm who introduced this little wrinkle into things. Plato mysteriously just claims that God must exceed existence, which is ambiguous. Does something that “exceeds” existence still exist as something containing existence, but also containing much more? Or is God, as that which exceeds existence, something entirely other than existence?