The general predicates made of God and creation respectively (as fragmentarily enumerated supra) are fairly intuitive, and indeed very little in the way of theological training is needed to know how to sort certain adjectives into the piles of ‘God’ and ‘not God’ respectively. But again, this does not prevent us from either implicitly or explicitly believing that when we speak of the former we are simply describing the foremost entity, the being above all beings, the king of the jungle who demands and rightfully deserves our timorous veneration by way of nothing more than his flawless exemplification of certain valued characteristics – so, really, exactly the same logic we would use to describe a particularly competent and magnanimous political leader, albeit expanded to encompass a cosmic scope (and lacking the rather humbling scandals which surface about two years into their reign). This belief is incorrect.
Although there are many theological and philosophical intellects who far preceded him (and, I would argue, far outstripped him) in this endeavour, I might here cite Martin Heidegger’s formulation of what he termed the ‘ontological difference’ as a hopefully clear way of articulating what it means to say that God and creation are different. Heidegger lamented the ‘Seinsvergessenheit’ – the ‘forgetting of Being’ – festering at the core of practically all Western metaphysics since the time of Plato, believing that many philosophical culprits committed the cardinal sin of mistaking Being itself for a mere being; for failing to distinguish between the ‘ontic’ (what for our purposes we can safely call all things in creation) and the ‘ontological’ (God). Heidegger was no theologian, and had some rather suspect opinions of the enterprise as a whole, but he does helpfully draw the line at that place over which many contemporary religious people rather brazenly stumble in attempts to defend their faiths. To aid with conceptualising this distinguishment, we might think of Aquinas’ formulation by way of an exposition of Boethius:
‘Therefore he [Boethius] says first that being and that-which-is are diverse. This diversity is not here to be referred to the realities… but to the notions or intentions themselves. For we signify one thing by saying ‘to be’, and something else by saying ‘that-which is’, just as we also signify one thing when we say ‘to run’, and something else by saying ‘one running’.1
To expand: the distinguishment here is not between a set of ‘runners’ – not even between the average runners and the quickest runner; not even an infinitely quick runner – but between the ‘runner’ and ‘running’ itself. Strictly speaking, in the frame of this analogy, there is no such thing as ‘running’. It is not something tangible that can be grasped. If the scientist were given free roam to dissect the runner, at no point would they encounter ‘running’ as a discrete force or concept dwelling within their constitution, not even as the totality. And yet the ‘runner’ ceases to be such if not for ‘running’ itself. There is no way of defining the former without the latter, and if somehow the notion of ‘running’ ceased to be, then the designation of ‘runner’ would necessarily follow suit.
In any case, the basic logic is this: given God is not an ontic entity, he cannot be located anywhere in the totality of creation, even as the invisible supernatural superhero discussed above. When we speak of his Being, then, we are not speaking in the same manner as the being of a water bottle, a person, an angel (should you so believe), gravity, a black hole, or an atom. All these are ontic; forces and entities which are interconnected with and thus conditioned by every other ontic being in the totality of creation. God is ontological; which is to say that we (as ontic beings) know him only through, with, or by the ontic, but can never truly know or experience him directly, because between us there resides an interminable, qualitative, infinite divide. But at the very same time, despite being entirely removed from creation (and thus in a very real sense may be said to not exist), he is also, strictly speaking, the only Being that exists. After all, the ontic does not have Being in itself, and only exists through God – not as a result of some distant, isolated, prehistoric act of causality, as though the flicking of the primordial domino (precisely as some theists try to depict the Big Bang) before standing back and allowing Newtonian physics to tick away in its self-sufficient clockwork, but as the act of creation which occurs infinitely in the divine Now, the eternal present by which God experiences himself. So ‘creation’, rather than being akin to human inventions which can only be conceived as occurring over a period of time (N.B. how many mythical cosmogonies tend to use this image), is the very being of all things, from their incipience to their conclusion. You are in the act of creation right now – indeed, you are the act of creation.
This should alert us to the realisation that God therefore cannot be an agent aside from and distant to the created order, even as its temporally original cause. Instead, he must be rather more intimate with it. If the ontic is always and eternally dependent on God (not just because he caused its provenance in days of yonder, but because it literally cannot be without him at any moment), then the very objects around you now are utterly contingent on his Necessity, and so, like the runner, are nothing without God. Ibn ‘Arabi, arguably the most ravishingly brilliant thinker in all of Sufism - and there are many of that ilk - described creation through various metaphorical images, one such (in his magisterial Fusus al-hikam, or ‘The Ringstones of Wisdom’) asserting that it could be reasonably described as the ‘shadow’ of God. We might imagine one cast by a tree beneath the gloaming. Creation has existence – the silhouette is on the ground there, clearly – but at the same time it is entirely inconceivable without the tree; and in a real sense, if the tree is said to be God or Being itself, and thus without opposition or rival, the shadow cannot be said to exist at all, and that it is only the tree that exists, with the shadow merely being an extension, an overflowing, or an emanation (to employ a Neoplatonic parlance) of its Being and so truthfully no different from itself.
Frightful stuff, I know. I do not here intend to pre-emptively repel all manner of wild accusations of ‘pantheism’ and its dangerously ill-defined cognates, so much as simply ask the reader to whom this proves especially opprobrious to acquaint themselves more thoroughly with the religious tradition whence they hail, and to recognise that Sikh, Muslim, Jew, Baha’i, Hindu, Christian, even (especially, I would argue – again, a discussion for another time) Buddhist alike all have a plethora of literature to engage within the bounds of their native tradition – though I must recommend reading outside one’s own – in consonance with what I have just described. In any case I shall apologise for the digression, which I hope has at the very least elucidated some matters, and hastily return to the original subject.
Apropos Heidegger, I think it fair to say that all those who adopt the psychology I have described, and who conceive of God as ontic rather than ontological, have ‘forgotten’ him. Ultimately, the question that one must direct at oneself, however uncomfortable the scrutiny may prove, is whether one is attached to the dogma of one’s religion because they actually love God, or because they love the security and guidance provided by the parental arm of an authoritative religious culture, often with one or more political powers at their zenith. To return to the job example: the issue here is not so much with desiring good things in the world as it is desiring good things, and then thinking God to be some extrinsic, secondary force who, if we happen to follow his rules with sufficient consistency and piety, will aid us in our attainment of that thing over there; that thing which is fundamentally distinct from him. Desire, as featured in many of the aforementioned traditions, is fundamentally oriented toward God; not because he is a particularly desirable ontic thing (like that job, relationship, wealth, legacy, etc. that we fancy), but because he is Being itself, and thus wanting anything is wanting something that depends entirely upon him, and indeed – as becomes fairly apparent to any human being when they have lived in the world and wanted things within it for long enough – arises only as a symptom of our ever-greater yearning for transcendence.
And yet, again, the opposite seems to be suggested in much of the language used by some to describe the afterlife in Abrahamic traditions, who by a combination of bad metaphysics and bad textual hermeneutics come to literally believe that heaven and hell are simply a collection of good and bad things respectively; again labouring under the general principle that God is simply a kindly and just benefactor who apportions the former to the faithful and the latter to the disobedient.
Again; the change of thinking is subtle, and so perhaps difficult to grasp. Yet nothing I have said here, I would firmly argue, contradicts anything about Biblical, Qur’anic, or Vedic (just three of many possible examples) narrative and imagery. This is precisely because how one construes the imagery within those texts is something that – hopefully this point is settling in – alters from generation to generation, and as such no matter how fervently one likes to believe that their particular holy book, whether in composition, language, or interpretation, has remained untouched and undefiled by the vicissitudes of history, and has always said exactly the same thing to all people who have read it, and – again, rather conveniently – if only all people could see the text as I see it, then all doctrinal issues would be resolved.
Exegesis is another subject I cannot possibly address in depth here, but some passing mention is perhaps necessary given it is the most likely objection to much of what is being argued. Basic hermeneutics would do us some good: to form even the most rudimentary assessment of a text, one must bring with them a quite indefatigable array of presuppositions, prejudices, assumptions, and a priori faculties which limit and direct the orientation of our reading. Even the laziest and least rigorous of all modes of interpretation – fundamentalism – despite trying to reduce the text to the bare minimum of naked literality, still functions according to the constitutive role that the ‘fundamental’ criteria set on the text provide. But beyond even this, I would ask quite innocently where the priorities actually lie in this case. If there are three elements here: the reader, the fundamentalist method, and the text itself, we must surely know that the middle of these is not inherent to the latter, but merely an import of the former. This then begs the question - if we do not derive it from the text, whence does it come?
If one’s criteria for, say, Biblical study is the assessment of all stories according to their historicity, then clearly one is engaged not in a theological reading, but a late modern one. The believer who fervently tries to argue that the Exodus was a historical event, for example, is worshipping at the feet of post-Enlightenment criticism, implicitly accepting that the bounds of historicity or rationality are all that could possibly legitimise the authority of a text, and from thence desperately attempting to exculpate Scripture in the eyes of secularism. For many of the defended tales, there is nothing in the text itself which necessitates its historicity: that some people believe the modern criteria to be what is entailed by a sacred work being ‘the word of God’ is rather telling regarding the location of their true loyalties. Under this impression, God shows his splendour by how successfully he conforms to the epistemic standards conjured up by rational human beings; suddenly, the task of apologetics seems to be akin to Odysseus’ return to Ithaca – he is lauded only insofar as he fulfils the test of those suitors far inferior to him, but so long as he does not, he remains a rather feeble, senile indigent who should not have a place at the table (and is this not exactly what modernity has come to think of theology as an intellectual endeavour?). I must say I find this manner of exegesis more than a little confused: intending to pay the utmost deference to divine authority, the fundamentalist advocates for a method which should prove at the very least mildly insulting to the honestly pious sensibility.
Unfortunately fundamentalism, in all its squalor, seems to be the default hermeneutic for this religious psychology. Implicitly disbelieving in God, believing instead in religion, the notion that one could have a book which is claimed to be God’s word, and thus possesses an authority slightly less dubious than the all-too-human leaders who likewise demand your obedience, is once again very attractive. To ease the impatience at the foot of the mountain, many need a consistent voice of direction, a particular tangible object one can grab and feel, a text whose pages they may flip open and then (for nothing here is problematic so far) describe as ‘objectively true’, ‘incontrovertible’, and – strangest of all, because this surely means they haven’t actually read the text – ‘entirely consistent’. And the anguish of Moses’ absence is so unbearable that one would cling to these arbitrary readings even if it means directly contradicting theological common sense (believing, as some Christians honestly do, that the God who implores us to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ (Matt. 19:19) is also the one who exhorts genocide and mass war rape (Num. 31)). To them, Scripture itself becomes God, and God becomes only an ancillary principle to which one defers post hoc to justify the authority of Scripture. It is in this way that Scripture itself becomes an idol.
My attempt is not to problematise anything to do with the venerated Scriptures themselves, but to problematise the rather clumsy inability to distinguish between their content and the interpretive faculty always at work whenever a community receives and professes them. Be careful here: what does it mean to say you believe in the Vedas, the Qur’an, the Guru Granth Sahib, the Bible, etc.? Surely we are aware that this is a slightly more sophisticated form of belief than saying ‘I believe it will rain tomorrow’ (which is an estimate that cannot be verified by reason) or ‘I believe in you’ (which is an indication of sentiment that has little to do with reason)? What is it that is so markedly sacred about the criteria of stringent rationality or historicity that could not be more fully accomplished with an embrace of the notion that religious truth often may well (though not always, of course) reside beyond these stifling modern palisades? That I say ‘not always’ should be of note: perhaps to many this seems a matter of sheer opposition, of dichotomy, of us-or-them (recall the imperialism mentioned supra), of believing either sheer history or sheer myth, either God exists or he does not, and that there could never possibly be anything which transcends and enfolds both poles; a manner of living that, well, lives, and so devotes itself not to particular aspects of existence vulnerable to negation, but to the rich plenitude of that life which so frequently and delightfully transgresses the limitations we human beings tend to arbitrarily place upon it.
Once ‘faith’ is unanchored from the implicit shackles of modern rationalism, all features of religious culture, whether textual or liturgical, ethical or doctrinal, are liberated to become what they really are: namely, metaphors for the God of whom nothing can be said literally. Perhaps ‘literally’ is inappropriate here, for I understand this word to do much heavy lifting in these discussions, often without sufficient definition. Consequently, I might replace it with more philosophically technical nomenclature: ‘univocally’. That is, in contradistinction from equivocity (difference) and analogy (difference-and-unity),2 predicating the sheer unity of all language with its referents; such that saying ‘the girl is loving’ and ‘God is loving’ is to use ‘loving’ in exactly the same sense, without qualitative difference, their variegation only a matter of greater or lesser fulfilment of that common characteristic.
What is perhaps most baffling for those with a more developed understanding of theology and religion is the fact that fundamentalists will fight tooth and nail to preserve the historicity of certain narratives, and resolve even to build entire arks and museums to defiantly exculpate their delusion, when the hill upon which they are dying is, from the vantage of proper theology, an entirely superfluous one. Again: one must interrogate one’s true allegiances. If your allegiance is not to the religious life, the life which happily mixes myth with legend with history and loses nothing because of it - indeed, gains a great wealth - but is instead to clear, delimited, rational fact (which in itself is of course no bad thing, so long as it is duly recognised as only one means of understanding the world), then you will be a fundamentalist. And once the fundamentalist realises that their position is a rather embarrassingly untenable one, they will likely be swept up in the deluge described above, and flow away from that nonsense altogether. But here is where we have difficulty. This event can be often located and detailed with some precision: it typically occurs anywhere in the adolescent years, perhaps spanning from the ages of thirteen to twenty, and in the majority of cases results in – horror of horrors – teenage atheism.
Part III to come.
In librum Boetti De Hebdomadibus expositio, lectio 2, 39. See also Lorenz Puntel, Being and God: A Systematic Approach in Confrontation with Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Marion (Northwestern University Press, 2011).
Spoilers for the curious: this is the correct answer from the three. See Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis, trans. John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014).