I have expanded on this description, in order to
pose the following question:
If
everything that I said – which is necessary for the cognizance of an
object – is applied to the cognizance (knowledge) of God,
what will happen straight away?
-An
absolute failure to apply it at all, and, for the following reasons:
A.
Because first of all, we apply the exclusion method,
that “A” is not “B”. This means that in order to know “A”, it is
presupposed that there is something else nearby, which I must
exclude. Therefore, we are obliged to accept that along with God,
something else always co-exists. Even if that something is
nothing. Be careful! We are looking at very profound notions
here. Notions like ‘creation out of nothing’. It is a huge issue.
When we say that God creates something from nothing, what is that
‘nothing’, if it isn’t His self? To many, (Thomas Aquinatus and
Karl Barth) this ‘nothing’ is a thing that God repulses. In other
words, it is as though the ‘nothing’ already exists, and God then
says: “No, the nothing shall not act. Let the world come into
being!” The ‘nothing’ is rejected. So, you are repulsing
something –in a certain sense- in order to relate God. If you
do
apply this method to God, you must suppose that God is that which is
not God. And what is that which is not God? It is impossible to
compare God to other things, because you lose the meaning of God.
In order for God to be God, He must be so unique, that He does not
co-exist with anything else. Hence, I cannot ‘know’ Him, by
the method of excluding something else.
B. The
second element that we mentioned – description – which has the
prerequisites of space and time (remember, I cannot relate
something, without describing it within a space and time), again
cannot be applied to God. We cannot describe God, because in
order to describe God, we must introduce His Existence into time and
space. But if you do introduce time and space, then God
becomes a creation that has a beginning, just as time and space
presuppose a certain beginning; hence the distance between objects,
this void. We cannot say that God is describable. Even the Fathers
referred to Him as “indescribable”. You cannot describe God.
‘Indescribable’ means that not only is it impossible to say anything
about God, but it is also impossible to inscribe limits (boundaries)
around Him. You cannot say something about God as you would say of
the table, i.e., that the table has this shape. Consequently, we
cannot apply this method of cognizance either.
And here we also have a very delicate issue. We are
accustomed – mainly from Scholastic Theology onward – to saying that
we can ‘know’ God, through His attributes; for example, in every
dogmatic area, we have a complete analysis of His attributes: God is
Benign, Almighty, Powerful, etc. There is a grave danger here, and
I had stressed it, when I said that in order to ‘know’ an object on
the basis of its attributes, it is necessary to draw those
attributes from an experience of other objects. I am not supposed
to detect them, exclusively within my object. For instance, if I say
that this table is strong, and this attribute of strength exists only within my table, I am not truly specifying it. I often
give my students the example of the clock. Take a clock, and show
it to a native, a primitive person who has never seen a clock, and
ask him to relate it to something, as soon as he sees it in motion.
He will throw it down and say that it is some kind of animal. You
see, it reminds him of something (else): an animal. He cannot
‘know’ it as a clock, because he has never seen a clock before. He
has only seen animals, which are capable of motion. We see
how his basic method of cognizance was to use familiar things, in
order to recognize the new. This indicates that ‘knowing’ is always
linked to a prior experience; in other words, objects are classified
on the basis of existing experience.
For
example, I know that a clock is that thing, which has those characteristics. That is when I recognize it as a clock.
If I don’t recognize it, if I have never seen a clock before,
then I can’t state that it is a clock. Thus, I reach the
conclusion that the attributes that I allocate to an object during
the course of cognizance (knowledge) have all been taken from
attributes that relate to other objects and are never unique to
that, one, single object.
(Imagine
someone so unique from the aspect of physical anatomy that one
cannot ‘know’ him by relating him to the experience one has from
other people. It will be impossible for a doctor to examine him; in
order for the doctor to recognize his ailment, he must be identical
to other people. A doctor can never truly ‘know’ anything, if it is
unique. All our knowledge is dependent precisely on the hypothesis
that the objects of our knowledge resemble each other; that they
have common characteristics).
So, if
this is true, then what can we do about God? From where can we
draw the attributes of God? For instance, so that I can say that He
is “benevolent”. From where did I draw this attribute of
benevolence? From experience of course; I know that so-and-so is a
benevolent person. I know God’s power. I draw this from the
experience I have of powerful people. Thus, after this projection
of my experience, I can reach God. God is thus a creation of your
own imagination, your own experience. But those attributes aren’t
exclusive to God; others have them also. And that is why so many
people replace God with those objects. Why should I be afraid of
God and not be afraid of lightning? After all, both of them are
‘powerful’.
Attributes - even the most affirmative ones, such as ‘benevolent’ –
are still attributes that we borrow from our knowledge and
experience of other things, which God isn’t.
I am characteristically underlining the notion of
God as Father, which is one of the most difficult meanings, for the
reason that anthropomorphism penetrates this theme very profusely.
We teach our children from their early years to refer to God as ‘our
Father’, but in what sense? It is on the basis of the children’s
experience of their father at home. They bestow their father
certain attributes, for instance: that he is stronger than them;
that he can do things that they can’t; that he protects them, etc..
So, with all of these amassed together, the child forms an idea of
God, the way that we have given it to the child. The child embraces
it, and then what happens? When puberty arrives, and freedom starts
to set in, and the child wants to rid itself of the guardianship of
the father in the house, that is when the crisis of its faith
in God appears, because all this patronizing that the youth wants to
shake off, is entangled in its conscience along with God, and the
revolution - the reaction against authority in general - leads the
youth towards a revolution against God.
And this
is the precise moment that the crisis of atheism appears; whether
one views it at a personal level, or at a level of civilization’s
history. In cultural eras, where we find exactly this emphasis on
freedom that opposes authority, that is when the idea of God
is discarded. Why? Because we came to ‘know’ God; we related Him,
on the basis of experiences and attributes that we acquired from our
family. It is therefore impossible, if you correctly preserve the
idea of God and wish to relate God ( because this is what it’s all
about), to avoid all those dangers and not give God any
attributes that can be found in other objects.
And that is why this route that I described ( which
reaches the point of using familiar objects ) if applied to God,
will have ugly consequences. The cognizance of God is very often
confused with the results that this cognizance offers. Do you know
how many people lose their faith in God, because He doesn’t answer
their prayers? Just as I choose to reject this table if it is of no
use to me and I ignore it altogether, thus, in the same way, if God
is a useless object, I choose to ignore Him. And the word ‘ignore’
does not simply imply that He doesn’t exist, but that He doesn’t
exist for me; it is I who do not know Him; it is I
who ignores Him. There is such a thing as a conscious ignorance – a
willed ignorance. You can see what kind of danger the cognizance of
God – gnosiology – contains, when it is based on the attributes of
God. It can lead to an outright atheism, because by definition, God
cannot be fitted into these molds, neither can He become an object
of exploitation. If this were the case, then at any given moment,
just as I push a button to start up a machine, I could likewise push
the prayer button and wait for the answer to come. This would be an
objectification of God, and what is worse, it is the demoting of
God, down to the status of an object.
Thus, we
cannot speak of God’s attributes and then attain cognizance based on
these attributes, because that would be dangerous. And of course we
cannot also resort to any categorizing that includes place and time,
because we already said that time and space came into being during
Creation and are therefore not applicable to God. So, the question
is raised: “How then can I relate God?” Is there anything to be
found in experience that could show me the way?
Is it possible to relate something, without going
into all this procedure of objectification, of exclusion, of
attributes and of utilization? Can I relate something, without
doing all this? If I can, then there is a chance that I can
also relate God. If I can’t, then one of the following two
is happening: either I cannot relate God at all, and
consequently I cannot say that I ‘know’ God, or, I withdraw
from this attempt to express Him on the basis of experience, i.e.,
“I know God, but I cannot express it, I cannot give a meaning to it.
Therefore I cannot apply gnosiology; I cannot say anything about
God”.
These
two forms of response to the question posed, have already been
expressed, repeated and are still heard in our times. The one reply
takes on the name of negation, which signifies that you
cannot say anything about God – there is absolute silence; we may
have cognizance perhaps, but without any possibility of actually
putting cognizance into words. The other reply is a form of
mysticism that allows a phrasing of cognizance of God, provided that
we are referring to emotions and experiences which, in an extreme
form of mysticism, obliterate the distinction between the one
who knows (the recognizer) and the one who is known (the
recognized). This is why religions applied these two Gnosiologies to
a broad extent, and created a certain confusion to us Orthodox;
because Negation was developed by the Greek Fathers in a certain
way, while mysticism was also present.
This
combination of mysticism and negation became the subject of a
special expounding, and especially in our times, by a renowned
Russian theologian, Vladimir Lossky, who wrote “The Mystic Theology
of the Eastern Church”, that caused some confusion. So, the problem
indeed arose: if this is the way, if this is
gnosiology, i.e., through a negation that claims I do not
know God at all, the question eventually remains: “What can I say
affirmatively about God, and how can I form an affirmative
Gnosiology and not just a negative one? It is easy to say “I can’t
say anything about God”. It is easy to say what God is not.
But, when we reach the point of asking: “What affirmative
thing can I say about God?”, the problem is, not to fall into
the trap and say things that I have borrowed from prior experience
of other things, because those other things cannot be placed on the
same level as God, otherwise they become anthropomorphic
projections. I must therefore say something about God, which,
however, must not be derived from the method that I use in order to
‘know’ things.
Negation made its appearance in history as a problem
of contrast between God and the world. In order to know God, you
must go beyond the world; you must leave the world behind. This is
a method that we find in neo-Platonism: the principle of “beyond the
essence”. With Dionysios Areopagitis, this method took on the form
of using expressions with the prefix “hyper” (=super, beyond). For
example, whatever affirmative thing we say about this world, we
should use the prefix “hyper” when we refer to God. We refer to God
as ‘benevolent’, but, because this expression is taken from the
experience we have of people, this could result in
anthropomorphism. In order therefore to avoid anthropomorphism, we
say that God is hyper-benevolent. ‘Hyper-benevolent’ does not imply
(in this usage) that He is exceedingly benevolent, which is a
superficiality of ‘benevolent’; it implies rather a surpassing.
It is the same as when we say that God is not ‘essence’, but
‘hyper-essence’ (Greek: yper-ousios) : beyond the essence.
This is why the terminology of
Negational Theology – which commences from Dionysios Areopagitis –
refers to God as ‘hyper-god’; he means to stress that all the
categorizing that we use from our experience of the world, contains
the danger of anthropomorphism. That is why we go beyond; and the
term ‘hyper’ is precisely that which implies ‘beyond’.