The Unknowable God

By Ignacio L. Götz

Most contemporary Christians are polytheists. They believe in many gods—unawares, of course. There is a Father-god, depicted old and white-haired; there is a Son-god, middle-aged, identified with Jesus of Nazareth; and there is a Spirit-god, symbolized by a dove. Many artists have depicted this trinity, like El Greco, who painted his "The Trinity" in 1578. These three gods are believed to constitute only one divinity, but very few ordinary Christians could explain how this could be the case. This plurality of gods is the reason why Christianity is reviled by Jews and Muslims who affirm steadfastly the unicity of God and who ban any pictorial representation of the divinity. The very first Christians, the family and friends of Jesus, who were Jews, would not have held such a pagan belief, but their writings were destroyed by later adherents, so we lack the evidence to prove this.Christians claim that the Trinity has been revealed, but the fact is that such revelation is disproved by science and philosophy. So why not transcend this trinity in a contemplation of the One Unknowable God of all? Why not learn to live without knowing what God is, being satisfied with the belief that God is neither male nor female, neither triad nor monad, but simply the Divine Incognito?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098060169

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The Unknowable God

Ignacio L. Götz

Copyright © 2020 by Ignacio L. Götz

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

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Table of Contents

Prolegomena to Any Future Theologizing

Legenda Inusitata

A Certain Sense of His Presence

Deus Absconditus/a/um

Quodlibets on Living a Life without Concluding

The eternally sucking gorge of the void.

—C. G. Jung

Among the secret things of the Lord, the supreme secret is the Lord himself.

—Jack Miles

What God shall we adore with our oblation?

—Rigveda X, 121. 1.

I am unknowable!

—Devi Upanishad 26.

Introduction

Theology is always potentially idolatrous.

—Karen Armstrong

This book is a sustained effort to demonstrate that God, especially the Christian God, is unknowable. Perhaps more accurately, that God cannot be defined. Perhaps better, we cannot know God to the point that we can define God and the attributes (if any) that characterize the deity. It goes counter to the entire theological enterprise that churns out literature that ignores the unknowability and undefinability of God. In this, it follows the example of St. Paul who, in his speech to the Athenians gathered in the Areopagus, claimed to preach to them the unknown God some of them worshiped. This God, Paul claimed, was the Hebrew creator God whose Son had been raised from the dead to judge the living and the dead.

The mention of the resurrection of Jesus threw the audience into a tizzy, a strange event because resurrection was not unknown to the Greeks as their stories attest. Asklepios, the physician, was said to have raised a man from the dead, and Heracles raised Alcestis, the wife of King Admetus, back to life. Plato, in his Politeia, Book X, tells the story of the warrior Er, who was killed in battle but returned to life after twelve days to give an astrophysical description of the afterlife.

While Paul was in Athens, waiting for Silas and Timothy, he walked around the city and, according to him, came upon an altar with an inscription To an Unknown God (Acts 17:23). According to Pausanias, there were many such altars throughout the city ascribed to gods called unknown.¹ Paul used these words as the opening for his speech.

He assumed, of course, that Jesus was unknown to his hearers and made an effort to make this unknown God known to them. Paul did not imply that God Godself is therefore knowable: this God is knowable, but God Godself need not be. In fact, Paul, a good Jew till his conversion, would have been keenly aware that the Commandments forbade any depiction of God for no other reason than that no one had ever known God.

I side, therefore, with Augustine who wrote: Let a pious confession of ignorance be preferred to a rash claim to knowledge. For to have the slightest glimpse of God is a great blessing, but to comprehend God is impossible.²

*****

In one of his books—which was first a famous open lecture—Sartre tells the story of a mad woman who used to claim that God spoke to her over the telephone. How do you know it is God? her doctor asked.

He says it’s God, she answered.³

More than a billion Christians and more than two billion Muslims claim that God speaks to them in their Scriptures. When asked, How do you know it is God? they answer, He says it’s God. But we do not consider them mad or in any way disturbed. That is what they believe, and we accept their beliefs graciously.

Now, I intend to prove in the first chapter of this book that their belief that God speaks to them is unfounded. It cannot be sustained. Well, you say, that’s why it is a belief because we give to it allegiance and credence beyond the evidence that we can sum up rationally. But the point is that no belief statements such as theirs can be sustained at all because what they claim to attest to, a revealing God, is obfuscated by the very statements themselves. And the proof is ready at hand: no two theologians, and no two believers, can agree on what they say God has revealed to them or even on what God is.

For example, right now there is this new belief system, Open Theism—which its proponents claim God has truly revealed—that is denied by a large segment of believing Christians. And in Islam, Sunnis are still battling Shias with all the animosity and viciousness they can muster. We cannot produce agreement because the tenets themselves of what is supposed to be revealed are mutually incompatible which, of course, is to be expected when the core of the belief itself, God, remains always unknown.

In short, I intend to prove that revelation is impossible, especially as regards to the Trinity. I also intend to show that the Christian belief in the Trinity was denied and/or differently conceived from what became eventually established as the orthodoxy. In doing theology, we usually pay attention to the lines of agreement, but there were many views that were forgotten and/or suppressed but which were also orthodox. Such were the views of the Judeo-Christian followers of Jesus. These views have been poorly studied, and what I have to offer is merely a glimpse of what is there, waiting to be discovered and studied.

I offer then a historical-theological approach to contemplation based on the writings of several of the great luminaries of the Christian spiritual tradition. An extended Appendix seeks to supplement this offering with a simple practical guide to meditation and contemplation.

A fourth chapter deals with the possibility of a Beatific Vision; that is, the vision the blessed in heaven have of the essence of God. It also deals with the contemporary claim made by some Evangelical theologians that God’s providence must retreat before the fact of the human freedom to choose, a position that was debated between Pelagius and Augustine and, a thousand years later, between Calvinists and Roman Catholics; and interestingly, between Dominican and Jesuit theologians. This so-called controversy de Auxiliis remains unsettled since 1748 when the Pope put an end to the mutual condemnations.

Chapter 5 contains sundry essays and comments on living a life without conclusions, as Camus suggested. The format is peculiar. During the late Middle Ages, the practice in the universities was for the masters to hold public discussions (disputations), now and then, on particular points of philosophy or theology. Classes would be cancelled, and the external community was invited to participate, which they could easily do because most of the educated people spoke Latin.

The presentations by the masters followed a conventional format with short propositions being enunciated, proved through a syllogistic process, and then the floor was opened to objections, which were also made in syllogistic form. After the whole process was over, the master would revise his notes, the objections presented and his own answers, and he would publish the entire text under a general title, for example, De Ente et Essentia (On Being and Essence) of Aquinas and his De Veritate (On Truth).

Luther, who was a professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg, announced one such discussion on Penitence and Indulgences to be held at his University. The announcement was affixed to the doors of the church in Wittenberg, which served as community bulletin. This simple action has been turned into the Nailing of the Ninety-Five Theses, but his action did not have the dramatic character that is often attributed to it today.

Sometimes the discussions announced did not have a specific point of contention; they were open discussions about anything anyone wished to bring up, and the same process of editing and publishing was followed for these materials. They became known as Questiones quotdlibetales (what-you-wish questions). The term what-you-wish has been preserved in English, and so we have this section titled Quodlibets on Living a Life without Concluding.

*****

Quotations from the Bible come from The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1959); The New English Bible. New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961); The Complete Gospels, ed. Robert J. Miller (San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco, 1994); The Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1964–).

All translations from Latin, from Greek, and from Sanskrit are my own.

---

¹ Pausanias, Descr. Graec. 1,1,4.

² Augustine, Sermo 117,3,5; ML 38,663.

³ Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), p.19.

1

Prolegomena to Any Future Theologizing

Therefore, I pray God that he may quit me of god.

—Meister Eckhart

Preamble

The purpose of this chapter is to justify setting aside the theological constructs of the Trinity in favor of a simple contemplative approach to God. In order to achieve this in an intellectually satisfactory manner, I have taken my stance in the traditional view of the great luminaries of the Christian Faith, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, that we cannot know rationally what God is. I argue that this stance, generally accepted, opened the door to the subterfuge of revelation, which was then claimed to explain God Godself through the Sinai epiphany and the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. I have denied this possibility by having recourse to a strict interpretation of the Kantian critique of thinking.

The reason for this exercise is that Scholasticism (or Thomism, in its modern garb) is an extremely powerful intellectual system which has proven to be, over the centuries, a persistent way of assimilating new ideas and even systems and of incorporating them into itself. Every conceivable question finds an answer within Scholasticism. And therefore, it is very difficult to break away from it. Having been nursed by it (I was a teenage Thomist), it has taken me decades to be able to think outside its ambits. I have done so in small matters, but reconceptualizing the Trinity is a fairly major undertaking, and I felt compelled to justify my denial of its revealed character.

*****

When he was about five years of age, in 1230, Thomas, the youngest son of Landolfo, Count of Aquino, and his wife, Teodora, was sent to the Benedictine monastery of Montecasino as an oblate in order to begin his studies. Later, he would read most of the works of Aristotle in the Latin translations that were then appearing, and he would write extensive commentaries on them. Actually, he would not really write these, at least not fully; his handwriting was mostly illegible (littera inintelligibilis), so he dictated most of his works to a number of scribes and secretaries who were employed for this purpose, and afterwards, he would add glosses and entire paragraphs, though most of the writing was done by them. He probably had dysgraphia as did the great philosopher Plotinus (205–270) before him who, however, counted on the services of an illustrious secretary, Porphyry (233–304).⁴

I mention this to emphasize the fact that Thomas Aquinas had done extensive philosophical work before he ever expatiated on his doctrinal tomes. Moreover, he had read widely in the writings of Jewish and Muslim thinkers whose works were extant in Latin; he did not know Greek, Arabic, or Hebrew—the Summa Theologiae alone quotes from more than thirty works by non-Christian authors. He had therefore laid the philosophical foundation for his major theological works before he ever attempted them. He had taken stock of the philosophical presuppositions available to him and stated them clearly in his published works and in his university lectures. Centuries later, another great theologian, Francisco Suarez (1548–1617), interrupted his theological disquisitions in order to clarify his own presuppositions in his masterful Disputationes Metaphysicae (1597).

Now, what I am attempting to do here against the background of these masters is to establish certain presuppositions for the theological work I am currently engaged in. These are basic tenets of philosophy and theology as I have found them in the writings of certain authors whose work has influenced my thinking, and I wish to state them clearly here.

What Is Revelation?

Most peoples of the world accept—and have accepted—some form of revelation; that is, some traditions which unveiled their divinities and offered a glimpse into their nature. Hesiod’s Theogony and Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods are prime examples, but so also are the Rigveda, the Upanishads, the Bhagvatas, and the Qu’rān. These are joined by the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels, the Eda, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and many others. And while all these claim to give an insight into the nature of God, only a few have gone beyond to explain how this is possible at all. Among these, Christianity holds a place of distinction.

Scholars sometimes distinguish between revelation and manifestation of the divine (theophany) and reserve the term revelation for more sophisticated congeries of beliefs than is found in mere apparitions or acknowledgments of the divine in nature or even in human affairs. The distinction may, at times, be difficult to make, but it is useful and appropriate.

Christianity has always insisted that it contains mysteries that are incomprehensible and, therefore, that are acceptable only on the authority of the revealing God (propter auctoritatem Dei revelantis). They cannot be proved rationally; they can only be believed. They are paradoxical, and belief or faith is the only cognitive way to hold them. Paradox is the kôan of Christianity. This was the position of Tertullian when he wrote that the death of Jesus as the death of God was to be believed because it was absurd (credendum est quia absurdum),⁵ meaning that belief was the only way to hold on to such paradoxical statements. But to say that the human mind cannot conceive X is self-contradictory when it is the very human mind that is conceiving X!

Two additional comments: To claim that the human mind cannot discover the mysteries of Christianity and therefore needs God Godself to reveal them is ludicrous when the same supposedly incapable human mind is the one that develops the theology surrounding those mysteries. For example: if we believe that the fact that Jesus calls God Father reveals (because Jesus is God!) the Trinity, we shouldn’t need an Augustine to explain the Trinity to us; but in fact, he did! And he used the same mind that we said was not capable to fathom the mystery of the Trinity (with reference to Augustine, I shall deal with this point below).

Secondly, the same mind that we claim to be deficient because of original sin (which we can no longer hold as a fact because of evolution and because monogenism is discredited as a theory of human origins) has discovered the heliocentric system, the Periodic Table, quantum theory, the theory of relativity, non-Euclidian geometry, undecidability, and many other facts about our world that rival—and surpass—any Christian mystery. But my opposition to revelation is based on other factors as I shall explain below.

Recently, however, after Barth (1886–1968), and certainly after Vatican II, the term revelation has been reserved for the designation of the self-manifestation of God in Jesus.⁶ There is no longer a question of proving that revelation has taken place, nor that it has taken place in Christianity, but as Brito writes, of reading in the Christian fact the actualization of the idea of God and of God’s role in human history.⁷ Moreover, as Brito goes on to explain, this revelation is no longer the body of doctrinal communications supposedly made by God contained in the Scriptures and the teachings of the Church; it is, rather, the self-manifestation of God in the history of salvation of which Christ is the summit.⁸

Protestant Christianity claims that the Gospels contain statements of Jesus which, since Jesus is divine, reveal what God wishes to reveal about Godself to us. This is especially so in the case of the Trinity. The persons of the Trinity have truly made each other and therefore themselves known, says Fred Sanders, and therefore the doctrine of the Trinity is a revealed doctrine.⁹ This revelation is found in the Gospels, so theologians and commentators have simply to inspect the Gospels to find therein the details of the revelation. Of course, this is easier said than done, and many squabbles ensue among scholars embarking on this task of elucidation.

Among Roman Catholics a great deal of emphasis is placed on justifying and defending such revelations from those who deny them. Great treatises are written purporting to show that regardless of the paradoxical nature of many of the statements of Jesus in the Gospels, such pronouncements are true because Jesus has said them. The general argument is made that because of original sin, our human nature is so weakened that we are unable truly to understand the mysteries of God and God’s nature, and this necessitates that God Godself reveal them to us in order for us to have faith in them and therefore be saved.¹⁰

Christians generally have no quarrel with such views, especially because the authors undertake an exhaustive critique and refutation of opposing views. But as Jack Miles says, in the Scriptures, God does not talk about Godself,¹¹ and he should know, since he has written a biography of God. Still, Christian theologians, both Protestant and Catholic, insist that God has self-revealed. The question, for them, is the meaning of God’s self-revelation. I shall deal with this position below.

I have always felt that the claim for the