Knowing God: God and the Human Condition

By Frank Sheed

Atheists deny we can know God because they deny there is a God to know. But even believers who affirm God's existence sometimes don't know him. They don't know much about God because they neglect to think much about God and what God has revealed about himself. They accept that there is a God but they don't give much thought to what God is like. And even if they know a great deal about God in the sense of being able to state truths about him, they don't necessarily know him personally and intimately.

In Knowing God (previously titled God and the Human Mind) the great Catholic writer, teacher, and publisher Frank Sheed helps readers to know that God exists, to think about who and what God is, and to know God personally. He clears away popular misunderstandings of God, often held by otherwise knowledgeable people. A masterful, lucid writer, Sheed is not timid about tackling the most challenging questions the human mind can pose about God, yet he does not reduce divine mystery to dry propositions or neglect the necessity of faith.

Sheed acknowledges the limits of human words and human minds when it comes to God. At the same time, he carefully explains the meaning of Spirit, the role of theology and revelation, including the place of the Bible in the Church, and the experience of God in mysticism. In the final section, Sheed goes into the heart of the mystery of God, exploring God as the Trinity and the difference the Trinity should make in understanding God and ourselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781681492872

Book preview

Introduction*

I had planned to put what I have to say of God and man into one volume, under the title God and the Human Condition. It has seemed to be better to bring out two volumes with that as overall title. The present volume is God and the Human Mind. The second will be God and the Human Race.

The whole represents my attempt at aggiornamento—which does not mean presenting as much of the Church’s teachings as men today can accept. It means (1) presenting it as it now is, at the point of its—and our own—present development; (2) stating it with such an understanding of today’s difficulties, today’s ways of thinking, speaking, asking, that today’s man may know what we are saying, and may see what the same truths might mean for him too.

My concern in this first volume is with what the human mind can know of God—with God’s revelation of himself; with theology, which is revelation explored by men with God’s aid; with how each can make all this his own, not verbally only, not even mentally only, but vitally.

Not verbally only, I say. But words are a large part of the matter. We must examine them closely; it is not sufficient to use them as consecrated formulas. They are telling us something about God; we must find out what it is. We must see why we use one set of words, avoid another, reject another. We must draw light from them to the limit of our present knowledge, without envy of our children to whom they may yield more light.

The aim of the present study is practical and at three depths. For the intelligent living of life nothing can be more practical than to know how we (or anything) came to be here, and where we are supposed to be going—only God can tell us.

There is a second depth of practicality: what we learn of God can nourish, develop, vitalize the selves which have to live the life.

And a third: God is not a problem to be solved, not even a solution to be admired, but a reality to be possessed, contemplated, conversed with, loved, enjoyed—this is fullness of living.

With God one and three, with creation, Incarnation, Redemption, with every matter treated in either volume, the effort will be made to see how life is richer for our knowing it. The reader new to this kind of thinking will find it helpful at every point to pose himself the question: What difference does the doctrine make to me? If it had never been revealed, would I have lost anything? To this last question he should constantly return.

At the moment Christians find themselves in what looks to them like a crisis of theology. They get the feeling that age-old certainties are being called into question and that it might be wiser to leave theology alone until the storm has blown over. Storm there is, but running for cover is not a good way to live through it, and no way at all to grow surer and stronger in it.

The air is filled with such a swirl of questionings as we have never known at one time, but there are levels of seriousness, largely because anybody feels that he can say his say. There is some pretty wild talk. But even at saner levels, I seem to be coming all the time upon new questions which in fact I had been hearing, new doctrinal ideas which in fact I had been teaching, these past forty years. Some of our more revolutionary thinkers seem to me to have led pretty sheltered lives.

None of this applies to the Rahners, the Schillebeeckxes, the Durrwells, the Benoits. For there are serious developments under discussion, their possibility rooted in the very nature of human utterance. No statement either as given in revelation, or as developed by the Church’s living with it and by it, can be more than a beginning. Even if finite words could contain the infinite, finite minds could not extract the infinite from them. But the great definitions proclaimed by the Church as contained in revelation or issuing from it are light-bearing; possessing them, we are in the light. In that light we can grow, not by extinguishing and substituting, but by growing in capacity to receive and respond.

God who gave the light has continued to guard men’s growth in it. There are moments when the sense of God looms so immense that the phrases of revelation and doctrine seem to mock us with their shallowness; they are shallower than God certainly, but they are not shallower than we, and by them we can move out of our shallows. We shall move deeper all the more surely by knowing the depth at which we now stand. Organizing, surveying, living fully in the territory already won is the best preliminary for conquering new areas for light.

For growth in the light everything serves—Scripture of course, but philosophy and mysticism too, and all the ways by which men advance in knowledge of the created universe. No one mind could cope with all of these; all do not serve equally, all have something to give. But Scripture, above all.

From the study of Scripture, says Pius XII, all branches of theology can be rejuvenated. In our century [the twentieth] we have seen this notably illustrated in the emergence from obscurity of the doctrine of the Church as Christ’s Body, and the new awareness of all that is bound up in Christ’s Resurrection. Our own day is clarifying the relation between the Word of God in the Church and the Word of God in Scripture. The study of each can rejuvenate the other; too often they have been used solely to drown out each other’s voice. The distortion of Scriptural texts to prove dogma is vanishing, as the concordism has already vanished which tried to make Genesis say what the newest scientist was saying. Scripture is no more a manual of theology than of science.

Using texts old style, whether to prove the Church’s teaching or to disprove it—each was a way of treating Scripture as what it was not. Church teaching and Scripture are different ways of approach under the direction of one same Word, to one same Reality. The appearance of disharmony is not a challenge to reject one or the other, but a call to restudy both in all confidence.

In our study of Scripture we have the Biblical specialists to help us, the linguists, the archeologists, the exegetes. The student of theology cannot do without them; but unless he knows how to keep his balance, he may find that he cannot easily do with them either. Balance? I mean between their learning, which is myriad and dazzling and far beyond the mere theologian’s testing, and their theological or philosophical systems, which any intelligent man can judge for himself and which can vary from brilliant to very dim indeed. Rudolf Bultmann, Oscar Cullmann, and C. H. Dodd may be surprised to find themselves grouped as Egyptians, but I have certainly spoiled them—and among the spoils I count not only things they have given me from their own special learning and their own deeper insights, but a better understanding of Catholic teaching at points where their refusal of it forced me to look closer at it.

Philosophy not only can but must serve theology. Theology is the literacy of religion, and there is no field in which philosophy cannot aid literacy. But here too there is need of balance. Aristotle’s Pure Act is one of the human mind’s most splendid achievements; it has been used for theology’s deepening, but for its desiccation as well. Unless we balance it with Scripture, the Infinite of the philosophers can be used almost as a way of telling God to keep his distance. The more active of today’s philosophers bypass God, and this must concern us. What concerns us more is that so much of today’s religion (not as lived perhaps but as preached and written) bypasses God too—does not reject him but does not very much advert to him, has no strong idea of him, does not emphasize contact or communication with him. In this kind of religion, God is a lightless cloud at Reality’s center, hardly distinguishable from sheer blankness.

Why we exist, what follows death, cannot be known if there is no God or no revelation from God. To keep God and refuse his revelation leaves the questions unanswered. By too many the questions are not even asked, all concentration being on love of neighbor in the fragment of life between conception and death, studied without reference to how life came to be and where it is leading, or any awareness that these might have a bearing.

Some of today’s ablest religious writers, poles apart in everything else, yet are one in removing God from life as men must live it here below—this in the name of his transcendence, or his difference, or his unnecessity, or his irrelevance to our problems. The exclusion of God—I mean by believers in him—has been a long process. The Trinity was dropped, or lingered on as a picturesque survival of an older thought pattern. In the twenties I heard speakers at a religious week refer to God as the Nobler Hypothesis, the Wider Experience, That Transcendent Other. In our own day we have him as Depth. One way or another, God was being purged of function and even of meaning.

The next steps cried out to be taken. Taken they were. Pastor Bonhoeffer cut the cord of man’s dependence on God—his reaction, one imagines, to the agony of concentration camps and gas chambers and a God who let them happen. Now we have ministers of religion who deny God’s existence altogether. Yet they hold on to religion.

If this moves us to mockery, we have not understood the situation. To those who have remained steadfast in their faith, a smile sometimes comes too easily. When Dr. Bultmann demythologized the New Testament, with only the kerygma left standing, the certainty was inescapable that dekerygmatization must come next. And it has come. But like the clinging to religion without God, it is a reaction to an Ultimate Mystery which can be neither grasped nor wholly unfelt. There is no place for mockery of men who find the unutterable beyond utterance and make what synthesis they can of as much as they can utter. There might be more depth in this than in any amount of unreflective swallowing. But there is pathos in what can seem to us only an effort to make some sort of establishment out of questions unasked, needs not felt, hungers that do not torment, thirsts that do not parch.

COMING TO KNOW GOD

ONE

Theology and Vitality

1. Mental Equivalents

Learning theology does not mean simply memorizing words shaped into a pattern of orthodoxy. It means making the truths our own, a living part of our being.

The trouble is that it has to come to us in words. It is in a clothing of words that the truths of theology enter the intellect. The teacher’s intellect frames them; our intellect receives them. And words have a strange power of setting up in business on their own, independently of the ideas they exist to express; it is rather like the Hans Andersen story of the man whose shadow left him, and went about its own affairs. Cardinal Manning said of Herbert Spencer that he had no mental equivalent for his terms; and one can get along so well and so effortlessly with the terms, while not adverting to their mental equivalents, that one can lose touch with these altogether.

One has heard discussions of human rights, or the arrangement of human society, in which the word man has figured as hardly more than a noise made by the mouth, accompanied by a mental picture of a biped to give it authority—which gives the two legs disproportionate importance and omits the decisive element in the discussion, namely what a man is. It is even easier to talk like that, for hours at a time, about God, the word carrying no real meaning but setting up certain mild vibrations in the emotions.

A third example: Faced with the question how Our Lord, if he possessed the Beatific Vision, could have suffered sorrow almost unto death in the Garden of Gethsemane, one has heard learned men answer that of course he was still in statu viae, not statu termini, and proceed to the next question as though that one at least had been satisfactorily answered. Here there is no examination in depth such as Karl Rahner has given the matter in his Theological Investigations; simply the technical terms are being used without mental equivalents. For the reason why the Beatific Vision would seem to exclude sorrow lies in what it is, not in where it is received; it applies therefore equally whether the soul has reached the end of the journey or not. We have, in fact, an example of one of the commonest of all fallacies—reliance on a difference that makes no difference, a difference that has no bearing.

And this is possible when one is using the terms only For the man who wants to take theology seriously, the intellect must go to work, pierce through the words to the meaning, and enrich the words with the meaning—that they may be real words. And it must build the reality they utter into its own substance. This is the essence of learning, whether theology or anything else. Unfortunately, examinations do not always test it.

When the intellect has made the reality its own, then the whole man takes over—will, emotions, imagination. This is essential, but there is danger in it, since these may wrench the truth away from intellect after all. The trouble is that intellect works with effort and anguish, and the others easily. Imagination, the power to make mental pictures of things we have experienced through the senses, works most easily of all and is always ready to offer its aid. Its aid too often takes the form of doing the whole job for the intellect. The results are always fatal.

To take a rough example: One of the great problems for philosopher and theologian alike is how the will can be free, if God knows in advance what we are going to do. The intellect may well blench. Imagination does not blench at all; it accepts the challenge with delight. It produces a picture of a winding river, and a man on the bank who cannot see what happens around the next bend. Take the man up in an airplane, and he can see the whole winding of the river at once. Substitute God for the man in the airplane, and where is your problem?

Where indeed is your problem? It has not been solved; it has not been partly solved; not the faintest gleam of light has been shed upon it; it has not been touched. The next bend of the river already exists; the man has simply gotten rid of an obstacle which prevented his seeing it. But when something hasn’t happened yet, doesn’t exist yet, what is there to see? What is there for even God to see? To make it worse, the airplane analogy is based upon a misunderstanding of the nature of God’s knowledge. Its only advantage is that the problem no longer bothers the intellect; imagination seducing, the intellect has bypassed the problem, and goes on its way with an error about God built into it. If it had waved imagination aside and coped with its own job itself—as we shall try to cope in a later chapter—it would have gained a certain amount of light upon the problem, it would have added to its understanding of God and eternity and time; though it would not have seen the whole answer, it would have discovered why it could not, and this too is a valuable piece of knowledge.

It is not only intellect that is the loser by letting imagination do its work for it; imagination is the loser too. For it is meant to be stimulated by truth to its own proper exercise, which is not a substitute for intellect’s. Once the mind has the truth, imagination can range all over the universe finding correspondences and interrelations and interlinkings, at every level from lowest to highest, family likenesses which show one mind at work throughout.

Imagination cannot give the meaning. But it can give new resonance and immediacy to the meaning once intellect has arrived at it; and in so doing it is most splendidly itself and brings powerful aid to intellect. For the new resonance and immediacy at once stimulate the intellect to plunge deeper, and are themselves facts for the intellect to take note of. In the same way will and emotion can help. Where will, emotion, imagination do not enter, but intellect goes it alone, what we have is not theology, which is the most concrete of all the ways of uttering reality. What we have is theometry, which is only a kind of geometry of God, with all God and man formulated, labeled, and indexed—even mystery only one item in the list, not the felt darkness wrapping everything.

It has been observed that the great proofs for the existence of God are unanswerable, but seldom move an unbeliever to accept; we do not lose arguments with atheists, but we do not often persuade them that God exists—by the use of the proofs, that is. People feel that they are a little thin, and indeed they are—conclusive but thin. The reason is that in them intellect does go it alone—the appeal is purely to reason. Will is sternly excluded; imagination and emotion are not even tempted to intervene. But intellect without will and the rest is thin, just as will and the rest without intellect are thick—thickheaded, so to speak. It is in the taking possession of truth by the whole man that the whole man lives.

I have already spoken of the necessity to move from the terms to their mental equivalents, but even there we cannot stay; we must go forward to their vital equivalents, getting down to the depths where something within ourselves stirs to life in response. An example may make this clearer. If we take the truth which most of us learned in our catechisms that God made us of nothing, and examine those who rest in the terms and go no further, we shall find, I think, one of two results. They either attach no meaning at all to the words; do not dwell on them longer than it takes to say them; use them, when they use them at all, as a kind of litany or tuneless chant; or, if they go one stage further, they see nothing as a kind of material that God used in the making of things, as though there were a vast reservoir of nothing on which he was able to draw.

But if the terms are given mental equivalents, we have a doctrine superbly coherent: that whereas all other makers use some material, it goes with God’s omnipotence that he made without material.

There was nothing; there is something.

And this something owes the whole of its being to the creative act of God, is produced in its totality by the act of the divine will, and therefore needs the continuing act of that same will to hold it in existence from moment to moment. So that the formula for every being from electron to archangel is nothingness made into something by God, given existence by the will of God, and by him held continuously in existence.

To this statement, nothing is contributed by will or emotion or imagination. But once it exists it can and should have the most profound effect upon all of them. Emotion, to begin with, feels shattered by it, knows real panic at the realization that no material has gone to our making, that we are made of nothing, that we have therefore no hold of our own upon existence. Imagination is stimulated to produce pictures of analogous instances of dependence in the created universe, and though none of these instances can be total, they do develop our awareness of what dependence can mean, and this reflects back on the intellect’s understanding. The will can accept the truth, try to live by it, come to love it, come to better control of itself in the awareness that some of its own movements are the effect in us of a kind of nostalgia for our original nothingness. Then feeling can enter again. We come to feel more secure when thus totally dependent on God. At a different angle, we find ourselves feeling fools when we sin, because sin is an effort to gain something against the will of God—that will which alone stands between us and annihilation!

This is what I mean by having a vital equivalent for our terms; this is studying theology. We may think of the terms as one-dimensional, of the mental equivalents as two-dimensional, only of the vital equivalents as threedimensional. There is what may be a fourth dimension, the mystical, which will be looked at later; of it I have no personal experience. I can only give my own testimony that three are wonderful. Wonderful but not easy to enter into. All ease is in the terms. Knowledge maketh a bloody entry, says the proverb. But words come in bloodlessly. They are so easy to handle and so compact; they sound as if they had a beginning and an end. Compared with them, thoughts are sprawling, messy, not ending when they end but always opening out onto some further reality. When you have thought a thought you have not thought it, so to speak; you have only started something. Once terms acquire mental and vital equivalents, we have no longer the old luxury of shutting off the mind and letting the pen coast.

All the immediate advantages are with words reduced to mere counters. But of course we must pay a price for them. And one way in which the mass of us humans pay is that it is almost impossible not to feel that what cannot be put into words cannot be, worse still that words are the measure of meaning, the measure of importance. Thus we find it hard to believe that what can be said briefly can possibly be of cosmic importance. When we come upon a discussion of whether God is the efficient cause or the formal cause or the quasi-formal cause of grace in the soul, we feel at once that the question really matters. But the importance of a truth is measured not by length but by meaning, and not by intellectual meaning only. Take two truths about Our Blessed Lady. She was the Virgin Mother of Christ. The length is under a line. How long is the meaning? Three words—Christ, mother, virgin—each by itself a deep well of meaning, the three thus combined more than the mind of man has been able to exhaust in twenty centuries. She shared Christ’s suffering; she had suffering of her own. A whole line there, if length is our main concern! But Christ is the glory of mankind, suffering is the anguish of mankind; these are not little words, shallow words, easily lapped up by the hurrying mind.

The word is is the meagerest-sounding word in the English language; but He is is the name of God, the whole truth of God, and in all eternity we shall not have unpacked all it contains.

2. Vital Equivalents

What I have called vital equivalents means an intimacy deeper than the words or the concepts. Normally, once we have attained it, it lives in the soul, pouring its energy—I had almost said automatically, serenely anyhow—into the soul’s whole relation with reality. But there are moments, not long moments usually or frequent, when it floods up into the consciousness, and the greatest theologian or the rawest beginner, uttering some truth long held in all serenity, can find himself shaken to the roots of his being by it.

Nor is this the mystical experience, properly so called. It is a perfectly normal operation of the mind—the God-aided mind as we shall see—doing its own proper work. One who does not know this can never have experienced the dynamic quality of truth really possessed, the excitement of it, the luxury.

Work, indeed, it is. The intellect must not rest in the terms or idle in the images. There is sweating labor for it, because it has no habituation in its muscles for this kind of effort; indeed it has almost no muscles and must somehow grow them. The truths of religion are so through-and-through spiritual that our minds, coming new to them, simply have not the muscles to cope with them. No other subject that we study calls for these particular muscles in anything like the same degree. So far we have been considering the kind of initial effort needed to master the meaning of the truths, and the kind of continuing effort needed to keep them alive and alert. But, when we have done all this, it still remains that the realities we are dealing with seem thin compared with the material world.

The thinness may make itself felt poignantly. We may, as an example, see someone suffering agonies in a disease that is incurable. The agonies are so very evident; the spiritual realities—God’s goodness, the joy of heaven—seem so remote in comparison. It is not only that we feel it would be a mockery to remind the sufferer of them; in our own minds we feel them inadequate—not actually irrelevant, perhaps, but too pale. This is a special case; we are not continuously in that sort of crisis; the patient dies, and our own trouble of spirit grows dimmer and passes away.

But there is a profounder difficulty, not bound up with a special experience like this, but contained in the daily routine of life. It lies in the apparent thinness of spiritual realities compared with the things the mind usually deals with. The trouble about the great mysteries is not to believe them true, but to see them as real; the mind finds it hard to get a grip on them—they seem to give it no hold, to slip through its fingers, so to speak. Once we have grasped what Trinity and Eucharist, infinity and eternity mean, there is no earthly reason for rejecting them; but there are moments when they seem remote and lacking in substance; as I have said, it is difficult not so