THERE is no better illustration of the way in which a mental image can still affect thinking even after it has been formally expelled from the mind than the picture of God as a venerable man with a beard, rather like the poet Tennyson, or perhaps Karl Marx. Nobody who can think at all any longer believes that this is what God is like. But even those who laugh most scornfully at its naivety would, I think, if they were skilled at exploring their own thoughts, find that they were still dangerously affected by it. It is rather like what happens when we read a novel with illustrations. Without in the least realizing it, we absorb a certain impression of the characters from the way the artist has drawn them, and this impression affects our whole reading of the book.
As I have said, the thing is below the level of consciousness. We take it for granted that we have formed our idea of the characters from what the author has written. We may very well have forgotten even that the book had any illustrations. But their influence abides to colour every judgment. I believe that a sufficiently penetrating analyst could discover some influence of the venerable man with the beard in all that is written about God - even by the most profound and profoundly orthodox theologians, but most notably by the most unorthodox modern thinkers in theology. Among these, for instance, there is a dead set against the idea of a personal God, an idea which their intellects find quite revolting. My own conviction is that they are not revolting against the philosophical concept of personality as applied to God: they are revolting against the venerable man with the beard. The influence of that long-established image is so great that the moment they begin to think of God as a person, they begin to think of Him as that person, so curiously like Lord Tennyson. Naturally they stop at once.
To the influence of this same image we may trace two of the principal modern tendencies about God, the tendency to treat Him as an equal, and the tendency to treat Him as an extra. Neither tendency could abide for one instant the light of the true idea of God's nature and person. But they do abide, and indeed they grow.
First, the tendency to treat God as an equal, the failure to realize the relation of the creature to the Creator, may be stated very rapidly. It is commoner in the semi-religious fringe than among practising Christians, but it is liable to show up anywhere. The commonest form of it is in the feeling that God is not making a very good job of the universe and that one could give Him some fairly useful suggestions. Another deadly effect of it is in the diminishing, to the point almost of disappearance, of the sense of sin. It would be too much to say that Catholics are much given to either of these aberrations, but also too much to say that we are entirely untouched by them. At any rate nothing would be lost by some kind of examination of intellect in this matter of the dwindling difference between the Infinite and ourselves. To take an obvious example. When some man well known to us who has lived a full and devout Catholic life for fifty or sixty years falls suddenly into serious sin, somewhere among our reactions will be the feeling that it is rather hard on him, after having given so much to God for so long, now at the end to lose all. It is a natural enough reaction and might seem to do some credit to our heart, but it does no credit at all to our head. The man has not been giving to God all those years: he has been receiving immeasurable gifts from God all those years. The malice of his sin is far greater precisely because of the immensity of God's gifts to him.
The second tendency - to treat God as an extra - is far more widespread. Religion, it is felt, is something that some people go in for; it might be better for ourselves if we all did a little more of it; but it has no place in the practical business of man's life. It may be an added grace to the female character, like playing the piano; it probably is rather a diluting influence in the male character, though occasionally one meets a religious man who seems to be none-the-less masculine for it; but either way it is not part of the essential of living. What a man believes about God is his private affair: in other words it does not affect anyone but the man himself, and it does not affect him in a way that matters to anyone else.
Now that is a very remarkable statement indeed. All history echoes with denial. What men have believed about God has caused more wars and fiercer wars than any other thing whatever. Rivers of blood have flowed because of what men believed about God. And now, suddenly, it has become their own private affair. Obviously this can only mean that men do not believe anything very intensely about God, or, if they do, are not likely to do anything very extreme about it. One remembers the men whose god was Moloch. They believed that he must be placated by the casting of little children into a furnace, and they placated him. One remembers the Thugs, whose god was a goddess, Kali. They believed that she was pleased when they strangled men in her honour, and they did their best to please her.
Obviously if people believe in deities like Moloch and Kali, even the most broadminded will feel that it can hardly be dismissed as their own private affair. In relation to Moloch and Kali such a position would be seen as grotesque. But in all sober literalness it is immeasurably more grotesque in relation to the true God. The belief in Moloch and Kali would have a considerable effect upon the children to be burned and the men to be strangled. But the belief in God has a more total effect upon everything whatsoever. Error about God cannot be a private affair. It can only lead to a diminished and distorted life for everyone. God's will is the sole reason for our existence; be wrong about His will and we are inescapably wrong about the reason for our existence; be wrong about that, and what can we be right about?
This question of what is private error (that is, one not likely to damage anyone but the man subject to it) and when it becomes public, is worth considering. Supposing that a man refuses to believe in the existence of the sun. He will, of course, be ready with a theory to account for the widely-held view that the sun does exist. He will say perhaps that the sun is a collective hallucination, or a large fire just fifty miles up in the air, or a result of wishful thinking, or a visual effect produced by spots on the liver, or a relic of tribal superstition, or a piece of sexual symbolism, or a purely mental compensation for an unjust economic system. However ingenious his theory or however excellent his character and intentions, he would be wrong about day and night, about the seasons, about the moon, the stars, the weather; he would be in danger of death by sunstroke. So far it might well be his own private affair. But if he persuaded large numbers of people that the sun did not exist, his private error would be in a fair way to becoming a public nuisance; and if he were the captain of a ship, passengers' lives would not be safe with him: he could not be trusted to get them across the ocean. You could not discuss astronomy with such a man because, however much a man may be entitled to his own opinion, the sun remains a fact, and a fact essential to astronomy and navigation. Similarly, you cannot discuss the purpose of life with a man who denies the existence of God. You cannot profoundly collaborate in human affairs, in sociology, say, or education, with a man who denies the existence of God. You cannot simply agree to omit God from the collaboration for the sake of argument, any more than you could agree to omit the sun from navigation. The sun is a fact and essential to navigation. GOD IS A FACT & ESSENTIAL TO EVERYTHING.
That this is so has already, I trust, been made clear in the first chapter of this book. Everything exists because God called it into being from nothing and continues to hold it in existence. The formula for all created beings, from the speck of dust to the highest angel, is nothingness made to be something by the Omnipotence of God. Omit God from the consideration of anything or everything, and you omit the reason why anything exists and make everything forever unexplainable; and this is not a sound first step towards understanding. Omit God and you are left with that other element, nothingness: what could be less practical? Living in the presence of God, that is being at all times aware that God is present, Is no more a matter of sanctity than being aware that the sun is there. Both are a matter of sanity. An error about either means that we are not living in the real world; but an error about the sun damages the reality of our world immeasurably less than an error about God, for that, indeed, destroys reality totally.
We must then study God, if we are to understand anything at all. We must come to a knowledge of God and then grow in that knowledge. How? In two ways, the way of reason or philosophy, what the exploring mind can discover for itself; and the way of revelation, what God tells us of Himself.
We shall consider first the way of reason.
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We may begin with the extraordinary compliment that the Vatican Council paid to human reason in the year 1870. It defined that the existence of God can be known by the human reason without the aid of revelation. This is the mightiest compliment ever paid the human reason, and it is of faith. As Catholics we are bound to believe that the human reason can establish the existence of God. What the Vatican Council put in its carefully measured words, the Holy Spirit had said a good deal more abruptly three thousand years before?
The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.
Both, as you see, come to the same thing? that the existence of God can be known by reason; therefore if you do not know it, your reasoning is defective, suggests the Vatican Council, you are a fool, cries the Psalmist under the inspiration of God.
There are various proofs for God's existence. The most famous are a series of five proofs formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas, working upon and supplementing the efforts of the great Greeks Plato and Aristotle some sixteen hundred years before him: one way or another they are a development of and a commentary upon St. Paul's words:
From the foundation of the world, men have caught sight of his invisible nature, his eternal power and his divineness, as they are known through his creatures (Rom. i. 20).
For a Catholic there is vast intellectual joy in these five proofs. There can be a kind of intoxication in his first meeting with them. But for many of us, once the intoxication clears away, there is a certain sense of anticlimax. They do indeed establish the existence of God with certainty: but we were already certain of the existence of God. It was delightful to find these proofs, but we did not need them. We were already quite sure about God. It was only on reflection that we realized that these proofs still had a vastly important function for us, even if we did not need them as proofs. If a man is already certain by faith that God exists, he should still study the proofs most carefully, not because they lead to certainty CERTAINTY THAT GOD IS, but because no one can study them carefully without coming to a far PROFOUNDER UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT GOD IS.
It is in this aspect that I shall consider reason's approach to the knowledge of God in this place. This book is being written not to prove the truths of Christianity to those who do not hold them, but to aid those who do hold them in their exploration. I shall take one of St. Thomas's five proofs, not using it as a proof, but as a most useful way of exploration in the nature of God. And this may be useful even to unbelievers: most of the argument about the existence of God is due primarily not to doubt of His existence but to inability to make head or tail of His nature. Even a little light upon what God is would settle many doubts as to whether He is. We shall see what light can be got from what is called the ARGUMENT FROM CONTINGENCY, partly because it is in itself the most fascinating, partly because it links up most closely with the truth we have already twice considered, the elementary truth about ourselves and all things, that God made us of nothing.
The line of thought runs roughly thus. If we consider the universe, we find that everything in it bears this mark, that it does exist but might very well not have existed. We ourselves exist, but we would not have existed if a man and a woman had not met and mated. The same mark can be found upon everything. A particular valley exists because a stream of water took that way down, perhaps because the ice melted up there. If the melting ice had not been there, there would have been no valley; and so with all the things of our experience. They exist, but they would not have existed if some other thing had not been what it was or done what it did.
The effect of this is that none of these things is the explanation of its own existence or the source of its own existence. In other words, their existence is contingent upon something else. Each thing possesses existence, and can pass on existence; but it did not originate its existence. It is essentially a receiver of existence. Now it is impossible to conceive of a universe consisting exclusively of contingent beings - that is of beings that are only receivers of existence and not originators. The reader who is taking his role as explorer seriously might very well stop reading at this point and let his mind make for itself the effort to conceive a condition in which nothing should exist save receivers of existence.
Anyone who has taken this suggestion seriously and pondered the matter for himself before reading on, will have seen that the thing is a contradiction in terms and therefore an impossibility. If nothing exists save beings that receive their existence, how does anything exist at all? Where do they receive their existence from? In such a system made up exclusively of receivers, one being may have got it from another, and that from still another, Even if you tell yourself that this system contains an infinite number of receivers of existence, you still have not accounted for existence. Even an infinite number of beings, If no one of them is the source of its own existence, will not account for existence.
Thus we are driven to see that the beings of our experience, the contingent beings, could not exist at all unless there is also a being which differs from them by possessing existence in its own right. It does not have to receive existence; it simply has existence. It is not contingent: it simply is. THIS IS THE BEING WE CALL GOD.
All this may seem very simple and matter of course, but in reality we have arrived at a truth of inexhaustible profundity and of inexhaustible fertility in giving birth to other truths. Not all at once does the mind realize the immensity of what it has thus so easily come upon. But consider some of the consequences that may be seen almost at first look. We have arrived at a Being, whom we call God, who is not, as all other beings are, a receiver of existence: and this satisfactorily accounts for their existence - they have received it from Him. But what accounts for His existence? At least we shall not be guilty of the crudity of those who ask who made God? For to make anything is to confer existence upon it, and as we have seen, God does not have to receive existence. He is not made, He simply IS. He does not come into existence,
He is in existence. But the question remains as insistent for Him as for any contingent thing, why does He exist, what accounts for His existence?
Here one must follow very closely. God exists not because of any other being, for He is the source of all being. Therefore the reason for His existence, since it is not in anything else, must be in Himself. This means that there is SOMETHING ABOUT WHAT HE IS, WHICH REQUIRES THAT HE MUST BE. Now WHAT A BEING IS we call its NATURE; thus we can restate our phrase and say that there is in His nature something that demands existence, better still, something that commands existence. In other words His nature is such that He must exist. Consider how immeasurable a difference this makes between God and all contingent beings. They may exist or may not. GOD MUST EXIST, HE CANNOT NOT-EXIST. Their nature is to be able to exist. GOD'S NATURE IS TO EXIST. GOD IS EXISTENCE.
For there are not two elements, namely, God and His existence. And indeed if they were two the question would arise, what accounts for their being found together? But they are not two, they are one. GOD IS EXISTENCE. EXISTENCE IS. All the receivers of existence exist because there is one who does not have to receive existence. He does not have to receive existence because He is
This, then, is the primary Truth about God. It was the crowning achievement of Greek philosophy in the fifth century before Christ to have reached the threshold of this most fundamental of all truths. Christian philosophers have continued their process, and for us it is a truth of philosophy and not only a truth of revelation. But all the same it is a truth of revelation, otherwise the philosophically gifted would hold it with less certainty, and the philosophically ungifted would not hold it at all. We have not only the word of human reason upon a matter so important. A good thousand years before the Greek intellect came so close to it, the Jewish people got the thing itself, and not by any effort of their intellect: God told them. You will find it in the third chapter of Exodus, when God appeared to Moses in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush.
God had told Moses to bring his people out of Egypt. And Moses said to God:
" Lo, I shall go to the children of Israel, and say to them: 'The God of your fathers hath sent me to you'.
If they should say to me:
'What is His name?' what shall I say to them?"
And God said to Moses:
"I am who am. Thus shall thou say to the children of Israel: He Who is hath sent me to you."
This, then, is God's name for Himself, HE WHO IS. When we have said He is, there is no more to be said. We have said everything. The only trouble is that we do not know all we have said. But we can begin to find out. All theology consists in finding out what is meant by the words "He is". Let us begin.
What we see at once is that since God is existence, that existence must be utterly without limit, for there is no principle of limitation in a being thus self-existent. Limitation is a deficiency of existence, something lacking to fullness of existence. But what deficiency of existence could there be in one who is existence, what could be lacking to the fullness of existence of one who is existence? God is infinite. What is not infinite is not God, not the source of all contingent beings.
Another consequence that we see at once is that God must contain in Himself all the perfections we find in things.
He that planted the ear, shall He not hear? or He that formed the eye shall He not see? (Ps. xciii. 9.)
Since all things owe their existence totally to Him,
all that they have is from Him
and therefore all the perfections that they have must in some
way be in him.
Obviously they will be in Him in a way immeasurably higher.
For He made all
things from nothing,
and these perfections will be in things only in so far as nothingness can receive them,
or to put it crudely, with a certain mingling of
nothingness:
whereas they are in God in utter purity.
Some notion of what this means we shall try to arrive at in the next chapter.
But meanwhile the truth stands that whatever perfections are to be found in created
existence must be in God Who is the source of all existence.
Thus since knowledge and love are
to be found in created things, knowledge and love must be in God.
God must know and love.
And this is the bare minimum that we mean
when we speak of God as personal:
a person is a being who can know and love.
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Earlier in the chapter we referred to the modern tendency to revolt against the idea of a personal God. I suggested then that they were revolting not against the application of the philosophical concept of person to the true idea of God, but against the picture of God as a venerable man with a beard. They have a feeling that the only way to get rid of the beard is to drop the notion of person. Unknown to themselves the idea of personality is still coloured by the mental picture they think they have outgrown. That this is so appears in the very argument they use against attributing personality to God. It is, they say, a limitation imposed upon God's infinity; it is anthropomorphic, a scaling down of God to the measure of man. So they avoid the idea of God as Someone and make Him Something, not He but It. God is a stream of tendency, a transcendent other, a polarization.
But in the concept of person we have just outlined there is nothing either limiting or anthropomorphic. To say that God can know and can love does not impose limitations upon God, it removes limitations - for to be unable to know and to love would be very limiting indeed. There is nothing limited about knowing and loving as such. There are limitations in my knowing and my loving, but these are limitations in me. Knowing and loving in themselves are expansive, not limiting. In an infinite being they will be as infinite as He.
By the same reasoning we see that they are not anthropomorphic. They are not a scaling down of God to the measure of man. For we know that our knowing and loving is only the faintest shadow of His. We have them because we are made in His likeness, so far as creatures made of nothing are capable of receiving his likeness. Our concepts of knowing and loving are necessarily dimmed with our own finitude, stained with our nothingness. They are not adequate to God. But they are the best we have. To throw them away would be less adequate still. Knowledge and love in God are infinitely greater than in us, but they are not less. We can say them at least, and use the uttermost effort of our mind to purify them of the limitations that arise in them from our limitation. That is the way of advance for the mind. Human language is not adequate to utter God, but it is the highest we have and we should use its highest words. The highest words in human speech are not high enough, but what do you gain by using lower words? or no words? It is for us to use the highest words we have, realize that they are not high enough, try to strain upwards from them, not to dredge human speech for something lower. GOD IS SOMEONE not only SOMETHING, A PERSON NOT A POWER, HE NOT IT.
To this idea of God as at once Infinite Existence and Someone, the mind has to habituate itself if it is to grow in the knowledge of reality. It will be laborious work if one comes new to it and, to begin with, totally unrewarding work. Cassian tells the story of the grief of Serapion, one of the Desert Fathers, when it was finally brought home to him that the God he had so loved and served was not in human form: how he
"burst into bitter tears and a storm of sobbing and wailed aloud: ' Woe is me, they have taken my God from me, and I have no one to hold on to, I know not whom I may adore and pray to!' " (Coll.x.103.)
We, of course, have always known better: yet Serapion's trouble is our trouble too, just a little. The mental picture of God as a venerable man had a kind of solidity about it, even though one knew that it was not the reality. In particular it was someone to say one's prayers to. By comparison this new conception of God seems thin and remote and uncomforting. But this is the way with every advance. In the new field we lack the comfort of long custom. Bernard Shaw phrases the experience very admirably. "When we learn something, it feels at first as if we have lost something." It is so, for instance, with a new stroke at tennis. Our old stroke had been a pretty incompetent affair, of the sort to make a professional laugh. But it had been ours, we were used to it, all our muscles were in the habit of it. The new stroke is doubtless better, but we are not in the way of it, we cannot do anything with it, and all the joy goes out of tennis - but only until we have mastered the new way. Then, quite suddenly, we find that the whole game is a new experience. So it is when we first begin to force the mind to do its own work in relation to God - particularly its praying, for it would be a pity to be thinking at a deeper level and praying at a shallower. A time will come when the mind will be happy and at home, functioning easily. But for the moment it hardly seems able to function at all. It can say the words, but it cannot handle the meaning. It is very much what happens when you first learn to play the piano. It is only when you start the exercises which are meant to make your fingers supple that you realize how utterly clumsy they are. They had always seemed to you reasonably competent fingers, and now all of a sudden they seem quite useless. It is because for the first time you are trying to use your fingers to make music. They were more comfortably employed making mud pies. But in the long run music is better worth making.