GOD

CHAPTER 4 - THE MIND WORKS ON INFINITY

 Listen to the Corydon Singers sing the Cheroubicon. | Music details HERE | |

I

WE have arrived at the notion of God as Infinite Existence. But unless the mind fixes itself upon these words with the determination to find some meaning in them, they will remain no more than words, and of no more value for our knowledge of God than the mental picture we are trying to outgrow. As we shall see, we shall never get all the meaning out of them, but it is surprising how much we can get. Obviously there are a dozen ways of approach, but as convenient a way as any is by the consideration of a question often posed by unbelievers: "Where was God before the universe was created?"

Image: Hubble Observatory - http://hubblesite.org/ (Gallery)

It is a convenient question for our purpose because it assails God's infinity in two ways.

The word WHERE raises the question of SPACE and brings us to some first consideration of God's Immensity: the word BEFORE raises the question of TIME and brings us to some elementary consideration of God's Eternity.

In finding the answer, we must use the intellect without imagination's aid; one of the neatest tricks imagination has played on us is the sense it has given us of the necessity of time and space: we feel that we simply cannot conceive anything without them. We must learn to. It goes with the maturity of the intellect to find itself more at home and at ease with the timeless and spaceless, not deceived by the "imaginability" of time and space, but finding them more problem than help. We shall not arrive at that maturity at once, or perhaps at all. But our present inquiry should bring us a little closer.

The word INFINITY is built from the Latin words FINIS, a limit or boundary, and the prefix IN which negatives the main word. Thus it means WITHOUT LIMITS OR BOUNDARIES - LIMITLESS - BOUNDLESS. But this must not be taken as meaning only the absence of any external boundaries. To say that a being is infinite does not mean only that it spreads in all directions without any limit, that whether you are considering its being or its power you never reach a point where you must say "thus far and no farther." It means THE ABSENCE OF ALL LIMITATIONS, NOT ONLY EXTERNAL BUT INTERNAL AS WELL. At first sight, this may seem needlessly subtilizing and even meaningless.

Actually it is quite vital to our knowledge of infinity. When we say that a being is infinite, we mean not only that there is no limit to what it can do, but no divisions within itself, no parts. An infinite being MUST be spirit.

Consider how the fact of having parts is a limitation. Our own bodies will serve to illustrate. My body has parts - arms, legs, kidneys, liver, vast numbers of parts. No part is the whole of me. Thus my very being is divided up. No one element in me is me, and no one element in my body is my body. How limiting this is to my being should be obvious enough: among other things, it means that parts can be broken off me - fingers and such like; it means the possibility of that decisive break we call death; even while I live it means that I take a good deal of holding together. Its limiting effect upon my power is more obvious still. The things my body can do are distributed over the various parts of which my body consists. My foot can do one sort of thing, my liver another, my nose another. Thus my power to act is not concentrated but dispersed. This means that I cannot perform any particular action without a preliminary bringing together of the various parts of me whose cooperation that particular action requires. Further, this dispersal of my power means that I cannot do all the things I am capable of doing at any one time; I cannot at once be playing the violin, writing a letter and building a fire.

There is no need to labour the point. To have one's being in parts is an immense limitation, and under this limitation the whole material universe lies.

It is because material things are thus made up of parts, that they are capable of occupying space.

We glanced at this in chapter II; it is worth pausing here for a moment to consider it more at length. Division into parts means that one element in a being is not another element and neither element is the whole being. This fact makes it possible for a material being to occupy space: for it is of the very essence of occupying space that there should be elements that are not each other:

Atom: Atoms occupy space in the order of 10-10 metres.  Elementary particles called Electrons orbit other elementary particles comprising the Nucleus at discreet energy levels. Most of the space occupied by an atom is empty. Energy-model : www.arphila.com

The thing may be microscopically small, or too small for any microscope, but if it occupies space then one end is not the other end, the upper surface is not the lower surface, the outside is not the inside.

Unless a being is composed of elements that are not each other, it cannot occupy space.

Thus we must not let imagination deceive us about the vastness of SPACE. Let our universe be never so vast, it occupies space only because it has the prior limitation of having it's being broken up into parts. The occupation of space is a limitation, because it is grounded in a limitation.

Scientists may argue whether there is any external boundary of the material universe, whether one can conceive a point in any direction beyond which the material universe does not extend. This is a pleasant argument, but it has no bearing on the question whether the material universe is infinite. It may extend in all directions without ever coming to an outer boundary; but it has the myriad boundaries within itself that arise from its being composed of parts. It is incurably finite.

GOD on the other hand IS infinite. Therefore there are no parts within Him. He is wholly Himself in one inclusive act of being. Because He lacks the limitation of having parts, He is free from the consequent limitation of occupying space. Space cannot contain Him. He transcends space and the things of space, and indeed all created things. He lives His life in utter and absolute independence of them. Here the mind must tread very delicately, or imagination will play a trick upon it. For imagination, the material universe is altogether enormous, spread out in its majesty throughout space; whereas God occupies no space at all, and therefore is for imagination unimaginably tiny. But in reality the universe is in space because it is limited; and God is outside space, not because His being is too small even for the tiniest pinpoint hold in space, but because His being is too mighty.

Heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him (3 Kings viii. 27).

God does not occupy space, yet we say, and say rightly, that God is everywhere. Everywhere is clearly a word of space: everywhere is the space occupied by everything. Therefore to say that God is everywhere means to say that God is in everything! We have seen that God transcends all things, but He is IMMANENT, in some way abiding in all things too. Strictly, of course, since God is greater than the universe, it would be closer to the reality of things to say that everything is in God: the trouble is that if we say that, imagination tricks us with a mental picture of God as somehow the larger space of the two. Until imagination is under better control, let us stick to the phrase "God is in everything." But what does the word IN mean when applied to a being totally spaceless? How can a being who occupies no space at all yet manage to be in everything that does occupy space? Clearly the word IN, the word WHERE, both need closer examination when we speak of God as being everywhere, in everything. A spiritual being cannot be in a material being as water is in a cup or a cup in water. God cannot be in everything by being spread out spatially to occupy everything. He is not in the material universe as water is in a sponge, or even as a sponge in the ocean. For all spaceless beings the word WHERE has one meaning; a spaceless being is WHERE IT OPERATES, IT IS IN THE THINGS WHICH RECEIVE THE EFFECTS OF ITS POWER.

God is at the central point of the being of everything whatsoever because He is infinite, and all other things are finite, so that He can totally dominate them all by His power. And the first act of His domination is to hold them in existence, to keep them from being nothing. He is everywhere, that is He is in all things, because the effect of His power is upon all things:

Do I not fill heaven and earth? (Jer. xi. 24.)

There is a still deeper and more mysterious level at which we must try to grasp God's presence in things. But what we have here will do for a first step. He is in all things, because His power operates upon them, holding them in existence, that is to say He is in all things not because He needs them, but because they need Him. The universe therefore is to be thought of not as a necessity for God, providing Him with a place to be. He transcends things by the power of His own nature, He is immanent in things only to meet their need. Thus the question we began with - where was God before the universe existed - fades away into the inconsiderable question: what created thing was being held in existence by the power of God before there was any created thing?
top

II

Thus we have seen that the first part of the question led us to consider space in relation to God, and thus to God's total transcendence of space, which we call His Immensity. Now let us look at the second part of the question: "BEFORE the universe was created." For just as the word WHERE raises the question of SPACE, the word BEFORE raises the question of TIME, and we must be as clear about God's transcendence of time as about His transcendence of space. What then is time? Philosophers use the word in two closely related senses; most of us find that one of these senses is sufficient for us. Time, say the philosophers, is the duration of that which changes; time, say the philosophers again and we with them, is the measurement of the changes of the universe. What is common to both statements is the relation of time to CHANGE. Where nothing changes, there is nothing for time to measure. Where nothing changes, time has no possible meaning. Thus time and the universe started together. God is infinite and therefore changeless.

He is

the Father of lights with whom there is no change or shadow of alteration (James i. 17).

He possesses the utter fullness of existence, so that nothing can go from Him, for that would be to reduce Him; and nothing can come to Him for He already possesses all. The universe He created is a changing universe. And because change belongs to it and not to God, time belongs to it and not to God. To repeat, time and the universe started together: TIME IS THE TICKING OF THE UNIVERSE.

Thus the phrase " before the universe was created " has no meaning at all. Before is a word of time, and there could be no time before the universe because time began with the universe. To say "before the universe" means when there wasn't any when; which is to say that it doesn't mean anything at all.

Let us look a little more closely at what is implied by CHANGE. It means that the being which is subject to it is never at any moment the whole of itself: it possesses its being successively, as the philosophers say. You, for instance, are never at any moment the whole of yourself. What you were last year, what you will be next year, all belongs to the totality called you. But last year has gone, and next year has not arrived. It is obviously an overwhelming limitation that one never wholly possesses one's self, that one possesses one's being in successive moments and not simply in one act of being, that one is never all there. There is no such limitation in God. He possesses Himself wholly in one act of being. This is what we call His ETERNITY. Thus eternity does not mean time open at both ends, time stretching away back into the past with no beginning, stretching away forward into the future with no ending. In fact we are back at our earlier principle: that infinity means not only the absence of external limits, but of internal divisions as well. Just as space has parts lying alongside one another, time has parts following one another. The Infinite has no parts, of either (or any other conceivable) sort. Eternity is not time, however much we may try to glorify the concept of time. The philosophic definition of eternity is in two Latin words, TOTA SUMIL, [These are the key words of Boethius' definition of eternity 'Vitae intermindbilis tota simul et perfecta possessio' the whole and perfect possession in one act of life without end.] which may be roughly translated as ALL AT ONCE. God's eternity means that He possesses the totality of what He is, not in successive acts as we do, but in one single act. Just as time is the duration of that which changes, eternity is the duration of that which simply IS, the duration of the Being who, in one infinite act of being which does not change and does not cease, is all that He is, and does all that He does.

We may help to clarify our notions of eternity and time by considering what the word NOW means as applied to each. Our now, the now of time, is the NUNC FLUENS, the FLOWING now. It does not apply to the same instant of time as when I used it in the last sentence. At every use of the word NOW, it applies to a different instant. It does not even remain the same while we are saying it. For it consists of two sounds, N - and - OW. While we are saying the N-, the - OW is still in the future; when we are saying the - OW, the N - is already past. In other words, time's present is a very fleeting present indeed: God's present abides. He lives in the eternal now.

Apply all this to the consideration of one further absurdity that tends to shadow the back of our minds, even when in the front of our minds we are by way of knowing better. It is the vague feeling we have that eternity had been going on for some time before God decided to create the universe. In the light of what we have said, this is seen to be sheer meaninglessness, for it brings time into eternity. We must not think of God creating the universe after a certain amount of eternity had rolled by, because there are no parts in eternity, and it does not roll by. This mental absurdity is perhaps related to the picture of God as an old man. But God is not only not an old man, He is not even an old God. He is not old at all. For "old" simply means that one has lived through a long time, and there is no time in God's life.

How then are we to conceive creation, if we are not allowed to think of time stretching back to its beginning and eternity stretching back before that? We must try to conceive it in some such terms as this: God who possesses the whole of His Being in one single act of infinite existence wills that a universe should be which possesses its being in successive acts, bit by bit. Eternity belongs to the one, time to the other. God's creative act, like all His acts, is in eternity, because God is in eternity. The result of His creative act is in time. We get something faintly comparable in human affairs: a man speaks into a microphone at a certain time in London, his voice is heard a measurable moment later all over the world: the man acts where and when he is, the effects of his action are where and when they are. It is only a shadowy comparison not shedding much light on creation in eternity and time. The discouraged intellect may feel itself utterly incompetent to make anything at all of such concepts. But there is no gain in trying to imagine eternity in terms of the bit by bit. It is easier, of course, but it is a denaturing of eternity and therefore of God.
top

III

We have seen God as infinite and utterly changeless; and these two ideas might tend to combine in our minds in a concept of infinite stagnation. But God is alive, and life is activity; and God is infinite so that His activity is infinite, too. Thus we are in the presence of two truths about God, that He is infinitely IN ACTION and utterly IMMUTABLE; both truths are certain, yet it is immeasurably difficult for minds like ours to see how they can be reconciled. In all our experience of activity, change seems to be of activity's very essence. Certainly it is of no use to call upon the aid of imagination. Imagination can furnish no picture at all in which these two elements are happily combined for our comfort. If we are to make anything of them at all, the mind must be prepared to strip away every vestige of the effect that its long immersion in time and space has had upon it. We shall never wholly succeed, of course; but we shall go far enough to be able to see what further road lies ahead, and why we cannot yet tread that further road - far enough to see how the difficulty of reconciling these two truths lies not in the truths, but wholly in us.

Let us at least make a beginning, some first steps in the knowledge of God's activity. God is not simply something, but Someone. He is personal, that is He knows and loves. Therefore we can see that His activity will be personal activity, His life will be a life of knowing and loving, knowing infinitely, loving infinitely. In our thought of God's activity, we very naturally tend to think first of His actions in relation to the universe and so to us. Indeed we tend to think of these not only first, but pretty well exclusively. It is something of a wrench to realize that we do not belong essentially to God's life and activity at all - it is of OUR essence that He should act upon us, but not of His. It is not mere crudity to say that running the universe is God's hobby, not His real life. We must of course study closely God's dealings with us; but we must not stop there. We must also study Who and What that God is Who thus deals with us. Otherwise we shall fall short not only in our understanding of God, but as a consequence in our understanding of His dealings with us. One result not infrequently observed of this concentration upon God's Providence and neglect of God is a tendency to figure God's activities as one's own action, to assume that He acts as one would act oneself, to read His purposes as one would read one's own, and indeed to be prepared to play Providence oneself on occasion. Religious people are in a certain danger of talking of their own will as if it must be God's will and, in that misapprehension, forcing it upon others. Nothing is so strong a safeguard against this silliness as a grasp of the nature of God in Himself.

Here, then, we shall concentrate upon God's own life, so far as we can come to any knowledge of it. It is a life of knowing infinitely and loving infinitely. The innermost secrets of the personal life of God remain to be considered in the light of the revelation given to us by Christ Our Lord. Here we shall consider them only in relation to our present problem, which is to see how infinite activity can be one thing in God with utter changelessness. At this first level we can see that the combination of these two truths means that God KNOWS infinitely and LOVES infinitely, and that these two infinite activities imply no faintest shadow of change within Himself. In one way we can see it simply enough. Change would imply either that some new element which had not been there, before entered into His knowing or His loving, or that some element which had been there ceased to be there. But His knowing and His loving are in their very being the perfect expression of His own infinite perfection. By the mere fact of being, they possess all the perfection that knowledge and love can have, so that nothing could be added to them; and they possess this perfection abidingly, so that nothing can be taken from them. They cannot grow because God is perfect; they cannot diminish because God is perfect. Infinite knowledge and infinite life are INFINITE activities, and change can find no point of entry. So far we have been considering how these two apparent irreconcilables, activity and immutability, are one in God's personal life within Himself. Later we shall consider how our minds may see a reconciliation for them in God's dealings with the universe. How the changeless Being lives His own changeless life is one thing: how the changeless Being handles the affairs of this changing universe is another.

Meanwhile, let us return to the problem as it affects our understanding of God's own life. I have said that in one way we can see the reconciliation without any great difficulty. That is, we can demonstrate to ourselves unanswerably that it must be so. But there remains the practical problem of SEEING it so.
top

IV

Not till we have the face-to-face vision of God in the next life shall we be able to see the two as totally one, so that we shall see the immutability as identical with the infinite activity. Here below we have no direct mental experience of the Infinite. We know that it is the complete negation of limits, but we cannot conceive the Infinite as it IS. Yet immense progress is possible toward it. We can at least develop an awareness of the elements of limitation in our own being and our own action, and try to conceive what the absence of these limitations must mean in God. I shall try to show by an example how we may make a first step towards this. We have spoken of God's KNOWING. Now all we know about knowing, we derive from our own knowing. From it we get our positive concept of what knowing means in itself; from it we can, if we make the effort seriously enough, discover some of the limitations there are in our knowing,

arising from our finitude; and by concentrating upon what knowing means in itself, and trying to strip away the limitations of knowing as it is in us, we can make some stumbling steps towards the realization of what God's knowing must be.

Let us consider our own knowing to find out both the positive meaning of knowing and its limitations in us. Positively, we discover that we know a thing when what it is present to our mind. Knowing will not be less than that in God: the mode of it may be beyond our conception: the majesty of it may be beyond our conception: but the essential of it we have hold of? all things are present to the mind of God as what they are.

Now for some of the limitations of our knowing. I do not pretend to list them all.

1.  In the first place, we know so little; there are such vast masses of things that we do not know;
2.  A second limitation is that in our efforts to acquire knowledge we have to proceed one step at a time, we cannot know about anything by the mere act of looking at it;
3.  Even of the things that we do know, we cannot hold more than two or three in our mind at once - attention to one set of things means that we cannot be attending to another set of things at the same time.

These three are limitations in our knowing that no one can possibly fail to hit upon at once. There is no great difficulty in realizing that God's knowledge will be free from them - there is nothing He does not know, He does not have to acquire knowledge, He knows all that He knows in one act of knowing, the same light bathes them all. But there are certain other limitations in our knowing less obvious than these, which one who comes new to such thinking might not discover as limitations. Two of these will lead to very considerable advance in the knowledge of God. The first of these not-immediately-obvious limitations is that our knowledge is dependent upon the object known. Our knowledge of an orange, for instance, depends upon our having an orange to study. We know about anything by closely considering that thing.  In its absence, we cannot know it. Our knowledge demands a real submission of our intellect to the evidence of the thing. We are so accustomed to knowing things this way, that it does not even strike us as limitation. But to be dependent is always a limitation.   God's knowledge, being infinite, does not suffer from this limitation. He knows things, not as we do by looking at them, but by contemplating Himself. Knowing Himself He knows what being He gave them. He does not need to look at them.

The second of these not-immediately-obvious limitations is less obvious still and very much harder to grasp.  But it leads us to a most profound truth about the nature of God.  It is a fundamental limitation in our knowing that our act of knowing is distinct from our self. My knowing is something that I do, but it is not I. This may at first glance seem either no limitation at all, or at best, mere hair-splitting.  But in fact it is a very powerful limitation.   If my knowledge were the same thing as I, I should not have to make the distinct effort of setting about knowing: I should be engaged in the act of knowing, and of knowing all that I know, all the time; nor should I ever forget anything if my knowing were myself. Because it is not, I am sometimes knowing and sometimes not knowing, always under the necessity of making a distinct effort in the matter, often totally incapable of making the effort.  God's knowing is not subject to this limitation any more than to any other conceivable limitation.  God's knowing is not distinct from Himself.  God and His knowledge are one.  God is His knowledge.  God's knowledge is God.  Once again there may be vast difficulties for the mind in actually seeing it so, but there is no great difficulty in seeing that it must be so. For if God's knowledge were not identical with God Himself, then there would be some distinction between God and His knowledge, something that God has and that His knowledge lacks: but that would mean that His knowledge would not be infinite: which is impossible.

A moment's reflection will show us that the same line of thought which leads us to see that God and His knowledge are one applies to all the other attributes of God? His love, His justice, His mercy, any you please. God's mercy is not something God has, it is God. If His mercy or His justice were in any way distinct from Him, it would mean that there was something in Him that they lacked, and so His mercy or His justice would not be infinite, and that again is impossible. Thus there is no distinction between God's attributes and God, and therefore no difference between one of God's attributes and another. God's justice is God Himself and God's mercy is God Himself. Infinite justice and infinite mercy are not two opposing tendencies in God: they are one same God.

Let us make one further effort towards the realization of this. All perfections are in God, yet not distinct from one another because not distinct from God Himself. But our minds cannot handle all concepts in one concept. We must see them as distinct in order to see them at all. The mercy of God is an infinite reality. The justice of God is an infinite reality. In the Being of God they are the same reality: but if we try to begin our thinking by seeing them as the same reality, we shall simply not see them at all. Because God's mercy is real, let us contemplate God's mercy; and because God's justice is real, let us contemplate God's justice. Here indeed is the perfect opportunity for what has already been suggested as the right approach to the polar elements in any mystery: accept them both at white heat, and in some utterly unsayable way they will tend to fuse into one. So with God's attributes. There is not one of them that will not immeasurably repay our study. And as we thus in the mind live with them, our sense of their distinction from one another will grow less, and there will form in our mind some faint suggestion of their oneness with God. For this oneness of God and His attributes is merely the living consequence of that oneness we have already seen between God and His existence. We have all sorts of attributes, and they are not we. But there is no real distinction between what God has and what God is. God is what he has.
top

V

But whatever light may be about to grow in us as we grow in the knowledge of God, our first steps are pretty much in the dark. Our going is heavy going. We begin by stripping away limitations, which are part of the very atmosphere we have always breathed, and we find breathing very difficult. The stripping away of limitations seems a very thinning process, since we have nothing so familiar to put in their place. There is at first an intolerable sense of thinness about the idea of God that results. We may know that we are not taking anything away from God, because to subtract limitations is to add reality. But at first it does not seem so. Reality as we are accustomed to it, with all its limitations, has a kind of thickness compared with the thinness of infinite spirit. It is true that what I have called thickness results from the element of nothingness, and that all the realities that we know as mingled-with-nothingness because they are created are to be found in utter purity in the Creator. But it is hard to realize that this purity increases their intensity.

The truth is that if we had only the God of philosophy, God as the exploring mind can discover Him by its own powers, we should probably always feel Him just too remote. Ideally we should be able to make vast progress in knowledge of Him and some sort of intimacy with Him. But we are not ideal. Fortunately man's seeking for God is not the whole story. God has also sought man, a seeking with a long history that culminated when God became man and dwelt among us. Nothing could be less remote than Jesus Christ.
top