Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

If God is Uniquely Unique, How could He be Addressed in Prayer?

My entry God as Uniquely Unique ended on an aporetic note. I acknowledged the following sort of objection, but had nothing to say in response to it. How could the ontologically simple God be of any religious use to the suffering creature wandering in the desert of the world?

"Such an utterly transcendent God as you are describing is ineffable!  He is the God of the philosophers, not the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. I want a God with a face, a God that can be addressed in petitionary prayer, a God that is a Thou to my I."

The problem can be put like this. The exigencies of the intellect drive us toward the simple God, a God so utterly transcendent as to be inconceivable to us.  The exigencies of the heart, however, move us toward a personal God with whom one could enter an I-Thou relation. Is it possible to mediate this opposition? 

Is it possible to stand astride Athens and Jerusalem, with a foot in each, and not topple over or be torn apart?

A letter from Robert Deinhammer, S. J., of Innsbruck, Austria suggests a way.  Here is his letter followed by my translation:

Ich bin gerade wieder einmal nach längerer Zeit auf ihrem Blog gewesen und finde Ihren jüngsten Eintrag über die einzigartige Einzigartikeit Gottes sehr wichtig.

Ich würde mit P. Knauer sagen: Gott fällt nicht unter Begriffe, er ist absolut unbegreiflich. Wie kann man dann von ihm reden? Antwort: Wir begreifen von Gott immer nur das von ihm Verschiedene, nämlich die geschaffene Welt, die aber auf ihn hinweist und ohne ihn überhaupt nicht sein kann. Geschaffensein bedeutet im Rahmen einer relationalen Ontologie ein "restloses Bezogensein auf …/ in restloser Verschiedenheit von …". Dies ermöglicht auch "hinweisende" Rede von Gott: Die Welt ist Gott ähnlich und unähnlich zugleich; Gott seinerseits ist der Welt gegenüber aber nur unähnlich. Die Relation der Welt auf Gott ist vollkommen einseitig. In diesem Sinne führt natürliche Theologie nur zur Einsicht, dass Gott in "unzugänglichem Licht wohnt" (1 Tim) und wir als bloße Geschöpfe keinerlei Gemeinschaft mit ihm haben können.

Vor diesem überaus dunklen Hintergrund erläutert allein der Inhalt der christlichen Botschaft, wie dennoch Gemeinschaft mit Gott ausgesagt werden kann: Wir sind von vornherein aufgenommen in eine göttliche Relation, nämlich in die ewige Liebe des Vaters zum Sohn, die der Heilige Geist ist. So kann Gott auf die Welt real bezogen sein, ohne dadurch von der Welt abhängig zu werden. Aber gerade weil diese göttliche Liebe nicht ihr Maß an der Welt hat und deshalb auch keine Macht der Welt dagegen ankommen kann, kann man sie auch nicht einfach an der Welt "ablesen" oder durch meditative Versenkung erkennen. Sie ist nur erkennbar im Glauben an die Botschaft Jesu: Der Sohn hat eine menschliche Natur angenommen, um uns in einem menschlichen Wort sagen zu können, das wir an seinem Verhältnis zum Vater Anteil haben. In diesem Sinne wird dann auch Gebet erst möglich: Jesus Christus nimmt uns hinein in sein Sprechen zum Vater.

………………………..

I have just now visited your blog again after a long while and I find your most recent entry on the unique uniqueness of God to be very important.

I would say, with P. Knauer, that God does not fall under concepts; he is absolutely inconceivable or unconceptualizable.  But then how can one speak of him? Answer: We conceive of God always only by way of that which is different from him, namely, the created world which points to him and which without him cannot be at all.  In the context of a relational ontology, creaturehood means 'a total relatedness  to . . . / in total difference from . . . .'  This makes possible 'pointing' talk of God: the world is both like and unlike God; God on his side, however, is only unlike the world . The relation of the world to God is completely one-sided or unilateral.  In this sense natural theology leads to the insight that God "dwelleth in inaccessible light" (1 Timothy 6:16) and we mere creatures can have no kind of community with him.

But if God so dwells and is unapproachable by us, and we can enjoy no community with him, how are we to explain the Christian message that we nevertheless can have community with God? As follows. We are from the outset taken up in a divine relation, namely, in the eternal love of the Father for the Son, which relation is the Holy Spirit. In this way God can be really related to the world without thereby becoming dependent on the world.  But precisely because this divine love has no worldly measure and also cannot be opposed by any worldly power, one cannot simply 'read it off' from the world or know it by non-discursive meditation.  Divine love is knowable only by faith in the message of Jesus: The Son has assumed a human nature in order to be able to say to us in human words that we share in his relation to the Father.  In this sense prayer is first possible: Jesus Christ takes us into his speaking with the Father.

How is community with God possible given his absolute transcendence? That is the problem. If I understand the above, the solution requires both Trinity and Incarnation. Within the Godhead, the Son loves the Father and the Father the Son. This eternal relation of love is the Holy Spirit. God, in the person of the Son, becomes man. "And the Word became flesh and dwellt among us."  Fully human and fully divine, Jesus Christ brings the divine into the creaturely realm.  The transcendent becomes immanent without ceasing to be transcendent. God acquires a human face and speaks saving words within the range of human hearing.

The question cannot be suppressed: Is not the solution as problematic as the original problem?   The exigencies of the discursive intellect drive us beyond it to the simple God who lies beyond the discursive intellect and is devoid of human meaning. The restoration of such meaning, however, via Trinity and Incarnation, also involves inconceivabilities, as any good Unitarian will be quick to point out.

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Bill Vallicella

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18 responses to “If God is Uniquely Unique, How could He be Addressed in Prayer?”

  1. Tom Avatar
    Tom

    I too feel the pull between Athens and Jerusalem. I am a committed Christian primarily for non-philosophical reasons. I was in a bad place some years ago. But the further I walked away from God, the more I felt (experienced?) a distinctly moral pull on my life from outside myself. It grew stronger and stronger, until I realized that I was approaching a crossroads and that if I continued in my Godless ways, I would reach a point of no return. I chose to go back to God and I found redemption in Christ (no hyperbole here, I am not even close to the same person now that I was). I cannot explain it in non-religious terms. It would be impossible. But it was uncannily similar to Augustine’s experience in The Confessions.
    As a philosophy student, my intellect draws me to ‘the God of the philosophers’. But, for the reasons above, my commitment to a personal God runs much, much deeper than any intellectual considerations to the contrary. I’m being merely descriptive here. I don’t know if this is bad or good, or neither. But this is why I am able to sit with the tension. It is a real tension. But for me at least, the tension itself seems subsidiary to my deep moral and spiritual convictions and experience of redemption. I don’t suspect it can ever be resolved in a satisfactory way. But, like I say, the tension sits rather ‘surface level’ for me, so psychologically I’m not that worried about it.
    In short, my experience of grace and redemption takes precedence over any intellectual tension I might have in natural theology. Should it be this way? I don’t know. But I can’t imagine it being otherwise.

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  2. Dave Bagwill Avatar
    Dave Bagwill

    Bill, you asked “How is community with God possible given his absolute transcendence?”
    Is that not a specific form of a more general question? “How is __________ possible given his absolute character?”
    IOW, is the problem only a problem for religious believers seeking community? Or does the DDS also challenge anyone who acknowledges the existence of anything?

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  3. Elliott Avatar
    Elliott

    Interesting entries. Some problems:
    (1) Likeness is a relation of symmetry. If A is like B with respect to some covering relation R, then B is like A with respect to R and vice versa. So, in what sense is the world like God if God is not at all like the world?
    (2) A relation is not a person. So, if the Holy Spirit is a relation, in what sense is the Holy Spirit a person of the Trinity?
    (3) If God is ontologically simple, in what sense does God have internal relations or persons?

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  4. BV Avatar
    BV

    Tom,
    That’s a fine statement. Ideally one wants a harmonization of head and heart, and one should strive for it. But if faith seeks understanding and doesn’t find it, I would say you are within your epistemic rights in remaining true to your religious experiences.
    One consideration is this. Philosophy is a magnificent thing, but the philosophers disagree about everything and always have. This reflects poorly on the cognitivity of the discipline. By what right, then, does philosophy set itself up as the judge of religious experience?
    Some say that if faith seeks understanding, but doesn’t find it, then one ought to abandon or suspend one’s faith. But it may be that there are truths that can be accessed — I don’t say ‘know’ — only by faith — truths essential to appropriate for our ultimate flourishing.

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  5. Elliott Avatar
    Elliott

    Bill and Tom, your exchange is very good in several respects.

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  6. David Bagwill Avatar
    David Bagwill

    Yes, very good exchange.

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  7. BV Avatar
    BV

    Elliot,
    Your three questions are difficult if not impossible to answer. I should pose them to Fr. Deinhammer.

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  8. Robert Deinhammer Avatar
    Robert Deinhammer

    Elliot,
    ad 1) The world-God-relation is unilateral, one-sided. Hence, in this case likeness is not a relation of symmetry.
    ad 2) Person is self-presence, i.e. a relation on to itself. The Holy Spirit is a relation of the Divine nature to itself and connects the Father and the Son who are also relations of the Divine nature to itself.
    ad 3) These “Persons” are not parts of the Divine nature. God’s simplicity transcends our comprehension.
    Best,
    Fr. Robert Deinahmmer, S.J.

    Reply
  9. Elliott Avatar
    Elliott

    Bill, one might attempt to answer these questions by appealing to dialetheism. Perhaps the divine realm is dialetheic. If one makes this move, it seems there’s not much left to say, if intelligible speech presupposes the law of noncontradiction.

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  10. Elliott Avatar
    Elliott

    “But it may be that there are truths that can be accessed — I don’t say ‘know’ — only by faith — truths essential to appropriate for our ultimate flourishing.”
    This is one of the interesting points from the exchange.
    Perhaps some truths are inaccessible by propositional knowledge, but they are accessible via knowledge-by-acquaintance (or something like it). The latter isn’t a matter of language and thus doesn’t require a linguistic version of the law of non-contradiction. But doesn’t k-b-a require the law of noncontradiction, the law of identity, etc. as laws of reality? Everything is what it is and is not something else. If I directly experience a tree, I’m not experiencing a not-tree. If I directly experience a person, I’m not experiencing (in the same sense) a non-person.

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  11. Elliott Avatar
    Elliott

    Fr. Deinhammer,
    Thank you for your response. I appreciate the Roman Catholic perspective on the mystery of the Trinity. I have a few follow-up questions.
    First, how can a relation of likeness be one-sided? Isn’t the concept of likeness by definition at least bilateral? If A is like B with respect to property P, then B is like A with respect to P.
    Second, the definition of “person” as “a relation on to itself” doesn’t seem to be what we normally mean by “person” (i.e., a being of a rational nature). Relations are abstract objects, while persons are concrete objects. Is this a unique sense of personhood that applies only to divine persons? Does this definition hold for human persons, too? If the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are relations, does that mean they are abstract objects?
    Third, the Gospel of John states that God is identical with the Logos. (John 1:1) The term “Logos” indicates intelligibility, reason, rational thought, rational discourse, etc. If God’s nature is beyond human comprehension, in what sense is God the Logos? Is God’s intelligibility and rationality inherently comprehensible, yet not comprehensible to human beings?

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  12. BV Avatar
    BV

    Elliot,
    Dialetheism is the theory that some logical contradictions are true. So on a dialetheist approach to the Trinity one would say that while the doctrine is logically contradictory, it is nonetheless true. This is not trad. Catholic doctrine. Fr. Deinhammer can correct me if I am wrong, but the Catholic doctrine would be something like this: the doctrine is non-contradictory and true but beyond our ken. It is a mystery in the sense that we in our present state, this side of the visio beata, cannot understand how it could be true. We should distinguish mysterianism from dialetheism.

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  13. Elliott Avatar
    Elliott

    Bill, yes, there is a difference between mysterianism and dialetheism. I’m open to mysterianism. God is supremely intelligible, nevertheless, in this life we humans can’t understand some things about God. Reality is comprehensible as such, why think that humans can understand all of it completely?

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  14. BV Avatar
    BV

    Elliot,
    There is knowledge-by acquaintance and knowledge-by-description. Both are in keeping with the laws of logic. What I was suggesting above is that there may be truths that cannot be known by us in our present state but can only be believed. Revealed truths would fall into this category. We have access to them by faith, not by knowledge. Now a Thomist will speak of cognitio fidei, but I balk at this phrase because I think that knowledge, strictly speaking, requires justification in the form of direct evidence. There is no knowledge by faith; that would be oxymoronic in my book.
    One of the issues that arises here concerns the ‘ethics of belief.’ Is it morally wrong to believe on insufficient or nonexistent evidence? What if your eternal happiness hinges on accepting a truth for which you have insufficient evidence?
    “Before Abraham was, I AM.” “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one gets to the father except through me.” Via, Veritas, Vita. “Ich bin der Weg, die Wahrheit, und das Leben”: All-important truths if indeed true; am I morally entitled to believe them on the basis of insufficient evidence? And the evidence is insufficient to make the claims more likely true than not. Agree?

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  15. BV Avatar
    BV

    Elliot,
    My latest entry explores the belief-knowledge issue a bit further. See if you agree with it.

    Reply
  16. Robert Deinhammer Avatar
    Robert Deinhammer

    Elliot,
    Just briefly:
    1.) The world-God-relation is sui generis and unlike all relations within the world. The reality of the world is constituted as a unilateral relation towards God. Hence, the likeness is also unilateral. God is not a part of an overall system. For a similar view see e.g. Aquinas, S.th. I q4 a3 ad4
    2.) I would say that personhood is ontologically a concrete relatedness of a reality toward itself (“Selbstpräsenz”). We as creatures actualize this relation in our selfconsciousness. In God, the terminus ad quem and the terminus a quo of this relation towards itself are really identical and only logically distinct. (Cf. “reditio completa” in Aquinas, Super librum de causis, I 15).
    3.) John 1:18: “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is Himself God and is at the Father’s side, has made Him known.” We can understand God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. But this does not mean that God becomes thereby an object of our comprehension. God in itself does not fall under concepts.
    I should add that I’m not a strict Thomist although I find many insights of Aquinas very helpful.

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  17. Elliott Avatar
    Elliott

    Fr. Deinhammer,
    Thanks for your reply. I’m aware of Aquinas’ position on the relation between God and the world. I hold Aquinas in high regard, but I don’t find his position very helpful. The claim that the likeness relation is unilateral seems like a contradiction in terms, and to refer to the relation as unique seems open to the charge of being ad hoc.

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  18. Elliott Avatar
    Elliott

    Bill, my reference to knowledge-by-acquaintance was a reference to the knowledge obtained during the beatific vision.
    I agree with your latest entry. Magee’s argument is probative overkill, especially with respect to the ethics of belief. It is said that one should never believe anything on insufficient evidence. But it’s not clear what the sufficient evidence for that claim is. Why believe it?
    Magee seems to reject the idea of reasonable belief that falls short of knowledge. His position would paralyze ordinary human activity. In ordinary life, we act (and must act) on common-sense beliefs that fall short of knowledge. Arguably, we are practically justified in doing so.

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