(Beyond Merely) Talking About God
Asymmetrically Participating in God's Transcending Immanence
Today we conclude our discussion on the difficulty of talking about God. After noting in part 1 that attempts to speak about God were hard, and that our language about God was often rather weird, last week, in part 2, we explored two approaches to talking about God that seemed to have promise: analogy and apophasis. (If you haven’t read parts 1 and 2 yet, I recommend you do before continuing!)
At the end of part 2, we found ourselves in a strange place: we found we could talk about God through analogical statements and also through apophatic (negative) statements, though each have their limits. But this results in a strange situation: we can say both that, for example, “God is a mother” (so long as we mean this analogically!) and also “God is not a mother”. But how can this be? In saying this, are we in violation of the law of non-contradiction?
As I said at the outset of part 1: talking about God is weird, and talking about God is hard. To see how it could be the case that God both is and is not a mother (or anything else), let’s employ some more analogy.
Harry Potter Meets J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter is probably the most famous fictional character in the west today.1 But is Harry Potter real? In one sense of this question, the answer is obviously no: I just introduced him as a fictional character, after all. Harry Potter is not a flesh-and-blood human being. There is no actual, physical place called the Hogwarts School of Magic. There are no wizards who fly through the air, playing quidditch.
However, and at the same time, it does seem like we can make true and false statements about Harry Potter. It is true (or it certainly seems true) to say that Harry Potter wears glasses, that he is, in fact, a wizard, that he is a young boy (or young man, depending on which novel we are talking about), that he is friends with the red-haired guy (Roy? Ronald?) and Hermione. Certainly, I think we could agree that it would be wrong to say that Harry Potter is an 80-year old grandmother, a mid-sized sedan, or a pint of beer.
Now, none of what I’ve said above is any kind of revelation; even young children can tell the difference between a fictional character and a real person. There isn’t anything mind-bending about pointing out that fictional characters can have real (at least in one sense of that word) properties, and that someone could say true or false things about them. We humans are wonderfully imaginative, after all.
But here’s the question I want to ask: can Harry Potter meet J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books?2
Again, at first glance, it would seem the answer to this question is straightforward: Harry Potter is a fictional character, while J.K. Rowling is an actual, flesh-and-blood human being. Harry Potter isn’t real, or at least not really real: he can’t meet anyone, because he doesn’t exist, at least not in the way a human being needs to exist in order to meet other actual human beings.
Now, one crafty way around this problem might be for J.K. Rowling to write herself into the Harry Potter books. If (the real) J.K. Rowling wrote (a character named) J.K. Rowling into a new Harry Potter book, and made that character as close a facsimile to the real Rowling as possible, then perhaps we might argue that Potter and Rowling can indeed meet.3
Of course, this is too clever by a half, since what we have done is had a not-real Rowling meet the not-real Potter, when what we wanted to know is whether the character Harry Potter could meet the real Rowling.
This might lead us to conclude that between Rowling and Potter, there is an uncrossable chasm, an infinite qualitative distinction: they can never meet, not even in theory.
But this conclusion seems wrong to me as well: after all, Harry Potter only exists—to the extent that he exists at all—because J.K. Rowling invented him. Everything that Harry Potter did, J.K. Rowling made him do. Indeed, everything Harry Potter did, or was, or experienced, was literally nothing more than a thought in Rowling’s head, at least at one point.4 In that sense, Harry Potter is always in the most intimate of contact with her, because he is nothing but her product, her action, her “energy”, the manifestation of her will. Indeed, Harry Potter is doing nothing but meeting J.K. Rowling in every moment of whatever constitutes his existence, because everyone he meets, and everywhere he goes, and every situation he faces, is nothing more or less than the concretization of J.K. Rowling’s imagination. Potter is as Rowling does.
So: Potter and Rowling can’t possibly meet, and they also can’t possibly do anything else other than always be meeting. I think the strange relationship between these two gives us a good analogy for how to understand our language about God, and indeed our relationship with God.
The Language of Participation: Ontological Asymmetry
The relationship between Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling is, I think, analogous to the relationship between humanity and God. I started this whole series with a simple reference to the idea of God as the creator—we might just as well say the author—of our world.5 That means that (analogically speaking!) something like the same odd relationship that Potter has with Rowling, we have with God: compared to God, we are basically unreal. God is not a “character” in this story (i.e., material existence), and so we cannot meet God. In that sense, God is indeed utterly absent, just as J.K. Rowling is utterly absent from the Harry Potter universe.
But, and at the same time, if God is indeed the creator of our world, the author of this story,6 then quite literally everything that happens happens because God either causes it to happen, allows it to happen, or at least provides the possibility that it could happen (God is the condition of possibility for any existence to exist). We are, in a sense, nothing other than the thoughts of God, made manifest in a world which is also really just a thought of God. This conclusion simply follows from the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, which we explored in part 1: if God is the creator, then God created all contingent existence from nothing (other than Godself). God is the only real foundation beneath all of everything. There is no other source, no other foundation for existence.7 We are the words God speaks.
What this has to mean is that simply by virtue of existing, we are necessarily participating in God, in a way analogous to how Harry Potter participates in J.K. Rowling’s mind and indeed her being. Many Christian theologians, especially those of the eastern traditions of the church and those most influenced by Neoplatonist ideas, have insisted that language of our participation in God is the best way to talk about God. Of course, it need not replace analogical or apophatic ways of speaking, but still it might get us closest to direct and literal expressions about God, in large part precisely because language of our participation in God allows us to simultaneously affirm both kataphatic analogy and apophatic negation: we are both totally other from God (just as Harry Potter definitely isn’t J.K. Rowling) and yet utterly defined and determined by God from top to bottom (just as Harry Potter is nothing but the expression of Rowling’s will).
We find, then, that we can both posit and negate our statements about God; the tension between these two approaches does not collapse, but rather provides the scaffolding for a necessarily dialectical understanding of our relationship with and to God: we are not God; we are nothing but God. Each of these statements is true, and captures something crucial. Yet, on their own, each statement is profoundly incomplete. It’s only in stating them both, back to back, that we have a more complete accounting of our relationship to God, language that at least begins to allow us to speak honestly about God.
Another way of putting all of this is (again, assuming that we accept God is the creator and creates ex nihilo) that our relationship with God is completely asymmetrical: we rely on God in a way God does not rely on us. God creates us, but we don’t create God. We are nothing other than God’s act, yet God utterly transcends us. This language of asymmetrical participation allows us to both affirm something like Barth’s infinite qualitative distinction between creation and God, on the one hand, and the necessarily utterly intimate relationship we have with God, on the other. Both are true simultaneously, and indeed, each can only be true when balanced by the other.
Deirdre Carabine puts its eloquently, I think, when she summarizes the metaphysical view of Plotinus:
…from a metaphysical point of view, the One is both everywhere and nowhere; it is neither limited nor unlimited; it both is in all things and yet in no thing; it contains all but is not itself contained; it is simple and yet not simple; it is form which is formless, and unity which is partless; and, finally, it is multiple, yet above all multiplicity. In sum, all things both are and are not the One. All things can be said to be the One, since it is present to them as their source; on the other hand, they are not the One, because the One cannot be the things into which its power flows.8
I think it’s accurate to say something like this: “God is me, but I am not God”—God literally constitutes my very being, and yet I am nothing but a completely contingent event “caused” by, sourced from, God. I cannot exist without God, but of course God can and does exist without me (and everything else in this universe)—yet, nevertheless, God does choose to create this universe, and that act of creation is the true and full expression of God’s will.
This language of asymmetrical participation is, I think, the crown jewel of theological language. But it’s important to note that it does not supersede analogical or apophatic language; rather, it unites and completes them, and it could not function without their input.
If we do accept this participatory language about God, a whole host of consequences flow. In concluding, I just want to point out one: if I (and you!) am indeed literally the action of God, then in the experience of my own being, my own existence, my own knowing and knowing-myself, then, I am experiencing an act of God. This means that in the immediacy of my own phenomenality, I experience God, even if only in an utterly asymmetrical way. In paying attention to my immediate experience, the bare nature of consciousness itself, I have the first rung on a ladder towards God—at least in theory. To accept that we always participate in God means that we can never be utterly disconnected from God. In that sense, phenomenology9 is a critical tool in any genuine spirituality, as it allows us to consider more carefully this crucial link between ourselves and our creator.
(If you want to hear someone both better educated and smarter than me approach this issue through the lens of Christology, I thoroughly recommend David Bentley Hart’s lectures entitled “The Light of Tabor”, which are all available for free through his substack.)
We are now approaching 1800 words in this post, and I have made a soft commitment to myself to keep my posts under 2k words going forward, so I want to wrap this post—and the series—up here. I hope these three articles have been a good summary introduction to some of the difficulties—and promise—of theological language. Please know that we have only tapped the tip of the iceberg here; there is much more to say about saying stuff about God! In the future, I will be doing so. I hope you will join me.
It will surprise no one, I think, to learn that I did zero seconds of research to verify this claim.
Ms. Rowling has become quite a controversial figure over the last decade or so, especially due to her views on feminism and the status and rights of transgender people (and, more lately, Palestine and Israel). I am using her as an example simply because of the popularity of her books; my reference to her should not be taken as support for or condemnation of any of her views, political or otherwise. Her name is but a philosophical prop here!
If memory serves, C.S. Lewis actually uses this as an analogy for the Incarnation, though I can’t remember in which book. If I had to guess, I would probably say Mere Christianity.
I hope that the Derrida fans among you will let me bracket concerns about the death of the author for the time being.
Careful readers will note that I took God’s status as creator for granted there, offering no argument in favor of such a view. That was because I want this series to focus on language about God rather than metaphysics per se. I do plan to post an article in the not-too-distant future focusing more on one good argument for believing in God as the creator.
Again, the language of “story” here is meant analogically, as all language about God must be (see part 2!) I am not suggesting any kind of deterministic relationship between God’s will and the events of the cosmos. Again: metaphysics will come at a later time!
It should be noted that this means that any deistic watchmaker style deity simply won’t meet the metaphysical demands that theism, and our world, actually make.
Carabine, Deirdre, The Unknown God: Negative Theology in the Platonic Tradition: Plato to Eriugena, 158. Emphasis added.
I told you our beloved term would make an appearance (see what I did there?) here!
Asymmetrical participation. Your getting at and offering an articulation of what I’ve been trying dearly to find the language for. In a sense as much as analogy can be productive as skaladom said it leads to us comprehending god (in the old sense of the word) rather than God comprehending is. Analogical language with hart sometimes starts to sound univocal. But in some ways don’t we have to say in a sense there it is also equivocal? Does that make sense? But you nailed it on the head. It’s the I am God in potency but not God but a contingent created being. I guess this is where I think only a qualitative monism can hold. Anyway thank you for your clear explanation of extremely hard to express ideas!
Well explained, thanks!
One thing that strikes me as odd about this approach, though, is that the thinkers involved seem to have a very full and fleshed-out concept of God, before they get around to finding how difficult it is to talk about that God. They sound pretty sure they know their object, before finding themselves unsure what can be literally said about it. That strikes me as methodologically backwards; wouldn't it make more sense to start from a rather minimal concept first, and only flesh it out to the extent you find things that you can actually say about it?
I guess the answer is that they are not operating in a vacuum, these are Christian theologians who first accepted their religion, with its scriptures amd tenets, and then proceeded to philosophize about it. Which is fair enough as things go, but then what they're producing is inseparably tied to that tradition. I don't think it makes sense to try to make it more abstract and general after the fact, when a specific religion has been allowed to shape not only the answers but even the questions.
Given the excellent name of this blog, I'd dream of an approach where the starting point is something relatively minimal, like the intuition of some kind of transcendence/immanence, which occurs East, West, North and South... and instead of jumping to put everything into a singular external entity called God, it could be examined through a phenomenological lens, prior to objectification.
With that kind of enquiry, one might find that the questions of transcendence/immanence and of the origin of the universe are "prima facie" quite unrelated, given that one occurs in the present moment, and the other at a definite point of time in the distant past!