Talking About God
Ways to struggle with language
Last time, we encountered a curious conundrum: when we try to talk about God, our words shift around on us, and we find that we can’t really talk about God the way we talk about basically everything else. (This post is Part 2 in a 3-part series; if you haven’t read that post yet, I recommend you do before continuing!)
When we say that God is the creator or that God is good, we saw that we don’t really quite mean creating or being good in the way that humans might create things or be good. (And the same limitation applies to things like calling God a father, or mother, or a castle, or anything else: for God to do the basic things we think God does, God can’t actually be a father or mother or a castle.)
In other words, we discovered that one way we might talk about God—univocal or unequivocal language—probably won’t work. When we use words that we use to describe things other than God to talk about God, our words will mean something different from what we mean when we talk about that non-God stuff. That’s confusing—and annoying—but I hope that in my last post, I showed that it is nevertheless the case.
Today, though, we get to move on to some good news. Though we probably shouldn’t ever talk about God unequivocally, that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about God at all. But we will need to figure out how we can use language to refer to something (or someone) who seems to defy normal description.
Analogy
The first strategy is to use analogical language. This is a common approach, but it was probably made most famous (at least in the west) in the work of Thomas Aquinas, who employed analogical language in his Summa Theologica to try and arrive at effective names for God.
You are undoubtedly already familiar with analogical language. For example, we often describe articles or pictures online as being “viral”.
When we do this, we don’t mean that the articles or pictures in question are actually viruses that infect our bodies. Rather, we are making a comparison between how viruses spread between living organisms, and how content online can spread if enough people decide to share it. The comparison is pretty obvious, at least to most of us, but it’s crucial to see that we are not using our language univocally or unequivocally here: to call the spread of polio “viral” and to call the spread of the I Can Has Cheezburger meme “viral”1 is to use the same word in related but distinct ways. A meme spreading rapidly across the internet is similar to a virus spreading through a population in some ways, but not in others.
Analogical language about God uses this similar-but-different feature of analogical language in general to allow us to speak about God without losing the real and necessary difference between the things of everyday experience and God. So we can say that God is the creator, in that God “causes”2 existence to be, while also remembering that, of course, God’s act of creation is quite different from our own creative work. Likewise, we can truthfully say that God is good, and yet remember that God’s goodness must be radically different from the goodness of anything in our world, since God would seem to need to be the source of goodness as such.
The same strategy can work with references like God as father, mother, or castle. The idea of comparing God to a parent is obvious; if God causes us to be and loves us, then that sounds a lot like what our parents are like (or what we hope they are like, at least). Yet, again, we know that God can’t be thought of literally as a parent: a human mother has her ability to reproduce given to her by someone else (her parents); likewise, many of us are well aware that a human’s ability to reproduce can be damaged or even nonexistent from the outset. Furthermore, our ability to reproduce depends on all manner of other outside factors, such as access to food, water, oxygen, etc. In the absence of these, we won’t be making any babies.
But God’s “parental” relationship to us and our world would have none of these limiting factors, since God would be not only our source, but also the metaphysical principle that allows for anything to be the source of anything at all in the first place—the source of “sourceness”.3 As we discussed last time, God’s act of creation is understood in Abrahamic theologies as creation from nothing (but God’s self); this is dramatically different from the way a human parent creates or parents. Indeed, human mothers literally make their babies from the food they eat. This is an act of creation that necessarily draws on things other than, and even prior to, the mother herself (it should go without saying that men’s creative powers in this department are far less impressive still).
The limits to referring to God as a castle should be obvious at this point (though it’s worth pointing out that Scripture often does so). God can be thought of as having some castle-like qualities: God is strong, big, solid, a defense in time of trouble, etc. Yet I think few if any Christians, Jews, or Muslims (or anyone else, for that matter) have ever thought that God is actually some big building made of stone somewhere. The reference doesn’t work unequivocally, but it is perfectly serviceable so long as we mean it analogically.
And yet, even as we rejoice in our ability to talk about God analogically, we might begin to feel a little perturbed. Sure, analogy is great, but it leaves us still at quite a distance from God. We are essentially stuck with similes and metaphors: God is like this or that, but we discover that we can’t actually talk about God as such. When we use analogy, in a sense, we really aren’t talking about God at all, but rather referring to God through a sort of house of mirrors. For those interested in theology, this is a problem. Is there a solution?
Apophatic Theology: Negating Our Way Back to the Source
You might have noticed something interesting when thinking through our examples above. Though it’s true that we can’t say that God literally is a father or a castle, we might think we can cleverly dodge our linguistic limitations by simply offering a negation. Isn’t it literally true to say that God isn’t a father, and God isn’t a castle? If so, then perhaps we could arrive at knowledge of God by adding up all the negative statements about God that seem to be literally true. Much like carving a statue from marble, we would arrive at our goal by removing everything unnecessary.
Such an approach is called apophatic theology, or “negative” theology. It is contrasted with kataphatic theology, or “positive” theology (of which both unequivocal and analogical statements would be examples).4 Apophatic theology recognizes the limits of human language, recognizes how strange God is, and attempts to arrive at a true theology by pointing out all the things that God isn’t.
Such an approach has obvious appeal and potential, especially for theologians and philosophers who want to be careful and systematic. It allows us to really draw into focus all the ways in which the universe as we know it is radically different from God. For example, one of the qualities we might want to predicate of God is eternality: God is eternal. But this positive statement can cause confusion. When we think of something as eternal, I think we often just think of something being really, really, endlessly old. The earth, for example, is more than 4 billion years old. Compared to a human lifetime, that’s very long. But, of course, it’s not eternal. Eventually, time will run out, and our planet will disappear. But it’s important to note that this would be true, even if we kept adding time. Let’s say that instead of being 4 billion years old, it turned out to be 40—or 400—billion years old. This would make it much older, for sure, but it would still be entirely not eternal, and indeed, would be no closer to being eternal. And this would be true, no matter how many zeroes you added after that 4.
To be eternal is to have no beginning or end whatsoever. Having extreme longevity is not the same as being eternal. Now, if we think about it for a moment, this should reveal something important: nothing in our cosmos is eternal, because everything in the cosmos is happening in time. Even very big, very old things begin, and they end. Indeed, the best physics today insist that the cosmos not only had a beginning, about 13.8 billion years ago, but will also have an end (though the nature and time of that end are more controversial). The universe itself is not eternal.5
For something to be eternal, it would need to be entirely non-temporal. This means it wouldn’t be young, yes, but it also wouldn’t be old. It would just be timeless, ageless. Here you might see the advantages of apophatic theology. If instead of calling God “eternal”, we say that God is non-temporal, it seems we are getting better conceptual clarity. Predicating eternality of God can lead to a confusion, where we, perhaps unintentionally, simply ascribe a kind of endless extension to God. But if we insist on calling God non-temporal, then it seems we can cut this error off at the pass.
Thus, apophatic theology gives us a series of negations that seem to be literally true of God: non-temporal, uncreated, incorporeal, non-spatial, etc. And it’s hard to argue with these as predicates of God. Surely, if the creator is anything at all, the creator must be uncreated.
Even so, we might again find ourselves a bit disappointed and still curious. After all, it would seem that we could basically negate every positive statement about God. If a sculptor keeps chiseling at her block of marble until there’s nothing left all, that’s a rather poor statue: a pure absence, a nothing-statue. Surely, if we want to believe in God, we will need something more than such a present absence?
But the problems run deeper still. Relying solely on negation, we also seem to introduce an absolute chasm between ourselves and God: if God is not like anything we know, if indeed it would be correct to say that God is not related to the universe (since this certainly seems to be a proper apophatic statement), then haven’t we basically defined a God that is not only not imaginable, but also has no features, and indeed has no real connection to us? Isn’t this more like a God-shaped hole than actually God? Does apophatic theology lead to a sort of atheist theology?6
Apophatic theology can be a powerful corrective to kataphatic theology, especially if we fall into the error of offering unequivocal statements about God. Even when it comes to more helpful analogical statements about God, apophatic negations can help us hone our understanding. But on its own, apophatic theology will simply erase the possibility of any language about God whatsoever. As the titles of these posts indicate, I don’t think we have to accept that outcome.
Next week, in the final post of this series, we will explore how we might approach language so that it embraces both positive and negative statements about God to get us, hopefully, closer to the truth.7
I’m really dating myself with this reference…
The word “cause” when used here should not be understood in the common modern use of this term, but in a broader sense, e.g. the fuller 4-part Aristotelean sense (or some other metaphysically rich meaning).
I have not dove into the metaphysical arguments around these topics yet—but I do plan to do so in a future post. I am trying to keep this series focused on our use of language rather than abstract metaphysics as such.
It’s important to understand “positive” and “negative” here in their technical, factual sense, and not their moral one.
It’s worth noting that even philosophical traditions that have held that the universe is infinitely old still recognize the difference between infinite length and true eternality—though that’s a topic for another post.
Many theology nerds (takes one to know one) will want to point out here that there are multiple different approaches to negative theology, and that I have lumped them all together here. That is true, but, as I hope to show, not germane to the work at hand.
Notably, after a complete absence of any talk of phenomenology in this post and the previous one, we will also finally get some phenomenology talk next week. I am sure that excites you.