The unknown God

A. N. Wilson, in God's Funeral, a work on the "Victorian Crisis of Faith," notes the following:

"The nineteenth century had created a climate - philosophical, politico-sociological, literary, artistic, personal - in which God had become unknowable, his voice inaudible against the din of machines and the atonal banshee of the emerging ego-mania called the Modern. The cohesive force which orgainsed religion had once provided was broken. The nature of society itself, urban, materialised, industrialised, was the background for the godlessness which philosophy and science did not so much discover as ratify."

Later, he makes the telling point: "God's funeral was not the end of a phase of human intellectual history. It was the withdrawal of a great Love-object." (Emphasis mine.)

I have no talent for the social sciences, and dare say that ego-mania dates to the days when our 'first parents' took the word of a serpent that God was depriving them of the fruit of the tree lest they have knowledge equal to His. My own speciality in theology, if indeed I can claim any expertise at all, is ascetic. It is difficult for me to fully grasp the sorts of faith crises which stem from believing that intellectual integrity is at odds with faith, when (for example) belief seems to contradict 'facts,' because I know, all too well and for all of my own intellectual leanings, that worship is a matter of Love. (It deserves the capital L.)

One of the most painful parts, perhaps especially for the intellectual sorts such as myself, is that prayer does not involve knowing anything at all. There is no certainty in faith. We have no 'proofs' for the resurrection, revelation whether at Sinai or in the Incarantion, and so forth. Somehow, I am recalling the glorious words of John of the Cross: "I entered in, I know not where, and I remained, though knowing naught, transcending knowledge with my thought. So borne aloft, so drunken reeling, so rapt was I, so swept away, within the scope of sense or feeling, my sense or feeling could not stay."

The great mystics all had their different emphases. Just to mention a few I treat on my own site, Julian of Norwich had a tender, homely way of speaking of God - expressing great truths in 'parables' of the Trinity as a family. Her total solitude must have been agonising (nearly as much as the gossip the supposed 'seekers,' must have brought to the grate.) Francis of Assisi, a great lover but fragile, extreme, and passionate, needed to keep most of his expression to images of the earthly Jesus - the poor man who was humble in birth and suffering. Francis never could get past the remembrance of his own sinfulness, and perhaps the divine Logos was too overwhelming an image, unlike an impoverished Holy Family or agony in a garden.

Yet the mystics would have agreed with the agnostics on one point. God indeed is unknowable. We who believe can seek to see the hand of the Creator in the world, to try to 'know Him through his actions.' I suppose that all of us devoted to prayer have times of intense, silent awareness of God (or is it imagination - or a wish?) If indeed it is a glimpse of Him which we caught, awe inspiring though it is momentarily, afterward one is left with the doubt... or the sensitivity which makes the world's evil all the more painful.

Where are you, Lord? is a constant undertone. (Naturally accompanied, at times, with the "Are you there at all?") Pining with love and longing, the idea that we cannot truly know the beloved leaves us in 'limbo.' Are we merely recognising, and this importantly, the limitations of our own vision? Or have we 'created God'?

The Gnostics would claim indeed to 'know' - and, in the process, strip God not only of omnipotence but of any part in Creation, let alone Incarnation. In modern times, too many of those who 'doubt' lose me, because either I wonder what faith they really had in the first place, or why (just to cite one example) they shuddered that Genesis might not be an explanation of the details of creation when I cannot see it ever was intended as anything of the sort. I see the emphases, in the century preceding my birth and the one in which I lived, on 'progress' and 'family values' as idolatry, and this though I am an avid Christian socialist (which at least a few Victorians were, even if the richer ones words leave me with an aftertaste of calves' foot jelly) and one who, at least, cannot be faulted for caring for family. I pine for knowledge, read the theology with a passion, yet have the sense that Thomas Aquinas had a point about its being all straw (and who, after all, felt all he could define was what God was not.)

In the end, truth about the divine (...Master, don't let me discover you are not there!) can only be expressed in doxology. It is not that I doubt one word of orthodox teachings - yet it is impossible to provide a logical explanation, and, once we allow for divine intervention and revelation, a 'scientific' treatment can become bizarre. A man who was crucified, then rose from the dead - his continued presence in Church, sacrament, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit - there is no explanation. I can be caught in an intense love and silence, praying before the Sacrament, yet the simplicity of a Creator who can express himself, so that the ultimate awe can be accompanied by the knowledge of kneeling before a piece of bread, is beyond me.

I am beginning to see that, at best, all a doctor of humanities (such as myself) can offer is a history of belief. Yet A. N. Wilson, who hardly was writing for devotional purposes (and whose insightful and witty work I'd highly recommend), does capture an important point in one of his comments. All many believers can do is act with faith.

Quite. Perhaps, one of these days, Christianity shall catch up to the Judaism which knew that the kingdom is here - that God is acting in creation - that our own actions express worship more than any creed. (And this not denying the creeds! A good part of the action is the doxology I previously mentioned.) We can get so caught up in wondering who is right - how we are going to be rewarded or punished in the next world - whatever. The true God indeed is not our own creation - but how do we know Him, when we indeed do create many idols?