Silliman's Papers

Speaking of God
Explorations in the possibility of theological language from Anselm to Levinas

Theology today is most fundamentally in quest of a language and mode whereby it can speak. Above all it is in quest of a language whereby it can speak of God.
              - Thomas J. J. Altizer

In five succinct paragraphs, Thomas Aquinas makes five straightforwardly philosophical arguments about metaphysics. He argues for an unmoved mover, an uncaused cause, a necessary being, a maximum being, and an intelligent end, and each of the arguments fits solidly in the tradition of philosophical arguments right up until the last line of each paragraph, where he appends this shift. At the very last line Aquinas turns it, ending each philosophical argument with some variation of the phrase “et hoc dicimus Deum” (and this we call God). Aquinas takes the philosophical argument using philosophical terms and then turns them to another purpose, turns them with a phrase to speak theologically. This shift is jarring. It is a change of subject that claims not to be changing the subject at all. It is a move from metaphysics to theology that claims to have made no move, to have been speaking only one language all along. The phrase seems so incongruous that we might do better to ask the statement as a question, noting that in question form this is the basic question of theology – what is it, what is this that we call God? Looking at this incongruity, and the seemingly supposed consistency, let us ask with what language we might answer that question.

When we speak of God in the Western tradition, we have spoken in two ways: philosophically and mystically. With philosophy we explain God’s place in our system of thought, the function of the divine within our world and how, so to speak, God works as a thing in this world. With mysticism we emphasize the otherness and uncontainability of God, the ineffability of the divine. Both of these languages, however, are problematic as theological languages. In mysticism we lose God; in this ineffability he slips beyond our world, beyond our comprehension. We are not speaking here of the worst of mysticism, which is a fetish of secrets and obfuscations that believes itself capable of conjuring or decoding the divine, but rather we are speaking of the best of mysticism which comes from this impulse of due reverence but still always loses the divine into the fog of distance between God and mankind. In philosophy, we lose God in the opposite manner. In philosophy we lose God by containing the divine, bringing God into the circumference of our system and thereby describing God as less than God. In philosophy God reaches mankind and enters into the world but, in fact, becomes a part of the world. He becomes contained and counted among the objects of the world – men and trees and elephants and now, God. If God is included in our philosophy, if our theological language is via affirmativa, God becomes an ontological object, a bit of the furniture that makes up the arrangement of things. If God is beyond our philosophy, if our theological language is via negativa, then the divine doesn’t enter our world and is irrelevant to it. We have God inside and God outside and neither of them are what we want when we want to speak of God. Both our traditional modes of theological speaking, then, are troubled by an inability to say what it is we want to say; we are floundering for a language with which to say what this is that we call God.

We need, somehow, to have God in our world without our world containing God. We need, somehow, God outside our world without eliminating God from it. The God we want to call God is both beyond comprehension and is somehow also comprehensible. If we play it one way we lose God, the other and we still lose God. We seem then to be in an impossible bind. If God is in our world then this thing which we call God is less than God, if outside it, then God is irrelevant. We need a God that crosses the line of outside/inside without falling over it. All of our philosophies and mysticisms attempt this but seem to all fail at crucial moments, letting what we call God be disfigured by our calling, letting that which is hoc dicimus Deum slide disastrously one way or the other.

This is not a problem when speaking of uncaused causes and unmoved movers, or when speaking of Zeus, of angels, or of UFOs. This is the particular problem of theological language. The purpose of speaking theologically is to articulate that which occupies this “space” of entering in and yet still remains beyond. This is not a problem either when we do not speak at all. There is here the distinct temptation to abandon altogether the project of theological language, to stop speaking of God at all or to simply speak of God as no more than a part of the world and a piece of a system. Certainly some have done this and there seems to be no well argued objection to that abandonment. But, for some of us, such a move seems to be impossible. To abandon the project of the possibility of a theological language would not be to abandon a God who both enters into and remains beyond our encapsulating circumference, but to settle for speaking in disfigurements. We seek and have sought a way to speak about God while at the same time feeling that everything that has been said is in some important way wrong, and to stop seeking would not eliminate the problem but accept it. For at least some people, among them both theists and atheists, the search for a theological language and the attempt to describe a “space” such that it is both inside and beyond our world, is an impulse that will not go away. There is a haunting insistence to the question, and we find ourselves asking again, what is this that we call God? Is a theological language possible?

The greatest attempt at speaking of God in such a way as to allow the divine to be wholly other, ineffably divine and yet still to take a place in our world and reach us here, is Anselm’s ontological argument’s thinking of infinity. Anselm attempts to balance God on this line so that God is infinite, so he is the beyond and also enters in. Anselm’s description of God has him piercing into this world and letting us see the Other. The person who approaches God Anselm-wise does so very vertically. He sees by God and through God to a God which cannot be delimited by the sight of humans.

Whether his argument works or not, there is something that feels wrong about it. I find this feeling in the island-argument response of his contemporaneous monk, in Kant’s famous rebuttal, and also in the normal reading of average freshman. It works on paper, the logic is sound, and yet we are deeply uncomfortable with it. There are, I think, two ways it feels wrong: First, it feels like a technicality. There’s a seemingly accidental nature of the proof. It is as if Anselm found a lucky technical solution for God. Second, this God of Anselm’s feels as though he’s present on paper, present to us logically but not viscerally. The common objection here is that Anselm’s God is not personal.

These objections may, however, be caused by asking Anselm’s project to extend way beyond its limited intentions. Anselm is not attempting to prove the existence of God. Anselm’s “proof” is at most secondary, as he is trying to prove that God’s character or nature is as we believed it to be, to answer the question of what this is that we call God, and in doing this he sets out a way we can talk about God. Many readings of Anselm’s argument are trying, really, to follow him backwards. Where Anselm’s move was one of, as he said, “faith seeking understanding,” we read him trying to get from understanding to faith.

Neither we, here in this exploration of the possibility of a theological language, nor Anselm are trying to prove the existence of God or to start from any place other than faith. For the purposes of this paper we are interested in Anselm’s attempt at developing a language with which to speak of that which we call God. Both of the common objections hint at problems in his formulation of a theological language. While not intended as such, both objections can be recast as objections to the way in which Anselm comes to describe God as contained within our world, our logic. What both objections point to as troubling is the way in which Anselm has employed a philosophical syllogism to speak of God and then has spoken of God as a piece of that logical syllogism. Let us ask then, is Anselm describing God in a way that contains God, that speaks of God as in within our world?

Anselm wants to move from meditation on the word “God” to God. He’s echoing Augustine’s language where Augustine says he wants to go from hearing the two syllables of “Deus” to “reach something than which nothing is better or more sublime.” It is unclear whether Anselm knew it or not, but he is also echoing the words of Seneca, where Seneca says God’s “magnitude is that than which nothing greater can be thought.” Where Augustine and Anselm wanted this language to be a theological language whereby they may speak of something that is in but also beyond our world, unencircleable by our systems of thought, Seneca uses the same language to speak of a god that isn’t wholly Other, a god that is one god among many and one worldly thing among many worldly things. The similarity of the phrases brings into question the supposed difference in what is being called God. It is not clear that this theological language is necessarily describing a God who is beyond this world, and it even becomes doubtful how this phrase could possibly be understood to describe such a divine. In a language where God is “that which greater than which none can be conceived,” there is nothing to say that a God such as that must be something more than ontological furniture, more than the world.

Examining Anselm’s own claims for his language leads us to same problem as above. He wants, in the course of his meditation, to move from God in intellectu, in perception, to God in re, in existence or--problematic yet literal--in things. Anselm’s theological language seems constructed then to break the skepticism of idealism, but it is ill designed to speak of a God who is ineffable. He does though, while making the move from God in intellectu to God in re, speak of God as infinite. We cannot rightly read of Anselm’s God in re without remembering that this in re God is also infinite. God is not, for Anselm a thing, but the infinitely greatest thing and great in infinite ways. Yet this language obviously still does not speak of God as beyond and as uncontainable. Anselm wants to explore how this infinite God can be contained within our finite cognition, but in doing that he doesn’t give us a way to speak of that “God” which is beyond our finite cognition.

Following the example of the Christian Apostle Paul’s proclamation that the Athenian altar to an unknown God was actually an altar to the God he had come preaching, Christian philosophers throughout the history of philosophy in the West have found things in one or another philosophical system that they identified as what we had called God. They have undertaken philosophical conversations and then added onto the end of that conversation the claim that “this is what we call God.” This identification always later becomes complicated and troublesome when the thing identified with God did not and could not act as God, and when the system or piece of the system identified with God was later rejected. If what we called God was only some piece of a philosophical system, then God stands or falls with the system and that piece of the system. The examples of this identification becoming publicly troublesome and complicated stretches back from the so called death of God philosophers in the 1970s to Nietzsche’s use of that phrase to Galileo, and back seemingly without end. In one lesser-known example John Scotus Eriugena identifies God with neo-Platonism’s Being and becomes a sort of pantheist condemned by multiple popes.

When those who loved something they called God speak about the death of God, they begin to count our types of God and to show us how the God who is now dead was never the one we wanted anyway. There are of course the old fashioned atheists, like, say, Sartre, who didn’t want a God or believe in any sort of God and who thought an age without God would be a golden one, but there are those who loved something they called God, who’ve lost something they called God. Pascal made this move when he, recording a religious vision on a piece of paper he carried until his death, wrote that he had seen “not the God of the philosophers and scholars,” but “FIRE,” the “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,” and the “God of Jesus Christ” Pascal sees that any God who is a piece of a philosophic system is less than God, and he sees us struggling to speak of God in any way so that what we speak of can be the God we and he had set out to love and understand. He wants to stop himself at this point of speaking and say no, something’s terribly wrong with this God who either slips beyond our world into obscure and nonsensical talk or slips into our world and becomes a bit of ontological furniture. He thinks that we began, as Anselm instructed, with faith seeking understanding but that the understanding has destroyed our faith. Let us then, he says, lose this God. We will not, he thinks, have lost something which we wanted. Buber makes this same move, counting in our history two Gods, two things we called God, and saying that now we have lost one but it turns out to be the one that was never really God. We have lost something, but it was the disfigured description of what we wanted. Buber says there is an It-God who was an object, and a Thou-God. Philosophy has always, by the nature of philosophy, been about the It-God, and it may have seduced us into thinking we were loving the Thou-God by speaking of the It-God, but we were mistaken and the sooner the It-God passes away the better.

There is something entirely right about the move these philosophers are making here, but this eagerness to be done with the It-God and the philosopher’s God, to dismiss the disfigurements, seems rushed. There are many things in Buber and Pascal’ analysis and the shift they propose which would be worth exploring, but what their story seems to be missing is the anguish. They’re with Sartre in being too cavalier in dismissing what we said it was we loved, in dismissing that which we would talk about and then say et hoc dicimus Deum. It may well be that the dismissal is right, that we had gotten God all wrong, but to move so swiftly to a solution misses the pain of this loss. Note that Nietzsche’s mad man, after proclaiming in the streets that God is dead and we have killed him, begins to weep and when no one understands him he goes to a requiem for the deceased divine. He is overwhelmed by anguish. When someone says, “God is dead and we didn’t want him anyway” there is something that has been brushed aside. So let us say “yes, perhaps,” but then also query further. When we destroy this idol-god, having thought of it as something which entered into and also remained beyond our world, but seeing now that it was only another thing in the world, we are still losing something, killing something. We are not losing God, but we are losing something nevertheless. We are losing the language by which we were speaking of God. To abandon what we called God, knowing now that it was but a disfigurement, is, it seems, to abandon the possibility of an infinite entering into our world, the possibility of speaking of something which would not by our speaking become a thing.

What we wanted from the Anselmian project was the preservation of the infinite, was the intrusion of the ineffable into our world in such a way that it both reached us and remained beyond us. We need an infinite we can behold without making finite. The initial problem, which still remains, is how to think of and speak of God such that God crosses the space of inside/outside without falling over. Pascal won’t help us if he does nothing more than continue to repeat the phrase “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob.” Buber seems to offer us only a language within which to speak to God, not a theological language, but a romantic and ecstatic one. Though he had, it seems, intended to, Buber never, from this understanding of God as approachable only as a Thou, developed a new way in which to speak of God. Buber and Pascal still need a way to talk about God, still need a theological language. Let’s look at two modern attempts at speaking of God without disfiguring him: first the ethical and second the impossible.

Tolstoy tells a religious story about a cobbler named Martin who despairs of life and wants to see God. Martin is promised in a dream that he would, the next day, see God. So he goes about his day keeping on the lookout for God and does pretty well, but he is distracted eventually by someone in need. They’re cold and need something to eat and a coat so he takes them in and cares for them and realizes later that he was distracted and didn’t see Jesus. That night again he hears a voice promising that he will see God the next day, if he remains vigilant. The same thing happens the next day and he hears the voice again and then again he’s distracted by someone in need and then the last night, in total despair, he apologizes to God for getting distracted and asks to die. That night in a dream he sees the people he has helped walking by and he hears the voice telling him that he has seen the face of God in the face of these people.

Perhaps the error of Anselm’s attempt at beholding the ineffable was its verticalness. In the most recent scholarship on death of God theology there occurs and reoccurs a turn to Levinas and his talk of the face of the other. The “other” in Levinas, is a conflation of the otherness of people, the faces we see around us, and the Otherness of God. This is not a problem but rather the point. He wants to make an incarnational move. Levinas attempts to make the Anselmian move horizontally, and with that horizontality to let us see God in a way that’s not technical and is very visceral. He thinks the face of the other offers us a way in which to see the infinite, the ineffable, the unthinkable divine, without surrounding it, overrunning it, and destroying it. Through the faces of other people we can let God enter the world and reach us while still remaining uncontainable. This ethics can speak theologically without losing God either by enclosing him in our world or walling him outside of it. Levinas offers us the possibility of a theological language that allows us to talk about God so that he’s in our world without our world containing him, and outside our world without being eliminated from it.

Yet the horizontal theological language has only repeated the problems of the vertical one. Buber’s point about the It-God and the Thou-God applies, originally and especially, to people. How does one go about looking with the Levinasian look that doesn’t deface the face of the other? It is no clearer how we can speak of people without treating them as objects, as things in the world, than we could of God. When we speak about people, we speak about them as things in this world, among the ontological furniture. There is nothing about the horizontal move which allows the face of the other to stay at this inside/outside space. It is constantly slipping into our world of things and being overrun and surrounded. In explicitly Christian terms, notice that the incarnate God-the-Son is no easier to explain and no less prone to heresy than the outside-the-world creator God. This horizontal theological language, rather than solving the problem, has recreated it.

There is, though, perhaps another reason for the turn to Levinas. While it is regularly depicted as a new way to see and speak of God, a way which will avoid the old disfigurments of God, it may be that the Levinasian turn to ethics is a turn away from the problems of the possibility theological language. Perhaps this turn is not to be explained by the Tolstoy story, but by a Hasidic parable told about Adam and Eve. On the day Adam and Eve were cast from Eden the sun set for the first time and as the world passed into darkness they were terrified, believing that their sin had set the world sinking into nothingness. They spend the night trembling in fear, eyes dilated to the darkness, looking each other in the face. For them there was now nothing, God had left them and the world had gone dark and there was nothing left but the face of the other. In the case of Tolstoy’s cobbler, looking into the faces of people was a way to see God, but for Adam and Eve it is all that is left. Perhaps the Levinasian turn is best understood not as concerned with a new theological language but with a way forward in a world which has no theological language. This turn can be understood as a manner in which to bracket off the continued unrest in theological language, to leave it unsettled and to still proceed.

It is as if presented with someone on the side of the road, beaten and bloodied and robbed and saying he was “God forsaken,” the Levinasian has put aside the question of whether or not God has indeed forsaken him. An atheist might have said God had. A theist might have said he hadn't. A Levinasian can claim to not know, can leave that question open, and can then, like the Samaritan in the Gospel parable, act to help the man. Where the entire debate has prepared us to engage the question of what it is that the man on the side of the road is calling God when he says that whatever it was he called God has forsaken him, to debate whether that God was the God he wanted to be speaking of in the first place, the Levinasian seeks to forsake that debate in favor of ethical action. The Levinasian is giving up, at least somewhat, the ability or possibility of speaking of God, replacing that with an ethics. The Levinasian takes on a sort of agnosticism, instead acting as God ought act to the beaten man and acting as if the beaten man were God. There is here a theological language, but it is incidental to the ethics.

This is a move, too, that despite its agnosticism and lack of a theological language
is hailed as “true religion” by Jewish and Christian prophets. “For how,” James asks, “could you possibly love God if you do not love your brother?” This Levinasian ethical agnosticism is the course that Jesus says the inheritors of the kingdom of God have taken. They have turned wholly to ethics and in dedicating their lives to helping people – feeding, clothing, washing, and visiting people - they have, to their surprise, served God. They have imitated the Messiah to the helpless, and the helpless have become the Messiah to them. God is thus found by not looking for God, but found without being looked for by looking into the faces of the worst of society.
This is the course that John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath character the Rev. Jim Casey takes. Casey, when we meet him in the novel's opening, has lost his faith and no longer knows how to speak of God. He's gone out into the wilderness to try and regain his faith, to figure God out, and has now come back down knowing only that he knows nothing. He abandons his ministry and refuses the normal deference paid to him, refusing repeatedly to pray over meals, sick people, etc. As he gives up speaking of (and for) God, though, he increasingly responds to the needs of the people around him, dedicating his life to helping people until, in the end of the book, he becomes a Christ figure, saying “you don't know what you're doing” to the man that kills him.
The Levinasian ethics, however, does not preclude a theological language and in fact can return us to the need for a theological language. If we can, at this point, avoid a theological language, avoid appending again that phrase, et hoc dicimus Deum, then we may find ourselves finished with the question. Here, as before, it is tempting to abandon the project, and perhaps it would be better if we did so, but it still seems that to abandon the question is just to answer it in a bad way, to settle for disfigurements. Even here though, we find ourselves wanting to say this is the solution, to say “this is what we meant by God.” Like Levinas, we want to say something about how that which we behold, that which inspires us to this ethical action, is beyond the world and is ineffable. The Levinasian turn may be a turn away from the question to an action, but the question is even here reasserted. We still want to ask what is this which we call God and how could we say what this is? The search for the possibility of a theological language remains.

Perhaps, however, we must come to recognize that theological language is impossible and that we are offered the choice of either speaking about God in a language that disfigures and defaces God or of saying nothing of God at all. But perhaps this impossibility is the key to theological language. Derrida, who says that he “rightly passes for an atheist” and that he “is always praying,” wants to put forward the possibility of a theological language of the impossible.

This is a language that recognizes and remains ever aware of its impossible task; thus it speaks of God, then notes its own inadequacies, then speaks of God, etc. This is a language that continually points out its own failure, a language that is always restless and disturbed. Our third choice is that of a blind theological language that recognizes its blindness, speaking within that blindness so that we know we’re saying impossible things but we are, by grace, through faith, hanging on by our teeth anyway.

In some sense, though, Derrida has not done something totally new here, but has looped us around and returned us to the place Anselm, and the whole Western tradition of theological speaking, began. Anselm begins to speak only after the caveat of the impossibility of speaking. Aquinas wrote for a mere 20 years and was recognized as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church, not for his philosophical writings and his systematizations of Catholic thought, but rather for his mystical apprehension of God that was, he is said to have said, so beyond anything that he had or could have written, leaving his writings “as straw.” When we speak of God, in the West, we speak in two languages, not choosing between them but speaking both. In our study of the thought of traditional figures we will separate the languages, but Aquinas, Anselm, et al, speak both in mysticism, placing God outside of our world, and in the philosophy placing him within it. They have, all the time, been referring to God, as it is said, via negativa and via affirmativa. We have normally recognized the difficulties and the errors of these languages, but we have found no solution other than to continue speaking in a cycle of theological language modifying theological language. Derrida's move then is not a novel one, but one that reminds us that theological language must be spoken recognizing and declaring its limitations. Derrida's move is one that reminds us why Anselm with his vertical language and Levinas with his horizontal one can, with their deficiencies, continue to speak of God.

With all of our protagonists agreeing, though, let us ask a question: Is this the best sort of theological speaking we can have? Can we only speak of God in the highly complex interplay of these two languages, in this cycle of languages where the first modifies the second and then the second modifies the first? Could there be a theological language such that we could simultaneously speak of God as speakable and of God as unspeakable? Surely no burden is too great in undertaking this project of theological language, so perhaps the answer simply is, “Yes, this cyclical language of speaking and unspeaking is the best we can hope for.” Still, it seems we must note that this is a highly complicated and confusing manner of doing theology, and, though it is profitable and ought not be abandoned, we ought to accept and champion a simpler language if we had it. Such a language, I think, might be found in Jesus' language of parables.

Jesus describes God in parabolic theological language as a father, a mother hen, a shepherd who's lost a sheep, and the host of a party and none of his listeners stopped him to say, “Wait, wait, how could it be both?” Speaking in parables is speaking in a way that we easily understand. It is simple without being simplistic, and it is somehow actively affirmatively speaking of God, thinking about and considering God, while not overstating or erring and without need of the disclaimers and caveats of other theological languages. By never marking themselves as anything more than “just stories,” this theological language of parables is at once describing a God knowable and unknowable, a God inside and outside, and in such a clear and unconfused way that even the least educated and the least subtle thinkers can figure God without disfiguring God. Not what we would normally consider a science of speaking of God, this methodology of simple stories manages somehow to describe God without being fraught by the errors we have seen wrack theological languages from Anslem to Levinas.

Looking, finally, at the three ways of speaking of God, we see that this is everywhere the case – we seek to state by misstating, to describe by misdescribing, to speak by misspeaking, and always to speak of God humbly.

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