Can God Be Known

Everything in this module runs off a single distinction, and if you get it wrong at the start nothing later will come out right. There are two and only two kinds of reality: God, and everything that is not God. Everything that is not God was made, is held in being from moment to moment, and would stop if the holding stopped. God was not made, is not held, and does not depend. Isaiah 44:24 has him say, 'I am the LORD, who has made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who by Myself spread out the earth.' Acts 17:25 says he is not 'served by human hands, as if He needed anything, because He Himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else'.

This is not a difference of size. A very large creature and a small one are on the same side of the line, and so are an archangel and an amoeba. God is not the biggest item in the universe or the highest rung of a ladder that also has us on it. He is not a member of the class of things that exist alongside other members. The theological name for this is the Creator and creature distinction, and its practical force is that every comparison you make between God and anything else is a comparison across a gap that has no other example.

Now the problem this creates, which is a language problem before it is anything else. Every word you have was learned from creatures. When you say God is wise, you learned the word wise from wise people. When you say God is a father, you learned father from fathers. When you say God is good, you learned good from things and acts inside the created order. So either those words carry their creaturely content over to God, in which case you have put God inside the order you just said he is outside of; or they do not carry it over, in which case you have no idea what you are saying and might as well be making noises.

That fork is the whole of this lesson. It is not a philosophers' game imported into theology from outside. It is forced on any reader who takes Exodus 33 and Isaiah 55 seriously and still intends to teach. The moment you open your mouth about God you have taken a position on it, whether or not you can state the position. The traditions differ about the answer and they do not differ about the problem.

One more thing before the answers. The distinction cuts both ways, and Christians who love God's transcendence sometimes forget the second edge. If God is not a member of the created order, then he is not in competition with it either. A creature's act and God's act are not two forces pushing on the same object from opposite sides, because they are not the same kind of act. Much confusion in later lessons, on providence and on grace and on the relation of the two natures in Christ, comes from quietly treating God as a very powerful item within the world rather than as the reason there is a world.

Three possibilities were named in the medieval schools and they still exhaust the field. A term used of God and of a creature is used univocally if it means exactly the same thing in both cases. It is used equivocally if it means something wholly different in the two cases, the way 'bank' means one thing beside a river and another in a town. It is used analogically if the two meanings are neither identical nor unrelated, but ordered to one another.

Pure equivocity is rejected by everyone, and for a reason worth holding on to: if 'God is good' shares nothing with any sense of good you possess, then 'God is good' and 'God is evil' convey the same amount of information, namely none, and revelation has told you nothing. Thomas Aquinas makes exactly this point in the Summa Theologiae, first part, question thirteen, article five: if the names were purely equivocal, nothing could be known or demonstrated of God from creatures at all, and every argument from the world to God would fall into the fallacy of equivocation. Nobody defends pure equivocity. It is in the list because it is where careless talk about God being beyond words actually lands.

Aquinas's own answer, in that same article, is analogy. Names are said of God and creatures neither purely univocally nor purely equivocally but 'according to analogy', which for him means according to an order of one to another. Goodness exists in God as in its cause and source and exists in creatures as an effect, so the word tracks a real relation rather than a bare resemblance. In the next article he adds the refinement that most summaries drop, and it reverses the direction people expect. As to the thing signified, the res significata, these names belong primarily to God and only secondarily to creatures, because the perfection is his first. As to our way of signifying, the modus significandi, they belong primarily to creatures, because we learned them there and cannot detach them from the manner in which we learned them. So on his account the word 'wise' is more truly true of God than of Solomon, while our grasp of what we are saying is fitted to Solomon.

Now John Duns Scotus, who is routinely garbled, usually in the direction of making him the man who flattened God into the same order as everything else. What he actually argued is narrower and harder to dismiss. In the Ordinatio, first book, distinction three, he defines a univocal concept with unusual precision: a concept is univocal when its unity is sufficient for a contradiction, so that affirming and denying it of the same thing contradicts, and sufficient to serve as the middle term of a syllogism without the argument equivocating. His claim is that unless at least one concept, being, is univocal in that strict sense, no argument can run from creatures to God, because every such argument would have four terms rather than three and prove nothing. He presses a second argument from experience: a thinker can be certain that God is a being while remaining genuinely uncertain whether God is finite or infinite, and a concept you are certain of cannot be the same concept you are doubtful about, so there must be a concept of being neutral between the two.

Two things must be said about that if it is to be stated accurately. First, Scotus's thesis is about concepts and words, not about being itself. He holds that God and creatures share a univocal concept of being while differing in their intrinsic modes, infinite and finite, and that the difference of mode is as absolute a difference as there could be. His univocity is semantic; it is not the claim that God and a stone are two instances of one kind. Second, Scotus does not abolish analogy. He argues that analogy presupposes univocity: unless some concept is common, the analogical relation has nothing to hold on to, and what people call analogy is then just equivocation with better manners.

The dispute is live and it is not a technicality. In the twentieth century Etienne Gilson and later the writers associated with Radical Orthodoxy, particularly John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, argued that Scotus's move was the hinge on which the West swung towards a God conceived as one object among objects, and so towards modern atheism. Against that, Richard Cross and Thomas Williams have argued in detail that the charge misreads Scotus by taking a thesis about the logic of our concepts as a thesis about the structure of reality, and that Scotus's doctrine of intrinsic modes preserves the Creator and creature distinction as sharply as Aquinas does. Cross's 2001 article on Scotus and Radical Orthodoxy, and Thomas Williams's essay arguing that the doctrine of univocity is true and salutary, published in Modern Theology in 2005, are the accessible entry points on that side. Each account has substantial scholarly support. What no honest teacher may do is present either man as obviously right, or present Scotus as a proto-secularist who thought God was a big thing in the sky, which is what he is most often reduced to.

What can be said without taking sides is the shared floor. Aquinas and Scotus both hold that God is infinite and creatures are not; both hold that our knowledge of God is from creatures and is therefore imperfect; both hold that theological language is meaningful and not a polite gesture at silence. They disagree about the mechanism by which it is meaningful. If you find yourself in a discussion where someone claims that one of those two men denied the transcendence of God, you have enough now to ask for the text.

Two motions run through all Christian speech about God and they are meant to run together. Cataphatic theology, from the Greek kataphasis, affirmation, says what God is: good, wise, just, loving, one. It works from what God has done and said, and the bulk of scripture is cataphatic. Apophatic theology, from apophasis, denial, says what God is not: not bodily, not finite, not composite, not subject to time, not one being among others. It works by removing from our concept of God whatever belongs to creatures as creatures.

The classic ordering is that the negations qualify the affirmations without cancelling them. Dionysius the Areopagite, the anonymous late fifth or early sixth century writer whose works travelled under the name of Paul's Athenian convert and shaped both East and West, sets it out in The Divine Names and The Mystical Theology. You affirm of God everything scripture affirms. You then deny of God everything that the affirmation carries over from creatures. And then you deny the denials too, because God is beyond assertion and beyond negation alike, since even 'not finite' is still a word we learned from finite things. Note that this is not scepticism in a hood. The affirmations are made first and they are made because God gave them; the negations are a discipline applied to them, not a replacement for them.

Now the Eastern tradition on its own terms, because it is usually handed to Western students as a curiosity or a mood, and it is neither. It is a worked position with a definite problem it was built to solve. The starting point is Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century, arguing against Eunomius, who had claimed to know the very essence of God and to name it: God's essence is to be unbegotten. Gregory answered that the divine essence is infinite and therefore cannot be comprehended by any finite mind, then drew the conclusion that is his own contribution. Because God is infinite, the soul's approach to him is endless: in The Life of Moses he describes the perpetual stretching forward of the creature into a God it never exhausts, which later writers named epektasis. Unknowability here is not frustration. It is the guarantee that there is always more.

Basil of Caesarea, Gregory's brother, gave the distinction that the tradition built on. In Letter 234, replying to the same Eunomian claim, he writes that we know our God from his operations, his energeiai, but do not undertake to approach near to his essence, because his operations come down to us while his essence remains beyond our reach. That sentence is the seed of everything that follows in the East, and it is worth noticing that it is a fourth-century sentence and not a late medieval novelty.

The distinction became a doctrine in the fourteenth century through Gregory Palamas, an Athonite monk and later archbishop of Thessalonica, who died in 1359. The occasion was a fight about prayer. Hesychast monks practised a disciplined prayer of the heart and reported seeing an uncreated light, the light of Christ on Mount Tabor. Barlaam of Calabria pressed them with a dilemma. Either the light you see is created, in which case you are not seeing God but a creature and your prayer is an illusion; or it is God's own essence, which is impossible, since the essence is inaccessible. Palamas answered by distinguishing in God between the essence, ousia, which is utterly imparticipable and unknowable, and the uncreated energies, energeiai, which are truly God and not a creature, and in which the creature genuinely participates. God in his energies is wholly God, not a part of God, and is really given; God in his essence remains beyond every creature forever. Councils at Constantinople in 1341, 1347 and 1351 upheld him, and the Orthodox churches regard those councils as binding.

What the distinction was meant to solve is the central question of Eastern soteriology. Theosis, deification, is the claim that salvation is real participation in the divine life, grounded in texts such as 2 Peter 1:4. If that participation is in God's essence, the creature becomes God by nature and the Creator and creature distinction is destroyed. If it is only in created effects, then what the believer receives is a gift from God rather than God himself, and the promise has been quietly downgraded. The essence and energies distinction is the attempt to say that the creature really touches God and never stops being a creature. That is its point, and any summary of it that omits the point has not understood it.

The Western objection is serious and must be given at strength. If the energies are really distinct from the essence, and both are God, then there is a real distinction in God, and divine simplicity as the Latin tradition holds it is compromised: God would have in him something that is not identical with his essence. Thomist writers have pressed this since the fourteenth century, and the sharpest Roman Catholic critics of the early twentieth century, Martin Jugie among them, treated Palamism as a genuine departure from the patristic inheritance rather than a development of it. The Latin alternative, worked out in the scholastic doctrine of created grace and the beatific vision, holds that in glory the intellect sees the divine essence itself by the light of glory, which is a created elevation of the creature's power, so that what is seen is God without the creature becoming God.

The Eastern reply is equally serious. It denies that the distinction divides God, since the energies are not parts but God wholly present in his acts, and it holds that the Latin account of simplicity is a philosophical commitment being used to overrule what the Fathers said and what prayer reports. Vladimir Lossky, in The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church in 1944, argued that a doctrine of created grace leaves the believer with a gift and never with the Giver, so that the Western scheme secures God's simplicity at the price of the reality of union. John Meyendorff's study of Palamas and Dumitru Staniloae's dogmatics develop the case, and David Bradshaw's Aristotle East and West in 2004 argues that the energies concept has deep roots in both the Fathers and the philosophical vocabulary they inherited, so the charge of novelty does not hold.

Two honest qualifications, one on each side. Within Orthodoxy, some scholars have argued that Lossky's presentation over-sharpened the contrast with the West into a system neither Palamas nor the earlier Fathers would recognise, and the label neo-Palamism is used, not always kindly, for that presentation. And from the Catholic side, the Belgian patrologist Andre de Halleux argued in the 1970s that the two traditions may be describing the same reality with different conceptual tools, and that the opposition has been overdrawn. Where this leaves an honest student: the distinction is dogma in the Orthodox churches, is not held by the Latin West, and the scholarly question of how far the two accounts actually conflict is genuinely open. You may not report that as settled in either direction.

Now put the biblical material back at the centre, because the distinctions exist to serve it. Three passages carry most of the weight, and they should be read as a set.

Exodus 33 is the fullest treatment in the Old Testament. Moses asks to see God's glory. God answers, 'I will cause all My goodness to pass before you', and 'I will proclaim My name - the LORD - in your presence.' Then the limit: 'You cannot see My face, for no one can see Me and live.' Then the provision: Moses is hidden in a cleft of the rock, covered by God's hand while the glory passes, and afterwards, 'you will see My back; but My face must not be seen.' Every element matters. The request is not rebuked. The refusal is stated as a fact about creaturely capacity rather than as divine reluctance. And the substance of what is granted is a proclaimed name, cashed out in chapter 34 as a description of God's character: compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in loving devotion and faithfulness, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin, yet by no means leaving the guilty unpunished. God gives Moses himself in words. He does not give him the unmediated sight.

Isaiah 55:8-9 is the verse most often misused in this whole area, so read it in place. 'For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,' declares the LORD. 'For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so My ways are higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.' The 'for' looks back to verse 7, where the wicked man is told to return to the LORD because He will freely pardon. The gap between God's mind and ours is introduced to explain a mercy larger than we would have extended. Quoted as a general shrug at the end of a hard conversation, it is doing the opposite of what Isaiah does with it. The transcendence is the ground of the gospel offer in that chapter, not a curtain drawn over it.

Matthew 11:27 sets the limit and the remedy in one sentence. 'All things have been entrusted to Me by My Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him.' Read the first half alone and you have a closed door: the Father is known only by the Son. Read the whole and you have a door that opens from the inside. The knowledge is not achieved by ascent, whether intellectual or mystical; it is given, by a person, to persons he chooses. This is why Christian theology is not finally a branch of metaphysics. John 1:18 says the same thing in narrative form: '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.'

So the settled Christian position, held across every tradition in this lesson, is a pair of claims that must be held together. God is incomprehensible: no creature can grasp him as he is in himself, and the doctrine is not a Greek import but is stated in Job, in Psalm 145:3, in Isaiah 40, in Romans 11:33, 'How unsearchable are His judgments, and untraceable His ways!' And God is genuinely known: not approximately, not provisionally, but truly, because he has spoken and because the Son has made him known. Incomprehensible does not mean unknown. It means inexhaustible. A man may truly know the sea without having measured it.

Deuteronomy 29:29 is the practical rule that falls out of this, and it should be memorised: 'The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, so that we may follow all the words of this law.' There is a reserve and there is a grant, the line between them is drawn by God rather than by us, and the purpose of the grant is obedience. That verse will keep a theologian from two opposite errors: speculating past what is given, and refusing to teach what is given because more was not.

A student who has understood the last four sections is in some danger, and it is worth naming the danger before the next lesson starts making claims. Having learned that God exceeds our concepts, it is easy to conclude that all theological statements are roughly equal and that precision is pride. That conclusion does not follow, and the tradition that talked most about divine incomprehensibility is the same tradition that fought hardest over single words. The men who wrote that God is beyond every name are the men who went into exile over homoousios.

The reason is that the limit runs in one direction only. Our inability to comprehend God tells us that our affirmations fall short of him. It does not tell us that our denials are safe, or that contradictory statements are equally acceptable. If God has said that he is one, then 'God is three gods' is false, and its falsity is not softened by the fact that we do not comprehend the divine unity. Incomprehensibility limits how far a true statement reaches. It does not convert a false statement into a true one.

There is also a pastoral edge to this, which is where it stops being abstract. People in real trouble are told, with good intentions, that God's ways are higher than ours, and they hear it as a refusal to answer. Sometimes that is what it is. Isaiah says it as an argument for pardon, Job hears it from the whirlwind as a restoration of proportion rather than an explanation, and Paul says it in Romans 11 at the end of three chapters in which he has just argued strenuously about exactly the thing he then confesses he cannot exhaust. In all three cases the confession of mystery comes after the work, not instead of it. A teacher who reaches for mystery before doing the work is not being reverent. He is being lazy, and the person in front of him can usually tell.

Hold, then, the shape this module will keep. God is not an item in the world and our words were learned from items in the world, so every statement we make about him is stretched. The stretching is not a failure, because God arranged the language and gave us the words himself. We say what he has said, we deny of him what belongs to creatures as creatures, we know that the saying falls short, and we do not treat falling short as permission to say nothing or to say anything. The next lesson takes the attributes one at a time and puts that method to work.