Why no word or thought can reach God

THE DIVINE BEING

No man can tell of God exactly what he is. According to St Dionysius, God is not anything we can say or think. St Augustine cries: I who have ever been in God and ever more shall be, would sooner I had never been and never more should be than that we found a single word that we could say of God. Were we compelled to speak of God, in that case I should say: 'Verily, in no sense is God comprehensible nor yet attainable. God is what thought cannot better.' Nay, I declare God beggars human thought; he transcends all human conception. No man knows what God is. Aught that a man could or would think of God, God is not at all. It is the nature of the soul not to be satisfied except with God.¹

¹ See Spamer's Texte, B. 1.

But all that heart can desire is small, is insignificant compared with God. Yet man's thought may be never so rich or so rare but his desire outstrips it. So he transcends man's desire as well as transcending human thought.

St Dionysius says, God is naught. Meaning that God is as incomprehensible as naught. St Bernard says, I know not what; God is; but what I know not that he is that same is he. A heathen philosopher maintains that what we know of the First Cause is rather what we are ourselves than what the First Cause is. For that passes understanding. And in this strain the heathen doctor argues in his book, The Light of Lights, that God is super-essential, super-rational, super-intelligible, i.e. beyond the natural understanding. I speak not of gracious understanding. By grace man may be carried to the length of understanding as St Paul understood who was caught up into the third heaven and saw unspeakable things. He saw, but was not able to express them. For what a man knows he knows in its cause or in its mode or in its effect. But in these respects God remains unknown, for he is the first. Further, he is modeless, i.e. undetermined. And he is without effect, that is, in his mysterious stillness. Here he abides apart from the names that are given him. Moses asked his name. God answered. He-who-is hath sent thee. Otherwise he could not tell it. God as simply being, in that sense he could never give himself to be known to creatures. Not that he could not do it, but creature could not understand it. — I have often laid it down that God's lordship does not lie merely in his lordship over creature; his lordship consists in his power to create a thousand worlds and dominate them all in his abstract essence. Therein lies his lordship. Dionysius and Gregory both teach that the divine being is not comprehensible in any sense: not to any wit nor any understanding, not even to angelic understanding. Its simplicity and triplicity is a thing not to be grasped by the human mind even at its best, nor by the angelic mind even at its clearest. It was said by a philosopher that whoso knows of God that he is unknown, that man knows God. For it is the height of gnosis and perception to know and understand in agnosia and a-perception. To know him really is to know him as unknowable. As the master puts it: If I must speak of God, then I will say, God is something which is in no sense to be reached or grasped; and I know nothing else about him. According to St Augustine, what we say about God is not true; what we say that God is he is not; what we say he is not that he is rather than what we say that he is. Nothing we can say of God is true. God's worth and God's perfection cannot be put into words. When I say man, I have in my mind human nature. When I say grey, I have in my mind the greyness of grey. When I say God, I have in my mind neither God's majesty nor his perfection. Dionysius insists that the more we can abstract from God the better we shall see him. God is such that we apprehend him better by negation than by affirmation. Hence the dictum of one master that to argue about God from likeness is to argue falsely about him, but to argue by denials is to argue about him correctly. Dionysius says, writing about God, He is super-essential, he is super-luminous; he attributes to him neither this nor that. For whatever he conceives, God far transcends it. There is no knowing him by likeness. Rather by attributing unlikeness may we make some approach to understanding him. Take an illustration. Supposing I describe a ship to someone who has never seen one, then on looking at a stone he will plainly see that it is not a ship. And the plainer he sees that it is not ship-like, the more he will know about a ship. It is the same with God. The more we can impute to him not-likeness, the nearer do we get to understanding him. Holy Scripture yields us merely privatives. That we should credit God with matter, form and work is due to our gross senses. We fail to find God, because we try to come at him by likeness. Dionysius cries, 'Friend Timothy, if thou wouldst catch the spirit of truth pursue it not with the human senses. It is so swift, it comes rushing.' God is to be sought in opposites; in unknowing knowing shall we know God; in forgetfulness of ourselves and all things even to the naked essence of the Godhead. Dionysius was exhorting one of his disciples. 'Friend,' quoth he, 'cease from all activity and empty thyself of self that thou mayst commune with the Sovran Good, God namely.' Pray God we may seek him so that we shall find him nevermore to lose him. Amen.