Theological Oration 2: On the Doctrine of God 1–18

In the previous discourse we cleansed the theologian: we went through what sort of person he must be, before whom one should philosophize, when, and how far. We said: before the pure, as far as possible, so that light may be grasped by light; before the more diligent, so that the word may not be fruitless by falling on fruitless soil; when we have calm within, away from the whirl outside, so that we are not interrupted in our breathing like the raving; and so far as we have grasped, or are grasped. Since this is so, and we have broken up divine fallow ground for ourselves, so as not to sow among thorns, and have levelled the face of the earth, being moulded by Scripture and moulding others by it, come, let us now approach the discourses of theology. Let us set at the head of our discourse the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, of whom it treats, so that the one may be well pleased, the other may work with us, and the third may inspire us; or rather, so that there may come from the one Godhead one illumination, divided without division and joined in distinction, which is indeed a paradox.

I am going up the mountain eagerly, or, to put it more truly, eagerly and anxiously at once, eager because of hope and anxious because of weakness, to enter within the cloud and be with God (for God commands this). If anyone is an Aaron, let him go up with me and stand near, accepting that he must remain outside the cloud. If anyone is a Nadab or an Abihu, or one of the elders, let him go up, but stand at a distance, according to the degree of his purification. If anyone is one of the many, unworthy of such height and contemplation, then if he is wholly unclean, let him not even approach, for it is not safe; if he has been purified for the occasion at least, let him stay below and hear only the voice and the trumpet, the bare words of piety, and let him see the mountain smoking and flashing with lightning, at once a threat and a marvel to those who cannot go up. But if anyone is an evil, savage beast, wholly incapable of receiving words of contemplation and theology, let him not lurk in the woods with evil and malicious intent, to seize on some doctrine or phrase, leaping on it suddenly and tearing sound words apart with his abuse; let him stand still further off and withdraw from the mountain, or he will be stoned and crushed and perish miserably, as the wretch he is. For true and solid words are stones to beastly men. If he is a leopard, let him die with his spots; if a lion, snatching and roaring and seeking which of our souls or our phrases he may make his food; if a boar, trampling the beautiful and translucent pearls of truth; if an Arabian wolf, of another race, or one even sharper than these in sophistries; if a fox, a crafty and faithless soul, now one thing and now another, shaping itself to times and needs, fed by dead and stinking bodies or by little vineyards, since the great ones have escaped; if any other flesh-eating beast, rejected by the Law and unclean for food and enjoyment. For the Word wishes to withdraw from these and so to be written on solid tablets of stone, written on both sides, because of the Law’s visible meaning and its hidden one: the one for the many who remain below, the other for the few who reach the height.

What has happened to me, friends, initiates, and fellow lovers of the truth? I was running as if to grasp God, and so I went up the mountain and passed through the cloud, entering in away from matter and material things, and drawing myself in upon myself as far as I could. But when I looked, I scarcely saw the back parts of God, and that while sheltered by the rock, the Word of God made flesh for us. And peering out a little, I saw not the first and unmixed nature, known to itself, I mean to the Trinity, the nature that remains within the first veil and is covered by the cherubim, but only its last part, the part that reaches us. That is, so far as I know, the majesty in created things and in the things he has brought forth and governs, or, as the divine David calls it, the magnificence. For these are the back parts of God, the tokens of him that come after him, like reflections and images of the sun in water, which show the sun to weak eyes, since one cannot look at the sun itself, as it overpowers sense by the purity of its light. This is how you will do theology, even if you are a Moses and a god to Pharaoh, even if you reach the third heaven with Paul and hear unspeakable words, even if you rise above him and are granted some angelic or archangelic station and rank. For even if something is wholly heavenly, or above the heavens, far higher in nature than we are and nearer to God, it is further from God and from perfect comprehension than it rises above our compound, lowly, and downward-weighing mixture.

We must begin again, then, like this. “To conceive God is hard, but to express him is impossible,” as one of the Greek theologians taught, not without skill, it seems to me: by saying it is hard he could seem to have grasped it, and by calling it inexpressible he could escape refutation. But as I say, to express God is impossible, and to conceive him is more impossible still. For what has been conceived, speech might perhaps make plain, if not adequately, at least dimly, to one whose ears are not wholly corrupted and whose mind is not dull. But to comprehend so great a thing in the mind is altogether impossible and beyond our means, not only for those who have grown sluggish and bend downward, but even for the very lofty and God-loving, and likewise for every begotten nature, and for all those for whom this darkness and this thick flesh stands in the way of understanding the truth. I do not know whether it is not impossible even for the higher, intellectual natures, which, because they are near God and are lit by the whole light, may perhaps see more clearly, if not wholly, at least more perfectly and distinctly than we, some of them more and others less, in proportion to their rank.

Let that stand here. As for us, it is not only the peace of God that surpasses all mind and comprehension, nor only the things laid up in promise for the righteous, which are not seen by eyes nor heard by ears nor beheld by the mind, at least not in any degree; nor only exact knowledge of creation (for be sure that of creation too you have only the shadows, when you hear, “I will see the heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars,” and the settled order in them, as one who does not see them now but will see them one day). Far before these, the nature that is beyond them and from which they come is beyond grasp and beyond comprehension; I mean not that it is, but what it is. For our preaching is not empty, nor our faith vain, nor is this what we teach. Do not again take our candour as a starting point for charges of atheism and slander, and exalt yourself over us as men who admit ignorance. For it is very different to be convinced that something is and to know what it is.

That God exists, the cause that made and holds together all things, both sight and natural law teach us: sight, as it meets the visible things, so well fixed and moving on their courses, moved and carried, so to speak, without change; natural law, by reasoning from the visible and ordered things to their author. For how could this universe have come to be or hold together unless God gave all things their being and sustains them? No one who sees a beautifully crafted lyre, with its fine tuning and order, or who hears the lyre playing, will think of anything but the maker of the lyre and the lyre-player, and his mind will run back to him, even if he does not know him by sight. So too for us the maker is plain, and the one who moves and preserves what has been made, even if he is not grasped by the mind; and very unreasonable is the man who does not willingly go this far and follow the proofs of nature. But even this is not God, what we have imagined or pictured or what reason has sketched. And if anyone has ever come to some comprehension of him, even in some degree, what is the proof? Who has reached the height of wisdom like this? Who was ever granted so great a gift? Who has so opened the mouth of his mind and drawn in the Spirit that, by the Spirit who searches and knows all things, even the depths of God, he has grasped God and needs to go no further, since he already possesses the last object of desire, toward which all the conduct and thought of the lofty strive?

What will you take the divine to be, if you trust all the procedures of reason? Or to what will reason lead you when it is put to the test, you supreme philosopher and theologian, who boast beyond measure? Is it a body? Then how is it infinite, unlimited, without form, intangible, invisible? Or are these bodies too? What licence! This is not the nature of bodies. Or is it a body, but without these qualities? What grossness, that the divine should have nothing more than we have! For how can it be worshipped if it is circumscribed? How will it escape being composed of elements and dissolved into them again, or dissolved altogether? For composition is the beginning of conflict; conflict, of separation; separation, of dissolution; and dissolution is wholly foreign to God and to the first nature. So there is no separation, so that there is no dissolution; no conflict, so that there is no separation; no composition, so that there is no conflict; and for this reason no body either, so that there is no composition. So the argument comes to rest, rising from the last things to the first.

And how will we maintain that God pervades all things and fills all things, according to “Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord,” and “The Spirit of the Lord has filled the world,” if he circumscribes some things and is circumscribed by others? Either he will pass through an empty universe, and everything will be gone for us, so that God is insulted by being made a body and having none of the things he has made; or he will be a body among bodies, which is impossible; or he will be interwoven and juxtaposed, like liquids that are mixed, cutting one and being cut by another, which is more absurd and more old-wivish even than the Epicurean atoms. So our argument about the body will collapse, and will have no body and no firmness. If we say he is immaterial, and if it is the fifth element, as some have thought, moving in a circle, let it be something immaterial and a fifth body, and, if they like, even incorporeal, according to the independent drift and fashioning of their argument; I will not quarrel about this now. But in what respect will he be one of the things moved and carried along (not to speak of the insult), if the maker is moved like what he has made, and the one who carries like what is carried, if they will even grant this? And what again moves this? And what moves the universe? And what moves that? And what moves that again? And so on to infinity. How is he not wholly in a place, if he is carried along? If they say he is something other than the fifth element, if it is something angelic, how do we know that angels are bodies, and what kind? And how far would God be above an angel, if an angel is his minister? And if he is above these, then once again an unreasoning swarm of bodies has been brought in, and an abyss of nonsense, which can stop nowhere.

So, for us, God is not a body. None of the inspired writers has ever said or accepted this, nor is the idea of our fold. It remains, then, to take him as incorporeal. But even “incorporeal,” if he is incorporeal, does not yet present or contain his substance, any more than “unbegotten,” “without beginning,” “unchangeable,” “incorruptible,” and whatever else is said of God or about God. For what is he in nature and substance, to which it belongs to have no beginning, not to change, and not to be limited? That remains to be further philosophized and examined by one who truly has the mind of God and is more perfect in contemplation. For just as it is not enough to say “a body” or “begotten” to present and show the thing of which these are said, but one must also name the subject underlying them if one is to present what is conceived fully and adequately (for this embodied, begotten, and perishing thing is a man, or an ox, or a horse), so one who busies himself with the nature of the one who is will not stop at saying what he is not; besides saying what he is not, he must say what he is, since it is so much easier to grasp one thing than to deny all things one by one, so that the thing conceived may be grasped both by removing what it is not and by affirming what it is. The man who says what something is not, but is silent about what it is, is like one who is asked what twice five is and says it is not two, nor three, nor four, nor five, nor twenty, nor thirty, nor, in short, any number below ten or any multiple of ten, but does not say that it is ten, nor settle the questioner’s mind on what he seeks. For it is far easier and shorter to show what a thing is not from what it is than to show what it is by removing what it is not. Surely this is plain to everyone.

Since for us the divine is incorporeal, let us examine a little further. Is it nowhere, or is it somewhere? If it is nowhere, one of those who are very keen on examination might ask how it could even exist. For if what does not exist is nowhere, perhaps what is nowhere does not exist either. If it is somewhere, then, since it exists, it is certainly either in the universe or above the universe. If it is in the universe, it is either in some part or everywhere. If in some part, it will be circumscribed by that part, which is smaller; if everywhere, by something greater and other than itself, I mean the contained by the container, if the whole is to be contained by the whole and no place is to be free of circumscription. So much if it is in the universe. And where was it before the universe came to be? That too is no small difficulty. If it is above the universe, was there nothing that separated it from the universe? Where is that which is above this? And how could one conceive of what exceeds and what is exceeded, without some boundary to cut and divide them? Or must there be something in between, by which the universe and what is above the universe are bounded? And what else is this but place, which we have tried to escape? I do not yet say that the divine must be circumscribed if it can be grasped by thought; for comprehension too is a kind of circumscription.

Why have I gone through all this, perhaps more elaborately than suits the ears of most, and in the style of speech now in fashion, which scorns what is noble and simple and has brought in what is crooked and riddling, so that the tree may be known by its fruits, I mean that the darkness that produces such doctrines may be known from the obscurity of what is said? It is not so that I too may seem to say paradoxical things and appear exceptional in wisdom, tying knots and untying riddles, the great marvel of Daniel; but so that I may make plain what my discourse set out from the beginning to say. And what was that? That the divine cannot be grasped by the human mind, nor pictured in its whole extent. And this is not from envy, for envy is far from the divine nature, which is impassible, alone good, and sovereign, especially with regard to the most honourable of its creatures (for what does the Word prefer to rational beings? Indeed their very existence comes from his supreme goodness). Nor is it for his own honour and glory, who is full, so that he might hold his honour and reverence by being unattainable. That would be wholly sophistical and alien, not only to God, but even to a moderately decent human being with some good opinion of himself, to secure first place by preventing others from reaching it.

Whether there are other reasons too, those nearer to God may know, the observers and beholders of his unsearchable judgments, if there are any so great in virtue, walking in the tracks of the abyss, as the saying goes. So far as we have grasped, measuring what is hard to see with small measures, it is perhaps so that what is easily gained may not be most easily lost: for what is gained by toil is usually held on to more firmly, while what is gained easily is quickly spurned, as something that can be got again; and so, for those with sense, the fact that a benefit is not ready to hand becomes itself a benefit. Or perhaps it is so that we may not suffer what the fallen Morning Star suffered: having received the whole light, we might stiffen our neck against the Lord Almighty and fall through pride, the most pitiable fall of all. Or perhaps it is so that there may be some greater prize there for diligence and a bright life for those who have been purified here and wait patiently for what they long for. For this reason this bodily darkness stands between us and God, like the cloud of old between the Egyptians and the Hebrews. And this, perhaps, is the darkness he made his hiding place: our grossness, through which few peer, and only a little. Let those who care to, philosophize about this and rise as high as they can in the inquiry. But to us, “the prisoners of the earth,” as the divine Jeremiah says, who are clothed in this thick flesh, this at least is known: that just as it is impossible to overtake one’s own shadow, however fast one hurries (for it always stays as far ahead as it is pursued), or for sight to come near visible things without the light and air in between, or for swimming creatures to glide outside the water, so it is impossible for those in bodies to be with the objects of thought wholly apart from bodily things. Something of ours will always intrude, however much the mind separates itself from visible things, withdraws into itself, and tries to reach what is invisible and akin to it. You will see it this way.

Are not spirit and fire and light, love and wisdom and righteousness, mind and word, and the like, the names of the first nature? What then? Will you conceive of spirit without motion and diffusion? Or fire without matter, without upward motion, without its own colour and shape? Or light not mixed with air and not released from what, as it were, begets and lights it? And what kind of mind? Not one that is in something else, whose movements are thoughts, at rest or put forth? And what kind of word, other than the one that is silent in us, or poured out (I hesitate to say, dissolved)? And if wisdom, what other than the habit, the one found in contemplation of things divine or human? And righteousness and love: are they not praiseworthy dispositions, the one opposed to injustice and the other to hatred, growing stronger and weaker, coming and going, and in short making us what we are and changing us, as colours do bodies? Or must we set these aside and look at the divine itself by itself from them, so far as we can, gathering some partial image from the likenesses? What then is the device by which it is from these and yet not these? Or how is the one, which is uncompounded and incomparable in nature, all these things, and each of them perfectly? So our mind struggles to get beyond bodily things and to converse with incorporeal things bare, as long as it looks with its own weakness at what is beyond its power. For every rational nature longs for God and the first cause, but cannot grasp him, for the reasons I have given. Worn out with longing, and as it were chafing and unable to bear the loss, it takes a second voyage: either it looks to visible things and makes one of them a god, knowing badly (for which of the visible things is higher and more godlike than the one who sees, and by how much, that the one should worship and the other be worshipped?); or through the beauty and order of visible things it comes to know God, using sight as a guide to what is beyond sight, and not losing God through the magnificence of what is seen.

From this, some worshipped the sun, some the moon, some the host of stars, some heaven itself along with these, to which they even gave the guidance of the universe according to the quality or quantity of their motion; others the elements, earth, water, air, fire, because of their usefulness, since without them human life could not even exist; others worshipped whatever visible thing each happened on, setting up as gods the most beautiful of what they saw. There are some who worshipped images and statues, first of their own family, the more emotional and bodily-minded among them, honouring the departed with memorials; then of strangers too, those who came after them and far removed from them, through ignorance of the first nature and by following the honour handed down to them as lawful and necessary, since custom, strengthened by time, came to be regarded as law. I think also that some, courting power, praising strength, and admiring beauty, in time made a god of the one they honoured, adding some myth as well to help the deception.

The more passionate among them even held the passions to be gods, or honoured them as gods: anger, bloodshed, licentiousness, drunkenness, and I know not what else of the same kind, finding in this an ignoble and unjust excuse for their own sins. Some gods they left below, some they hid under the earth (the only sensible thing they did), and some they raised to heaven. What a ridiculous allotment! Then they gave each of their fictions the name of some god or demon, with all the licence and independence of error, set up statues whose very costliness was a bait, and thought to honour them with blood and the smoke of sacrifice, and some even with very shameful deeds, frenzies and human sacrifice. For such gods it was fitting that there should be such honours. They have even degraded themselves before monsters, quadrupeds, and reptiles, and the most shameful and ridiculous of these, and have handed over the glory of God to them, so that it is not easy to decide whether the worshippers or the worshipped deserve more contempt. Perhaps the worshippers deserve far more, since, being of a rational nature and having received the grace of God, they set the worse before the better. And this is the sophistry of the evil one, who misuses the good for evil, like most of his crimes. He took hold of their longing as it wandered in its search for God, so that he might divert the power to himself and steal their desire, and, like a man leading a blind person who is looking for a road, he threw them over cliffs, one here and another there, and scattered them into a single pit of death and destruction.

So much for them. But reason took us up as we longed for God and could not bear to be without leader or pilot; then, turning to visible things and meeting what was from the beginning, it did not stop there (for it was not the part of reason to give leadership to things of equal rank with ourselves as far as sense goes), but through them it leads us to what is beyond them, and through which they have their being. For what ordered the things in heaven and on earth, those that move through the air and those in the water, or rather what came before these, heaven and earth and air and the nature of water? Who mixed and divided them? What is their fellowship with one another, their natural union and “common breath”? (I praise the one who said this, even though he is an outsider.) What set them in motion and drives their unceasing and unhindered course? Is it not their artificer, who put reason into all things, according to which the universe is carried along and governed? And who is their artificer? Is it not the one who made them and brought them into being? For surely we must not attribute such power to chance. Suppose their coming into being was by chance: whose was the ordering? Let us grant that too, if you like. Whose is the preserving and guarding of them according to the principles by which they first came to exist? Someone else’s, or chance’s? Clearly someone other than chance. And what else is this but God? So the reason that comes from God, implanted in all and the first law within us, bound up with all, has led us up to God from visible things. And now let us speak, beginning again.

What God is in nature and substance, no human being has ever found, nor will find. Whether he will ever find it, let those who wish investigate and philosophize. In my opinion he will find it when this godlike and divine thing, I mean our mind and reason, is mingled with what is akin to it, and the image has gone up to the archetype, which it now longs for. And this, I think, is the meaning of that much-discussed saying, that we shall one day know as we are known. For now, all that reaches us is a small outflow, like a little ray from a great light. So even if anyone has known God, or has been attested to have known him, he knew him only to the extent that he appeared more full of light than another who was not equally illuminated. And this superiority was thought to be perfection, measured not by the truth but by the capacity of his neighbour.

That is why Enosh hoped to call on the name of the Lord: hope was his achievement, and hope not of knowing but of calling on. Enoch was taken up, but it is not yet clear whether he had comprehended the nature of God or would comprehend it. Noah’s fine achievement was that he pleased God, he who was entrusted with saving the whole world from the waters, or the seeds of the world, in a small ship that escaped the flood. Abraham, the great patriarch, was justified by faith and offered a strange sacrifice, a type of the great one; yet he saw God not as God, but fed him as a man, and was praised for honouring as much as he grasped. Jacob imagined a high ladder and the ascent of angels, and anointed a pillar in a mystical way, perhaps to point to the stone anointed for us; he gave a place the name “Form of God” in honour of what he had seen, and he wrestled with God as with a man (whatever this wrestling of God with man may be; perhaps the testing of human virtue against God), and bore on his body the marks of the struggle, showing the defeat of created nature; and he received as the prize of his piety a change of name, being called Israel instead of Jacob, that great and honoured name. But neither he nor anyone after him among the twelve tribes whose father he was has boasted to this day of having contained the whole nature or vision of God.