Alexander Waugh - God

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CONTENTS

For Mary

FOREWORD

Discussions about God were not encouraged at home. My father was reticent about his own religious views and shortly before his death offered me, chequebook in hand, the grand sum of my advance, so that I might withdraw this book from publication. He never asked what line the book was taking nor had he read a word of it it was just finished and I never learned what lay behind his eccentric gesture. When I am occasionally asked by a lunatic in the train if I believe in God, he once wrote, I answer, Sometimes. This is not because I sometimes also disbelieve in Him but because at other times I am reading a book, brooding about a famous actress or whatever. God, for him, was a matter for discussion not with a lunatic, not in a train, not with his sons, not even perhaps with a priest, for Mans relationship to God, he wrote, is an intensely private affair, the most intimate and personal of all his relationships.

I tried to satisfy my own curiosity about the Divine Being at school; but my earnest questions were shunned by the schools chaplain who thought me perverse presumptuous arrogance he once called it in an end-of-term report. At Christmas the whole school was required to sing O come all ye faithful, God of God, light of light, lo, he abhors not the virgins womb. This line struck me as extremely odd, so afterwards I asked the chaplain why it was that God had decided to gestate inside the womb of Mary who was a married woman. Could he not have appeared magically as a fully grown saviour without having to be an embryo first? For which question I was required to write a thousand-word detention essay on the title Education is all that is left behind when you have forgotten what you have learned.

Rather than waste any more time in this way I decided to pursue my own lines of enquiry. I read the Bible, the Apocrypha and later went on to discover the Quran, the wonderful pseudepigraphical texts of Nag Hammadi, Qumran and an abundance of ancient Jewish apocalyptic and mystic literature.

This then is the fruit of a long and at times perverse investigation into the nature and being of God. It is a book not just about any old god, but about the God who created Adam and Eve, the God of Abraham, the God of the Jews and the Christians, that is also the God of Mormon and the God of Islam without a doubt, the most influential figure in the history of human civilisation. For thousands of years, he has shaped the way the whole world looks, thinks and breathes. Yet, finding out anything about him anything concrete, that is is surprisingly difficult; for God is the slipperiest of all slippery fish.

Millions of words of scripture and theology have been published but only a tiny fraction of it describes God himself. In the Bible, for instance, God is arguably not even the central character. Jesus nabs that role in the Christian New Testament, while elsewhere others (Abraham, Jacob, Saul and David, for instance) are more to the fore than God is. In the Old Testament and the nearly identical Jewish scriptures, the Tanakh (henceforth referred to as the Hebrew Bible), God is not even mentioned throughout several books, while for huge chunks he is sidelined by political histories, squabbles, descriptions of primitive rites, long lists of obscure laws, genealogical surveys, sordid rapes, and other matters which are implicitly of greater interest to the Bible authors than God. Likewise the Quran (a book which Muslims believe to have been dictated by God himself through the agency of Gabriel to the illiterate seventh-century prophet, Muhammad) is not an autobiography. The Quran is a book of laws, guidelines for good living, a call to moral and religious obedience, all these things and more, but it is not a book about God.

Why is it then, that so little appears to have been written about God himself, the central raison dtre of it all? The reason, according to some, is that there is nothing to say about him; nothing, at any rate that could possibly make any sense. In Denis Hid Divinity, an anonymous fourteenth-century English mystical author suggests that any attempt to write about God will end in certain failure:

Nor is he virtue, nor light, nor he liveth, nor he is life, nor he is substance, nor age, nor time, nor there is any understandable touching of him, nor he is knowledge, nor truth, nor kingdom, nor wisdom, nor one, nor unity, nor Godhead, nor goodness, nor is he spirit, as we understand spirit; nor sonhood, nor fatherhood, nor any other thing known by us or by any that be; nor he is anything of not-being things, nor anything of being things; nor any of those that be, know him as he is, nor he knoweth those things that be as they be in themselves, but as they be in him.

Not a promising start! The attitude, exemplified here, that no one can know what God is (only what he is not), is known to Christian theologians as the via negativa (the Negative Way) and to the Cabbalistic religions as Ein-Sof (an understanding of God as that which cannot be conceived by thought). According to Thomas Aquinas, a philosopher of the via negativa, in order to understand God at all we must consider the ways in which He is not rather than the ways in which He is.

But there is no difference between the proposition God is not finite and the statement God is infinite. So that considering the ways in which he is not must be just as futile as considering the ways in which he is. Even if it were true that God is infinite, what does this actually mean? Does he carry on expanding in time and space for ever? Or does he already encompass all of time and space (past, present and future) united without boundary?

Since human brains are finite, they should not be expected to understand the infinitude of God, for the whole (that is to say God, the universe and everything in it) cannot be explained with the use of a single part (a finite human brain). If this is so and infinity really is impossible for human beings to comprehend, then to say that God is infinite adds nothing to our understanding of him that is not already contained in the statement God is impossible to understand. Nor is it any more helpful than statements like God is One, God is Truth, God is Wisdom, God is Beauty which, from a philosophical perspective, are all meaningless.

Not everyone will agree of course. Many believers will argue that such statements bear witness to a truth, a transcendental truth maybe, but a truth nonetheless which is pregnant with mystical significance and here lies the rub, as the philosopher A. J. Ayer pointed out:

If a mystic admits that the object of his vision is something which cannot be described, then he must also admit that he is bound to talk nonsense when he describes it. In describing his vision the mystic does not give us any information about the external world; he merely gives us indirect information about the condition of his own mind. ( What I Believe )

Be that as it may, theists continue to assert that God cannot be understood without subscribing at least in part to a language of mystical explanations; a view, which irritates rational thinkers. Why must we be irrational in order to understand God? Or, as that arch-critic of the Christian religion, Friedrich Nietzsche, bluntly put it, Mystical explanations are regarded as profound; the truth is that they do not even go the length of being superficial. If that is accepted, what is left? Something worse than superficiality, or what? Nothing, perhaps.