God as a mystery

Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev

One of the main themes of Gregory Nazianzen’s theology was the theme of the incomprehensibility of God. Its historical context was the polemic with Eunomius, in which many fourth-century theologians were involved, including all the three Great Cappadocians. Eunomius claimed that God’s essence is comprehensible for a human person: ‘God does not know about His own nature more than we do’.[1] Eunomius is reported to have said, ‘I know God in the same manner as He knows Himself’.[2] If what we know about Eunomius from his hostile opponents is true, then his teaching may be considered as a rationalization of Christianity, in which no room is left for a miracle, for a mystery, for anything beyond the limits of human reasoning. ‘The religion within the boundaries of reason’, which was sought for by the European rationalist philosophers of the nineteenth century,[3] was, it seems, invented long before them.

            This rationalization of religion was something quite opposite to what Gregory Nazianzen believed in. He regarded the whole of Christian faith as first of all a mystery. The way of a theologian, as we have just seen, is considered by him as a mystical ascent to the peak of Mount Sinai. However, this way leads only to seeing the ‘averted figure’ of God, that is, not to the comprehension of God’s nature, but to some sort of revelation about God though the incarnate Word and through the visible universe: 

What experience of this have I had, you friends of truth, her initiates, her lovers, as I am? I was running with a mind to see God and so it was that I ascended the mount. I penetrated the cloud, became enclosed in it, detached from matter and material things and concentrated, so far as might be, in myself. But when I directed my gaze I scarcely saw the averted figure of God, and this whilst sheltering in the rock,[4] God the Word incarnate for us. Peering in I saw not the Nature prime, self apprehended... but as it reaches us at its furthest remove from God, being, so far as I can understand, the Grandeur, or... the ‘majesty’[5] inherent in the created things He has brought forth and governs.[6] 

            The human person cannot know God in the same manner as God knows Himself: one can only learn about God through Christ and through the things of the visible world. God’s essence and nature is inaccessible for the human intellect. In this affirmation we find the most fundamental disparity between Gregory’s and Eunomius’ theories of knowledge of God. For the former, the knowledge of God is a way leading beyond the limits of discursive knowledge, for the latter, a movement within its limits. Gregory Nazianzen was himself a rhetorician and a philosopher: he was a defender of Christian paideia, scholarship and knowledge. However, he understood that human knowledge has its limits and that human reason cannot grasp the nature of the divine things. Reason can lead one to the recognition of God’s existence, but in no way can penetrate into God’s essence. Speaking of this, Gregory polemicizes not only with Eunomius, but also with Plato, ‘the theologian’ of Greek antiquity. Gregory quotes his famous saying which was quoted by many Christian writers:[7] 

To know God is hard, to describe Him impossible, as a pagan philosopher taught.[8] ...No - to tell of God is not possible, so my argument runs, but to know Him is even less possible. For language may show the known if not adequately, at least faintly... But mentally to grasp so great a matter is utterly beyond real possibility... Whether higher, incorporeal natures can grasp it, I do not know. They may, perhaps, through their proximity to God and their illumination by light in its fullness know God if not with total clarity, at least more completely, more distinctly than we do.[9] ...The incomprehensible and boundless nature (of God) passes understanding. I mean understanding what that nature is, not understanding that it exists. Our preaching is not vain, our faith empty;[10] it is not that doctrine we are propounding. Do not take our frankness as ground for atheistic caviling and exalt yourselves over against us for acknowledging our ignorance.[11] 

            Now, according to the Eunomians, atheism is the affirmation of the incomprehensibility of God. On the contrary, according to Gregory, the claim that God is comprehensible in His nature and essence is the highest degree of atheism and blasphemy. A Christian theologian humbly confesses that he deals with a mystery beyond comprehension, while a rationalist pretends that he knows God no less than God knows Himself. A Christian theologian knows that we can only speak about what is ‘around God’, but not about what He is: 

God always was, is and shall be; or rather, He always ‘is’. For ‘was’ and ‘shall be’ are taken from our divisions of time and from transient nature, whereas God is He Who always is, and this is how He calls Himself in his revelation to Moses on the mountain. He possesses concentrated in Himself the entirety of being (to einai) without beginning and without termination, like an ocean of substance,[12] limitless and indefinite, which surpasses any idea of either time or nature. Only the intellect might roughly depict Him, however, in some obscure and mediocre manner, and not in His nature, but in what is around Him, joining certain elements of representation in one image of truth, which runs away before you can overtake it, and which escapes before you can comprehend it... So, the divinity is limitless in it is difficult to contemplate it. And only this is comprehensible in it: its limitlessness, even of someone would think that it is pertinent to a simple nature to be either totally incomprehensible or entirely comprehensible.[13] 

            Speaking of God in His nature, Gregory makes mostly negative statements. He is boundless, limitless, formless, impalpable, invisible; there is no composition, no conflict, no division, no dissolution in His nature.[14] Therefore God is not a body. But the term ‘incorporeal’ does not give all-embracing revelation of God’s essence. The same is true of the terms ‘ingenerate’, ‘unoriginate’, ‘immutable’, ‘immortal’, and all other expressions which refer to God’s attributes.[15] These and similar apophatic expressions only tell us of what God is not, but cannot explain what He is in His essence. Is God somewhere or nowhere? If we say that He is nowhere, one can ask whether He exists at all. But if we say that He is somewhere, this would mean that He is limited in space.[16] Every term is inadequate to express the nature of the incomprehensible.

            Why is God incomprehensible? ‘Not that deity resents our knowledge’, Gregory answers, ‘resentment is a far cry from the divine nature, serene as it is, uniquely and properly “good”, especially resentment of its most prized creation’.[17] We do not know the reason for God’s incomprehensibility. However, we know that there is this ‘corporeal gloom’ which ‘stands barrier between us and God like the cloud of old time between Hebrews and Egyptians’.[18] Only a few can peer through the ‘darkness which He made His hiding place’,[19] which is our body.[20] In this idea, one can discern the influence of Plato, who said that to reach pure knowledge is only possible when one is liberated from one’s body and contemplates things with one’s soul alone.[21]

            Gregory compares the way of the knowledge of God with the pursuit of one’s own shadow, which is impossible to outrun. God’s nature always escapes the human tongue and reason, however much they may strive to describe or present God. Being encircled by the material, one cannot reach the level in which true knowledge of God is possible. Yet knowledge of God in this life is only possible through the instrumentality of something material. Therefore, the full knowledge of God is not attainable for the person clothed in the material body: 

...You cannot cross your own shadow, however much you haste - it is always exactly ahead of your grasp. Sight cannot approach its objects without the medium of light and atmosphere; fish cannot swim out of water; and no more can embodied beings keep incorporeal company with things ideal. Some corporeal factor of our will always intrude itself, even if the mind will be most fully detached from the visible world... This way our mind tires of getting past bodily conditions and companying with things sheerly incorporeal, and meanwhile it gazes in impotence at what lies beyond its power.[22] 

            The way of the knowledge of God is also compared with the descent into a bottomless abyss: the lower the reason descends, the more dense darkness around it is, while the reason never achieves its goal. The immersion into the depths of the divinity is endless, and this is again connected with limitations of human reason and word, which are unable to peer into the mysteries of God’s essence and God’s prodigies: 

So it was with Solomon... The more he entered into profundities, the more his mind reeled. He made it a goal of his wisdom to discover just how far off it was.[23] Paul tried to get there - I do not mean God’s nature, that he knew to be quite impossible, but only to God’s judgments.[24] The marvel of all - I share his feeling as he closes his argument with impassioned wonder at the sort of things he calls the wealth and depth of God in acknowledgment of the incomprehensibility of God’s judgments.[25] His language is almost the same as David used. David at one point calls God’s judgments a great abyss fathomless by sense;[26] at another point he says that the knowledge even of his own make-up was too wonderful for him, too excellent for him to be able to grasp.[27] 

            The way of the knowledge of God is accomplished with wonder and astonishment at a miracle. In this state all discursive knowledge discontinues, the word falls silent. This state is not a knowledge of God’s essence, but is silence of every human knowledge in face of God’s limitlessness and bottomlessness. The knowledge of God’s essence is inaccessible for a person, while he is in a body, speaks earthly language and thinks in earthly categories.

            Does it mean that the human person will know God’s essence when he becomes free from the body? Gregory leaves the question open. It seems, however, that he is inclined to a positive answer. The full knowledge of God will become possible in the state of deification, when the person’s intellect is united to what is related to it by nature, that is, to the divinity: 

No one has yet discovered or ever shall discover what God is in His nature and essence. As for a discovery some time in the future, let those who have a mind to it research and speculate. The discovery will take place, so my reason tells me, when this God-like, divine thing, I mean our intellect and reason (noun kai logon), mingles with its kin, when the copy returns to the pattern it now longs after. This seems to me to be the meaning of the great dictum that we shall, in time to come, know even as we are known.[28] But for the present what reaches us is a scant emanation, as it were a small beam of a great light...[29] 

            So, Gregory leaves us with hope that in the age to come, when we are liberated from our material bodies, some fuller knowledge of God will be possible for us. Even then, though, we shall not know God as He knows Himself: there can be no identity between our knowledge of God and God’s self-knowledge. The possibility which opens to a person in the future world is that of knowledge of God as He knows the human person.[30] What this entails, one does not know now. One can only guess that this idea of St Paul implies a certain fullness and immediacy of the knowledge of God in the age to come. When the barrier of the body has been destroyed, an encounter face to face with God will become possible for the human person. As far as earthly life is concerned, only some kind of coming closer to this encounter is possible here, something like Moses’ ascent on Mount Sinai, where in darkness and cloud he recognizes God’s presence, but cannot see His essence.