Xavier MORALES On Unknowing God

An epistolary meditation November the 26th, 2014

Dear P.,
You wont be surprised if I tell you that, among the rich and various topics of
your last letter, the three items I was most interested in were the theological ones.
Of course, you treated them from your own point of view, which is that of a
philosopher. But nobody would accuse you of a deontological or epistemological
trespassing, because actually, these three topics converge in the central theme of
the cognoscibility of God, which is the typical question where both philosophy
and theology have something to say. And I would add : something to say to each
other.
Evidently, my reaction will be that of a (neophyte) theologian.
I. GODS LIKENESS IN MAN MANS LIKENESS IN GOD
I liked your beautiful meditation on God mirrored in the human person :
As much as I bear the weight of the image of God, I am a looking-glass. [] So
looking into myself as into a mirror, I must come really to see whom it is I reflect.

Now, the question is : what is the image of God in you ? What is this mirror
you are ? You dont explicitly answer to that question, but in saying that the mode
of this mirroring is an introspection or, with a pun, a self-reflection , you
reduce it to that which in you is the self-reflecting faculty : the mind.
It reminds me of a wonderful little treatise by Nicholas of Cusa, The filiation
of God1:
Suppose that there is a most lofty reflection of our beginning, viz., the glorious God a
reflection in which God Himself appears. [] And let all creatures be mirrors2

This convergence between Nicholas and you is, of course, not fortuitous, as
Nicholas is a philosophical theologian. And the source is evidently platonism or
more probably neo-platonism : a very famous and controversial passage in Platos
Alcibiades Major, including interesting lines transmitted only by Eusebius of
Cesarea and Stobaeus, reads :
[The faculty of knowledge and thought in the soul] has a likeness with the divine and
if you turn your eyes towards it and know all the divine, god and thought, you are in the
See ch. 3, 65-67 and ch. 6, 86. Translation by Jasper Hopkins accessible at http://jasperhopkins.info/DeFiliatione12-2000.pdf.
2
Nicholas of Cusa, De filiatione Dei, ch. 3, 65 ; transl. Jasper Hopkins, p. 346.
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Xavier MORALES On Unknowing God

best condition to know yourself. [] + It is when we turn our eyes towards the god, that
we use the best possible mirror [] and see ourselves and know ourselves best3.+

You may notice that, here, God is a mirror for the soul to know itself,
whereas you imagined the soul to be the mirror to know God but the platonic
tradition emphasized the correlative aspect of the knowledge of the divine by selfknowledge4 (introspection). Now, the idea of looking for God inside oneself
enters the Christian tradition with Augustin, for whom the image of God in man
is in the mens5. The mens is a mirror of God, and by this mirror, we are to look
for him, and by this mirror, see him, at least for the time being 6 .
So far for the Quellforschung. As a matter of fact, when I was younger, I was
fascinated by this intellectual-mystical way of looking for God in oneself. I liked
most the idea of purity as absolute transparency, absence of any form or image, or,
as you say : per-spicuousness . Growing older, I questioned this theological and
spiritual position, for different reasons. First, it is neither scriptural neither
hebraical. Purity, in the Bible, doesnt mean absence of any proper form , but
singleheartedness . Id like to oppose the translucidity of pure reflection
(mirror-metaphor) to the opacity of the painted or carved image (icon-metaphor).
We are images of God, not merely the (virgin) mirror where the image of God
can be reflected ; we are images of God, not because of a lack of any form, but
because of the printing of a form. This comes to my second reluctance : the
theology of pure reflection implies a spirituality of annihilation (French anantissement ) you have for example in Eckhart or in the Quietism7. The theology of
image implies a more positive anthropology, with an ontological separation
between the image and its archetype, allowing the image to possess a real density
of its own and a freedom to be oneself (precisely as the image of a God who is
freely himself).
Let us go back to the Revelation of God in the Scripture. When we read that
God said : Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. , we are made
aware of two things quite opposite to the neo-platonic tradition :
1. God himself got involved in the process of creation. The world (this
inferior world, lacrymae vallis) was created by God himself, not by another God,
be it an opposite principle (the Demiurge of Gnosticism or the principle of Evil of
Manicheism) or a secondary God (like in Arianism, where God first creates the
Son of God and lets him create the material creation, in order to maintain his own
PLATO, Alcibiades Major, 133 c 3-16 ; the passage between + comes from EUSEBIUS, Evangelical
Preparation, XI, ch. 27, 5.
4
Doctus cum libro, I refer to the commentary in Sources Chrtiennes 292, Paris 1982, p. 366, n. 4.
5
AUGUSTIN, On The Trinity, XV, I, 1.
6
AUGUSTIN, On The Trinity, XV, XXIV, 44, with an allusion to 1 Co 13, 22.
7
See R. DAESCHLER, Anantissement , in Dictionnaire de spiritualit asctique et mystique , t. I, Paris
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1937, col. 560-565.

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Xavier MORALES On Unknowing God

transcendence to keep his hands clean from the dirt of it !). Our God, the God of
the Scripture, the God who decided to reveal himself to his creature, is not an
absolutely transcendent God. This first point is a preliminary condition to his
cognoscibility.
2. That Man should be Gods image means two more things.
A. Let us make man in our image [] and let them have dominion
Gods image is not primarily Mans nous, or interiority, or self-transcendence a
line of thought which is absolutely not hebraical and scriptural, but Mans royal
dignity inside the living world8. Man is the lieutenant of God in the world. Man is
the representative/representation of God in the world. And the first consequence
of that is his dominion over all forms of life (not over minerals Man has no
power against hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes etc.).
B. That Man should be Gods image is less an access to the answer to the
question : What is Man ? , or else, it would mean knowing Man departing from
what we know God to be, that is, what we essentially dont know, it would be
claiming a knowledge per obscurius. It is more likely an access to the answer to
the question : What is God ? - Well, essentially, he is like a Man he is a
living being, has intentions, makes decisions, speaks them and realizes them he is
a person9.
II. GOD AS A PERSON
I come more closely to the question of the personal/impersonal ontological
status of God. God reveals himself as a person. Revealing oneself is already an
evidence of the personal character of a thing. An impersonal being doesnt reveal
itself. It appears, it manifests itself, at the best (as the French philosopher Jean-Luc
Marion would say), it gives itself as a phenomenon but it doesnt reveal itself.
Only a person makes this gesture of ex-pressing oneself : drawing from what is
inside (and, in the very doing, making something like an inside exist rocks have
no insides, no interiorities) and exposing it outside. Only persons have a face in
French, we say, a visage something that is viewed, but also something that stares
at you and at which you stare (viser=to aim at) : a rock doesnt stare at you.
Now, the question is : perhaps this is only God as he reveals himself. Perhaps,
beyond this way of revealing himself, God is different,. Perhaps there is a God
beyond God, something we dont know how to call (deitas ? Gottheit ? Even
This is Basil of Cesareas and Gregory of Nyssas interpretation of the likeness of God in Man : I take these
two Fathers of the Church because of their affinity with neoplatonism, in spite of which they maintain the
biblical meaning.
9
Perhaps we could oppose to your becoming the likeness of God by self-re-flection=introversion (flectere
se retro ad se) a becoming the likeness of God by alter-pro-flection=extraversion (flectere se prorsus ad
alterum).
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Xavier MORALES On Unknowing God

Eckhart doesnt affirm that bluntly10), beyond the Trinitarian God who reveals
himself in Christ and whom we know by his name of Father and Son and Holy
Spirit. To use your own words : Perhaps God as God exceeds this triple person.
In that case, God would reveal himself as a person, but be impersonal. But
such a distinction would precisely be contrary to the way God has revealed himself
to us. He has revealed himself to be Light, a metaphor for Truth. God is light,
there is no darkness in him . If God revealed himself differently from what he
really is, he would be cheating, he would be a sort of malevolent genius which he is not. Moreover, God revealed himself to be Love. His revelation of
oneself is a communication of oneself without restriction. Love gives (itself) with
no restriction. There is nothing kept for himself in God, only infinite self-giving,
and if he has always something more to give, it is because he is infinite, and not
because he retains something of himself.
So God is a person. Thomas Aquinas gives a philosophical confirmation of it,
when he argues that, even if you make abstraction, in an exercise of the intellect,
of the personality of the three divine persons, there will remain in your intellect a
single personalitas Dei, like the Jews think it to be11 : if ever Gods Substance
were something beyond the Persons (which is not the case), all the same, God
would be a person. And of course, you have the theological confirmation in the
fact that God reveals himself perfectly in Jesus Christ who is a person.
Now, we cant just dismiss this idea of a God beyond God, of God beyond
the personal. We must understand what truth about God this mistake tries to
express.
I have already alluded to a first answer. The God beyond God, the impersonal
God beyond the personal God, could be the divine Substance in opposition to the
divine Persons. The argument would run as follows. Concerning our way of
knowing him, God reveals who he is : Father, Son, Spirit, but not what he is : To
Moses, he says : If you want to know, I am who I am and thats all.
I object. First because there is nothing like a divine Substance in opposition
to divine Persons : there is no real distinction between the divine Substance (if we
are allowed to apply the category of substance to God, which is already an
analogical predication) and the divine Persons, even less than between your being
a human being and your being this human being. But the fact is that, as there is
one human substance and one human person in you, the coincidence of them is
obvious, whereas in God, there is one divine Substance and three divine Persons,
so that the coincidence is really much more difficult to apprehend. The only thing
See the clarification of the Latran IV Council of 1215, ch. 2, DH 804. Nevertheless, Eckhart says : The
intellect doesnt want God as he is God [] It wants him where he has no name. It wants something more
noble, something better than God as he has a name (German Sermon 26).
11
Summa theologiae, IIIa pars, qu. 3, art. 3, answer to objection 2.
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Xavier MORALES On Unknowing God

we can say is that there is a distinction, in our access to the knowledge of it,
between the Substance of the three Persons, and the distinction by opposition of
the three Persons, that is : their relations. We know that there are three really
different Persons : who they are. We cannot know what they are : their Substance.
But they are the Substance, the Substance is not beyond them.
Second objection: As we saw, God doesnt reveal what he is, not because he
wants to hide something of himself or because he created us with wrongly
adjusted seeing organs, but because, as you stressed, there is nothing like a what
for God : God is beyond any what, any de-termination, he is infinite which is
true, not only of God as one, but of the Father as being God, the Son as being
God, the Spirit as being God.
Now, if you please, I would like to propose a different interpretation, a
Trinitarian interpretation, of the beyond-ness of God. In this proposition, God is
beyond God inside the Trinity. The argument would run as follows : God the
Father, totius divinitatis principium12, is beyond God the Son he engenders and
beyond God the Spirit he spires.
This transcendence of God the Father concerns not only our knowledge of
him, but also who he is in himself, or, better said, in the Trinity.
As to our knowledge of the Father, being God, he verifies the
epistemological principle that our human knowledge of God can only be by
deducing the cause from the effects. We only know the Father because we know
him to be the Father of the Son. We know the Son personally because the Son
revealed himself in the personality of Jesus Christ. We dont know the Father
personally that is : we dont know him directly as a person, but only aprs coup,
because, knowing the Son, we know the Father : Who has seen me has seen the
Father. So, because God the Father decided to send the Son in person, and not to
come in person, his personality is, in relation to our knowledge, withdrawing in
the background : he lets the Son appear in his behalf.
But this letting the Son appear in his behalf is not just an economical device.
It has its eternal correlative in the fact that the Father, engendering the Son, lets
him be God in person (in the person of the Son), no less than he, the Father, is
God in person (in the person of the Father) and without himself stopping to be
God in person ! Even if the Father doesnt withdraw from being God in person,
I would like to speak of a withdrawal of his person as a sort of renunciation to be
the One God without anyone else, exclusively. You can find this description of the
engendering of the Son as a sacrifice, a kenosis, in Boulgakov, and Balthasar
follows him. You could also borrow and adapt the kabbalistic concept of imum

12

Augustin, On the Trinity, IV, c. XX, 29.

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Xavier MORALES On Unknowing God

to an inner-divine receding of the Father in order to leave (analogical) space to

the Son.
A corollary remark. You cannot say either that the Trinity is the (self-)
objectivation of the God beyond God, as if there were a Subject-God and an
Object-God, the Subject being beyond (in the sens of prior to) the Object. You
only can say that in the Trinity, the Father objectivates himself through the Logos
and the Pneuma (well, Barth says so, but I personally dont like this way of
presenting the Trinity : too close to a modalist interpretation).
So far, so good. But this assumption of a personal God has a consequence on
the way we relate to him.
III. CONTEMPLATION VS. REAL LIFE
Of course, God is a name without any secure content, so that when we
say that God is God, we dont know exactly what we say. But this name
designates, and this is enough. Moreover, if God is a person, he is a You , and
You can be used as his proper name. Now, the word You has an interesting
property. At the same time, it has such an emptiness of content that it can be used
for anybody : it is a common name, a name potentially common to everyone
except myself. But it designates nonetheless the ultimately definite : you : this
one and no other . That it to say : it has a deictic connotation, and as such, it is
the most proper name. When I say You to God (but always remember that he
was the first in saying You (are my son) to you), I adequately designate him.
He really is this You .
Of course, contemplation can sometimes and does often mean : seeing
without intervening, looking with no concern, lazily. You contemplate a
beautiful sunset on the ocean let your material and even intellectual concerns
aside and just open your eyes to the light, the colors, the movement of the waves
and the progressive sinking of the sun into the water. In this contemplation ,
you reduce the phenomena to what is given to you, trying to eliminate any
intervention of your daily occupations and worries ; and in so doing, you reduce
yourself to a pure receptive subject : a pure I (a pure eye !) with no
determination. For me, contemplative prayer is such a double reduction : I try to
reduce God to who he reveals to be to me, and myself to whom he reveals himself
to. And the results of this double reduction are a pure You and a pure I .
So, prayer is less a lazy contemplation than a conversation : the
exchange of the personal pronouns. And in that measure, contemplation is not
an exercise in modifying ones mode of consciousness (supranatural perceptions,
rapt, ecstasy or whatsoever) is not a suspension of time, existence or everyday
life. Id rather say that contemplation is an exercise of tuning ones
consciousness to the existential existing-before-God , in order to be able to
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Xavier MORALES On Unknowing God

exist before God more authentically in everyday life (this is of course an

allusion to Heideggers philosophy of existence). You meet God in contemplation
in exactly the same way as you meet him (well, actually, he meets you) in
existence, because contemplation is existence. Contemplation has no value in itself,
only Real Life is worth living. Or is it that existence should always be
contemplation ? Existence should always be existing before God as exchanging
the I/You with him , which is the definition of contemplation. Contemplation is
the phenomenological reduction of life to its essence and, as such, shouldnt be
secluded from the rest of ones existence, but should make you become an ever
more practical person (in short : make you become more American !).
Brotherly,
Xavier