Imaging the Uncircumscribable
Inexhaustible Comprehensibility and Incarnational Reality
If God is infinite, then how can we know Him?
This quandary lie at the heart of my confusions years ago. Confusions of an engineer, of a materialist, an alchemist, who wished (and perhaps still does) to utilize the truth for some end. To take the sword of truth and with it, cut up and conquer the world. Or at least beat people in stupid debates.
But that analogy of the truth as a sword has its limit.
God is truth. And God is infinite.
We can never fully grasp truth, in the sense that we never know every true statement. We may arrive at a relationship with Him who is the truth. But we never circumscribe Him. We never put our arms around Him, as if to take hold of, to possess an object.
We arrive at truth, in the way that we may finally arrive at a house, or a city, or a garden. We do not grasp it. It grasps us. We must be received into it before we can receive it.
Another way to consider this is that our knowledge and definitions are mere images of reality which lay outside ourselves. As John Henry Newman writes in The Development of Christian Doctrine,
“There is no one aspect deep enough to exhaust the contents of a real idea, no one term or proposition which will serve to define it; though of course one representation of it is more just and exact than another, and though when an idea is very complex, it is allowable, for the sake of convenience, to consider its distinct aspects as if separate ideas. Thus, with all our intimate knowledge of animal life and of the structure of particular animals, we have not arrived at a true definition of any one of them, but are forced to enumerate properties and accidents by way of description.”
Our words ultimately fall short of reality. They are mere signs, pointing to something deeper.
When Moses asks God for His name, His reply was cryptic:
I AM WHO I AM.
Or as rendered in the Septuagint, Ὁ ὬΝ - The One Who Is; The Being One.
When we speak of God we are not speaking of a sort of thing “in the system”, a thing that can be weighed against other things. Christ isn’t on the scale - Christ is the scale. Jesus is not man subject to law, He is the divine law made flesh. He is not a great man, who lived in the right way following from divine principles. The divine precepts are but statements about Him.
Why would God act in this way, and why in the context of a religion with precepts on how to live morally?
On one hand, God could have simply gave himself as a person to emulate without any sort of additional words, commands, or guidance (such as the ten commandments, the sermon on the mount, and continued revelation through the teachings of the epistles, apostles, and magisterium). But the world is incarnational. God acts and reveals himself through particular means and ways - and these ways are not just nice signs, they are reality. Angels, demons, and yes, the sacraments - these things are not just useful models and helpful aids to live life and “love God”. We have models of them in our mind, but these things exist whether or not we believe in them or not.
On the other hand, God could have simply given a set of precepts to follow. But again, God is inexhaustible. The set of precepts to follow would be - like the mind of God - infinite.
The word of God, and the world of God, have inexhaustible comprehensibility, and this follows from our incarnational nature. Infinitely many true images and statements can be made about these real objects.
The Word became flesh and became a little child. The Word became alive. As Newman continues:
When an idea, whether real or not, is of a nature to arrest and possess the mind, it may be said to have life, that is, to live in the mind which is its recipient. Thus mathematical ideas, real as they are, can hardly properly be called living, at least ordinarily. But, when some great enunciation, whether true or false, about human nature, or present good, or government, or duty, or religion, is carried forward into the public throng of men and draws attention, then it is not merely received passively in this or that form into many minds, but it becomes an active principle within them, leading them to an ever-new contemplation of itself, to an application of it in various directions, and a propagation of it on every side.
To believe is not mere intellectual assent, but necessarily results in the application of truth to the world around us - Christ, after all, is the “truth, the way, and the life” - “faith without works is dead”.
And so our chase after truth is not so much a series of syllogisms, argumentation over right and wrong, or a trying to create a list of facts. It is an act of purifying our spiritual senses so that we can perceive the reality of God’s will more perfectly, and may follow in the way of our Blessed Lord:
Then Jesus answered, and said to them: Amen, amen, I say unto you, the Son cannot do any thing of himself, but what he seeth the Father doing: for what things soever he doth, these the Son also doth in like manner.
Or as we were commanded:
The light of thy body is thy eye. If thy eye be single, thy whole body shall be lightsome.