Transcendent God

All of the major world religions have explored the area of divine transcendence - that the human view of god is limited and finite, that god is so much larger in both scope and dimension that we have no hope of comprehending him. Our conception of him encompasses no more than a fraction of his essence, which transcends the mere physical. Or even more, we see nothing of his essence but can only perceive him indirectly through his actions in the physical world, because he exists outside and beyond it.

As Karen Armstrong put it when describing the Spanish philosopher, Ibn Saddiq,

"God was not simply another being - one of the things that exist in our usual sense of the word. If we claimed to understand God, that would mean that he was finite and imperfect. The most exact statement that we could make about God was that he was incomprehensible, utterly transcending our natural intellectual powers. We could speak about God's activity in the world in positive terms, but not about God's essence, which would always elude us.

Similarly Erigena argued that God is more than existence. God does not exist like the things he has created and is not just another being existing alongside them. What that is which is more than being it does not reveal. In fact, God is nothing. God is not an object; he does not possess a being in any sense that we can comprehend. His mode of existence is as different from ours as our being is from an animal's, and an animal's from a rock. But if God is nothing he is also everything. Because this super-existence means that God alone has true being, he is the essence of everything that partakes of this. Everyone of his creatures, therefore, is a theophany (a sign of God's presence).

In this view, he is the Ultimate, the absolute infinite, beyond being, but the essence of being itself. What a statement like that actually means is debatable, and I would say that anyone who claims to understand it is confusing their opinion and emotions with fact. The quotes Armstrong provides fall short of expressing anything very specific or even comprehensible. There is a sort of internal consistency in Ibn Saddiq's and Erigena's commentaries. But one comes away from their writings thinking they have experienced some clever sophistry rather than a real explanation, having a similar affect on me as when I contemplate Anselm's ontological proof of god.

The school of "negative theology" in the middle ages dealt with this inability to describe god in positive terms by instead describing what he was not. For example, we should not say "god is wise" because wisdom is a human attribute that falls short of describing any attribute of god. Instead we would say, "god is not unwise". Similarly it should not be said that "god exists", but that "god is not non-existent". This was somehow supposed to help, though I am not sure how.

Clearly, this is beyond logic, and is intentionally so. If it doesn't make rational sense, well, that is by conscious design. It would be futile to attempt to use reason to try to either prove it or to overturn it because it's defenders have already conceded that it is fundamentally beyond logic and is, by definition, unreasonable. The transcendent god transcends, among other things, logic, consistency, and reason. If this type of god doesn't make sense, that is not a problem. That is the essence of transcendence - it is beyond explanation and concrete description. There can be no debate or even real discussion about this type of god. There is no middle ground - one either participates in the subjective experience of his wonder and awesomeness, or one does not.