This is the question asked and addressed in David Bentley Hart’s “The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss” (Yale University Press, 2013), one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.
If you are an atheist, then you should at least know what it is you reject. And if you are a believer, then you should at least know what you worship and dedicate your life to. Unfortunately, in many debates today about the existence of God, both sides of the debate – including the ‘New Atheists’ as well as fundamentalist believers – often display a poor grasp of the meaning and history of the word ‘God’, and use the word in a variety of confusing and incoherent ways.
This is where David Bentley Hart, an Orthodox theologian living in America, is of immense help. In his recent book he engages in what he calls “a kind of lexicographical exercise”, an attempt to render as clear and precise as possible the meaning of ‘God’. As Hart states on the very first page:
“My intention is simply to offer a definition of the word ‘God’, or of its equivalents in other tongues, and to do so in fairly slavish obedience to the classical definitions of the divine found in the theological and philosophical schools of most of the major religious traditions.”
As this quotation suggests, Hart’s strategy is a global one: he draws not only from Western sources (such as the Christian theologians Gregory of Nyssa and Thomas Aquinas, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, and the Sufi mystics), but also from complementary accounts found in many Eastern religious traditions, including certain schools of Hinduism and Buddhism.
Just consider the subtitle of Hart’s book: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. These are the three characteristics ascribed to Brahman, regarded as the supreme reality within Hinduism. In Sanskrit, the classical literary language of the Hindus of India, the three characteristics are known as ‘sat’ (being, reality), ‘chit’ (pure consciousness) and ‘ananda’ (serene beatitude, or bliss), and the three terms taken together elegantly summarise the divine nature as understood in many of the Western and Eastern religious traditions.
But if this is what God is like, then the way many people think and talk about God is completely wrong. Many people imagine God to be something very familiar, something like a human being but only a lot more powerful, much more knowledgeable, much more compassionate and loving, and of course invisible! Some even say that God whispers in their ears (maybe in Greek), that he often becomes angry and even violent towards his misbehaving creatures, that he sometimes needs to step in and miraculously fix problems in the world, and so on. But is this God, or is this Superman?
There is another way to think about God, one that is more in keeping with the great religious traditions of the world. The first thing to say about this alternative way of thinking is that God is far from familiar. In fact, God is incomprehensible. Augustine once said: “If it’s something you understand, then it’s not God.” The words we use to describe God are always inadequate and can never fully capture the divine mystery. As the Catholic philosopher, Herbert McCabe, nicely put it: God “is always dressed verbally in second-hand clothes that don’t fit him very well.” If that’s right, then the Creator of all must be entirely different from the created world, and so he cannot be just ‘one of us’, only infinitely better and stronger, a super-duper man.
In order to avoid anthropomorphic and idolatrous ideas about God, we need to think deeper about the question: Who Is God? In looking for an answer to this question, David Bentley Hart turns to one of his favourite theologians, the great fourth-century Cappadocian Father, Gregory of Nyssa. It was Gregory who first systematically applied the concept of ‘infinity’ to God, and if we follow his lead we can arrive at a more adequate and coherent understanding of who God is, such as the one provided by Hart when he writes:
“God is the infinite to which nothing can add and from which nothing can subtract, and he himself is not some object in addition to other objects. He is the source and fullness of all being, the actuality in which all things hold together; and so he is also the reality that is present in all things as the very act of their existence. God, in short, is not a being but is at once ‘beyond being’ (in the sense that he transcends the totality of existing things) and also absolute ‘Being itself’ (in the sense that he is the source and ground of all things).”
In other words, God is not one more being or thing amongst others. He is not even the supreme or greatest being (the ‘God as Superhero’ idea). He is beyond being altogether, and the ultimate source of all being, of everything that exists.
To understand this, consider the famous philosophical question: Why is there something rather than nothing at all? Hart’s point is that if our answer to this question is ‘God’, so that if there were no God then there would be absolutely nothing at all, then God must lie ‘beyond’ or (to use another metaphor) at the ‘foundations’ of the physical universe. God could not be one more inhabitant of the universe, perhaps sitting atop Mount Olympus like Zeus.
If that’s the case, then perhaps the best answer to the question ‘Who Is God?’ is the one Hart gives: God is “not just some especially resplendent object among all the objects illuminated by the light of being, or any kind of object at all, but is himself the light of being.”
*Dr Nick Trakakis is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University.