Before God created the heavens and the earth, what was there? We are told there was nothing. We are taught creation was ex nihilo, made out of nothing. In the poetics of the Hebrew telling that nothingness is a void formless and dark. There was nothing until God commanded “let there be,” let something be, let something exist. How then is God something? How then “is” God? God is no thing. God is not an existent. God is without being. God is beyond, before, above being. And even here we fail the very notion of God because terms such as beyond, before, and above are as much about relation as they are direction and dimension, and there are no such divisions in that which is not in some manner being. God is a notion that impales itself in every attempt to define it, conceptualize it, explain it. We can in no wise hold onto an idea of God because it is God who holds onto us, defines us, who gives us “being.”
There is here no denial of God, only of the inadequacy of every attempt to define, to de-finite, God. To speak of God is to confine ourselves to the realm of analogy, the realm of “without [ana] reason [logos].” Here we enter the world of symbols, and the sacred stories and teachings that accrue to them. Everything that ever has or ever will be said of God is for us—because of us in our finitude—relegated to a world of tempered conjecture, hinged upon a humbling “it is as if.” If ever we descend into thinking we have something concrete and real about God in our grasp, we have fallen to the worship of an idol, an object of our manufacture. Man is not made to grasp at God. It is God who grasps man. It is God who has made man, allowed man. The very term “God” itself indicates that from which, out of which man arises. Man cannot escape God. No being, no existent, can escape its roots, its history, its destiny. Man can in the propriety of his being merely bow before the mystery of the no-thing that is the beginning—and the end—of his being. This alone allows him to be authentic to his self, to God.
Scripture is in accord with this. In the Epistle to the Hebrews we hear that only faith can prove God. In the First Epistle to the Corinthians we are taught that there is no philosophy that can command a definition of God or of his nature. In Exodus we learn that to look upon God is to die. In the Gospel according to St. John we are told no one has seen God. In the First Epistle to Timothy God is said to dwell in an impenetrable light. God is beyond the grasp of our minds, and our bodies.
But the goodly Christian will object, and claim Christ reveals God, that we know God in Jesus Christ. This is true. We know Christ, and thus we know God. But those statements about our knowledge of the divine and sacred are contingent or conditional statements. We know Christ only as far as we are at one with his will, at one with his command to “love one another as I have loved you.” The issue turns upon the answer each must give to the question: who can so love either self or other? It is our humbling reality that coming to the knowledge of God, coming to the Christ-like love of self and other, is a journey that has no end. It is a journey that drove some into deserts and monasteries, which drove some to a life-time of prayer, penance and deprivation. It is a journey into the core of that creative love that is kenosis, the self-giving of God into creation, the primal sacrifice, the eternal sacrifice, the giving away of God, the surrender of no-thing into its some-thing. Kenosis is the death of all-creative no-thing. It is thus that the Christ must die, and die in dis-grace, in order to fully reveal and deliver to creation the Spirit of God. Here also death for us itself is transvalued, and becomes not a deprivation but the horizon whereon we first meet God in his sacred nothingness.
To be fully creative, to truly “create,” is to empty self, to breathe out, to expire—to expel spirit (breath). We touch upon this in the experience of ecstasy, a standing [-stacy] outside [ex-] our being, a type of momentary death. As most of us will not experience the depth and breadth of self-loss which the mystics speak of as ecstasy, let us delimit the focus here to the loss of self or the consciousness of self often termed la petite mort. It is a type of orgasmic moment wherein one experiences an abruption of self. One feels the soul has gone out, and yet one abides. Biologically and psychologically we are constructed such that the experience of an expulsion of life is intricately bound up in the making of new life. The orgasmic moment involves a type of ecstasy, a propulsion of our being, a collapse of our being, a petite mort. From death comes life. Here is the evolutionary strata from which arise notions of life after death. Every cell in our bodies, every intercellular chemical configuration prepares the way for the notion of immortality, for a continuance of life into the everlasting processes of life.
For many today death is seen as simply the end of being. One on hand being is dis-solved, on the other it is solidified. The totality of one’s experiences are made absolute. Corporeal experience reaches its terminus. Time and space can no longer offer a platform to add to or subtract from what has been. It is bluntly taken that all that which one had been is now lapidified. Thus we place a stone over the mortal remains. There is no path forward or backward. It is a materialist view of man and of death. It is alienated from the impulse of evolution which of itself thrusts us into imaginings of eternality and immortality. It isolates the life of man from the embrace of the endless depth and expanse of cosmic being. It ignores the sheer potentiality of being that is psyche.
We find this attitude toward death in the de-spiritualization of sexuality. Sex becomes about acquiring a degree of physical or psychological satisfaction. It is ego driven. It is cut off from the intensity, depth, and self-intimacy of the ecstatic. But in authenticity, sex is not about having an orgasm; it is about being orgasmic, about freely and creatively giving oneself away for another. Biologically both can produce new life. Yet to produce life is not the same as creating life. Creation summons psyche and spirit. Life requires more than physical sustenance. To create life one must give one’s life, body and soul, soma and psyche. One must reach deep within to the core of one’s being and there be willing to give one’s very spirit. We see this lesson rehearsed in myriad ways in the evolution of life, the cycles of birth, adaptation, maturation, fertilization, death. We are a species which has too often been caught up half-formed and stagnating upon our egos, ignoring the subtler calls of evolution to let go of ego and be compelled by greater depths. The brutalist architecture of so many modern individuals, families and societies speaks of how broadly the orgasmic life has given way to the superficiality of the orgasm. It is only in really giving away life that life is brought forward. There is nothing here scripture has not already recounted: whosoever clutches onto their life will lose it, and whosoever clings not to ego-identity and self-investment will find life (a paraphrase, Matthew 16:24).
Talk of non-being is problematic to the Western mind. Thus, there is in Western thought a prejudice that is willing to see God only as the fully actualized Being, a type of perfect human, a super-existent with rationality and will. That prejudice may well be set in the need to have a God who is relatable, but it can also make of the notion of God something too small, too primitive. Even if one were to claim God is no-thing, that “is” makes for a definition of God, and thus one would fall short, making yet another idol as much as another idea. We need always in talking of God to keep in mind that if we say God is we must say also that God is-not. Indeed we ought to say God is and is-not, both is and is-not, neither is nor is-not. Yet, that too fails. The argument is not abated were we to say God is love, or good, or true, or beauteous, or holy (whole, one). We know love only as love for someone or something. We know good only as someone or something good. The same may be said for beauty, truth, and holiness. But God is not “some” thing. God is—”as it were”—absolute good, beauty, truth, love, holiness, and that very absoluteness, that divine absoluteness, is beyond us and every dimensionality of us. God is no thing, no quantity, no quality. God is the creator of all things visible and invisible, and we, a commixture of things visible and invisible, can never find words or concepts, minds or hearts, to know or to de-fine God because it is simply the case now and forever that God knows us and defines us. It is now and forever the case that God alone is the Sub-ject, and we—creature and creation— are the object, the objective, the factual, the conceptual, the definable, as well as, to our joy and glory, the inspirable.
In the Gospel according to St. John, when the man Jesus is risen into God his first command is “do not grasp me,” do not de-fine me, do not try to hold in your reasoning mind who I Am (the divine name). Rather, go and tell the others that I Am With You (Emmanuel). It is in and by the divine Spirit, the bonding power of the divine love, that I am with you. I am here because from the foundations of the world I have chosen you, have loved you, and so share my spirit with you. You are the life I have made out of the depths of me, and I summon you now to find that depth and live it. That, in paraphrase, is Christ speaking. It is also, by grace, the human psyche speaking. We have a foundation in and beyond the imperceptible and hidden depths of being. The spirit of that depth wills us to know it, to embrace it, conform to it, and thus to come to the fullness of whom we are to be.
In this Jesus Christ is the icon of the superordinate personality into which psyche calls us, through which is revealed the true spirit of man, and the Spirit of God, therein empowering the human spirit to be led by the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God is God because like God it is no-thing. It is a power, a community of power with meaning and intent—or at least it is thus “as if.” And the spirit of the human psyche is like unto this Spirit, a community of powers with meaning and intent whose meaning is the inestimable value of life, and whose intent is the very fulness of life. It is from this meaning and intent, this meaning and intent which is structured into our very evolution, that the vision of the immortal and eternal arises, that the yearning for God, immortal and eternal, pulses.
We speak of God making man only because we are made for God, to thirst for God, for the silence and stillness, for the no-thing, for the exhaustion, the breathing out of spirit, for the orgasmic breath that is the heart of God. A rich young man came to Jesus and asked what he needed to make himself perfect. Their conversation turned on being at one with God. One may do well to obey the commandments, but perfection requires something more, not quantitatively, but qualitatively. He was instructed to surrender all and follow Jesus. To follow Jesus is to go where he was going—into the heart of God, the core of meaning and intent. Life is not about having things, doing things, accomplishing things. For Jesus, the meaning and intent of life is not to have, to do, or achieve but to give away the quest to have, to do, to accomplish. Life is to give forward. Life is for-giveness.
What does scripture seek to tell us when it speaks of God being the “all in all” if not an absence of differentiation. It points us toward a silence, the silence of the eternal wherein the creative word speaks no words, and the spirit rests in joyous love. Here no thing stirs, no thing is. Here is all in all in a place that is no place, a time that is no time. It is completeness. It is the “no-point” of the “moment” beyond the “It is consummated.”
Life hurls toward death and death toward life. That is our evolutionary pattern, our biologic construct. If we add to this the complexity and vastness of the cosmos of which we are slightest part, the incalculable chemical transactions that create the myriad types of cells that configure our physical body, the depth of the microcosmic human psyche which recedes layer upon layer toward that imago Dei, the core imprint of whence we are and the wither are called to be, we are not only humbled, but we are exhausted, and yet there is behind, beyond and above it all a Spirit that moves us ever inward and ever forward, and so we, like infants sensing the surety of parental bond, daily make bold, not to define, but to pray: “Our Father!”