When we say God, we mean the Essence or the Principle. But we don't know Him. And because we don't know Him, or whether He is a someone, or a something, we say: God! in every language, culture, belief, monotheistic or other. From the moment this transcending Essence or Principle begins to take shape in their consciousness, men of all religions give it a name adapted to their needs and beliefs so as to qualify or determine this God, even though He is beyond any conceptualization and strictly unknown.
In Christianity, the Father is only accessible, revealed, approachable through the Son, the Incarnate Logos.
For Judaism, there is no need for such mediation. However, there is no circumventing this evidence: there is God, and then there are the names or attributes of God.
The Muslim who says "Allah Akbar" to distinguish Him from other gods and idols, or sometimes to oppose Him to the God of the Jews and the Christians, does not realize that when he says "Allah Akbar" ("God is greater" or "God is the greatest"), he determines God and implies the existence of other rival or similar gods. It is enough to say "Allah", the coranic name of God, which leads back to His Essence, as the Sufis understood. The true meaning of the superlative form "Allah Akbar" is that "God is greater" than anything that men can imagine or conceive. This is why the Sufis establish a distinction between the "Supreme Name" of God, and His multiple attributes: seeing, living, all-powerful, creator, etc.
The essential name of the God of the Bible, the one that was revealed to Moses at the Sinai, is the origin of "YHWH", the Living God. In Hebrew "Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh": "I am that I am" (or "because I am") or more exactly "I live because I live", because the root of the name YHWH is the word Life.
Life cannot be explained, it can only be lived, and so it is with God, the Living God, who is a Force, primordial and ultimate, a Force that modern astrophysicists call "Big Bang". But no sooner have they discovered it that they start wondering what was behind, or just before the Big Bang.
So it is with religion: what is behind the name of God, or more accurately the names that we give Him to try to define Him. These names are the veils shrouding the divine. And the first ontological veil of God is man, or rather, the consciousness or the heart of man; the second veil is the universe; the third is death.
So God, particularly under the name of YHWH is the root, the spring of life in all its forms. It is an extraordinary chance, and maybe a unique one, to have been given this life, in the crucible of this earth that carries us, and to wonder how to return to the Source of Life and walk through the door of death with the certainty of meeting this unknown God who created us and that we are powerless to picture or name.
Bonjour Stéphane, I just discovered this blog, and decided to answer you here in English, in hopes that this discussion might be more accessible to others.
ReplyDeleteThis danger of reducing God (or as my Orthodox Jewish brother says: G-d) to an object, or even to a Being among beings, cannot be over-emphasized. In my opinion, it is the main reason that the word has become so misused, degraded, and for many people, meaningless. It may even be a major reason for the oppression that has too often characterized all the great religions, though certainly not the only one.
Furthermore, a more general form of this danger runs throughout every human language I know of, even non-religious language: that of applying the logic of REFERENTIAL language to numinous and transcendent contexts, where words do not derive their meaning from referring to things.
Even in personal relationships this typically occurs: I see the person before me as an object, as a separate-being among other separate-beings. How often do I --- am I able to --- REMEMBER that he or she cannot be reduced to an object? It is perhaps more difficult to practice this aletheia with other humans than with God!
(PS sorry for the caps, I haven't figured out how to get italics or boldface on this site.)