The Unavoidable "Moreness" of God

reflections on a quote from Abraham Heschel

“To the pious man God is as real as life, and as nobody would be satisfied with mere knowing or reading about life, so he is not content to suppose or to prove logically that there is a God; he wants to feel and to give himself to Him; not only to obey but to approach Him. His desire is to taste the whole wheat of spirit before it is ground by the millstone of reason. He would rather be overwhelmed by symbols of the inconceivable than wield the definitions of the superficial.” — Abraham Heschel

I have written before somewhere in these entries that whatever we may conceive God to be, he is more. She is always larger than the temples we build to contain her, no matter how holy we decide they are. For example, the pronouns we employ in reference to God. Is God a man that he would care whether you think of him as male? God is not male, yet is every man. God is not female, yet is every woman. God is fundamentally other, yet is most intimately one of us.

God is uncreated. No created thing, least of all a name or pronoun, can sufficiently reflect or contain all that God is. Even “God” — the word itself — is just our common label for it. But the thing itself, which is not a thing at all, is quite beyond our language. 

It is this unavoidable “moreness” to God that rightly places all of humanity on equal footing when it comes to knowing God. As Heschel intimates in the quote above, our human tendency is to try very hard to quantify God, to break God down into his constituent parts, the way one might disassemble an engine to catalog it all and see how everything works. We call this theology. Such explorations are not without merit, but they are built on a Grand Conceit: that a transcendent God can be personally known in this way. Thus, there are many atheist theologians. 

What Heschel is pointing to here is the superior way, and perhaps the only way, of knowing God. To my mind, it is similar to the way we might come to know a painting or some other masterwork of art. One does not slice up the canvas of a Van Gogh, or study the chemical formula of its paints, to know it. You sit in silence before it, and offer your whole self to it. You give the art access to all that you are, and you allow it to have its effect on you. In this way, your understanding of the art is a visceral thing. It is not academic, or scientific, but it is none the less valid for all that. Heschel would argue it is more valid, in fact, for it is a direct encounter, not a secondary observation, or a tertiary analysis. It is a way of knowing that is unique to each person, and as such, carries a deeper authority than any religious or societal interpretation of God. 

You can get all the religious degrees you want. You can read all the books, and join all the clubs. And all of that might be well and good. But until you sit in silence every day for a year and open yourself to the “moreness” of God to the point of laughter and to the point tears, you won’t really know anything about what God is.