6 — What is God?
Why christianity?
It is a very common thing to say that “an abstract argument won’t change anyone’s mind”, that only a personal experience of trancendence is enough to bring someone to believe. Generally speaking, I believe that to be the case.
But I have to admit: I’m a pretty odd guy. One of the main reasons for my transition back to christianity was the cosmological argument — especifically its thomistic-aristotelian version. This very abstract argument solved a lot of problems I had with the concept of God. And when the concept made sense, it became hard to see how it could be otherwise.
The unmoved mover — of course! Not the self-moving mover, as Leibniz would have Him, but the unmoved. Not the self-justifying foundation of our knowledge, as Hume and Descartes tried to find, but the unjustified justifier — the one beyond justification.
It is not too hard to see — wasn’t for me, at least — how this being, reached by metaphysical reasoning, can be seen as all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present, eternal, infinite and perfect. It is full reality, completely realized, existence and essence in one, the not yet and the already, simultaneously.
For me, that was enough, somehow. Maybe other people need some emotional moment where God speaks to them and they cry and change their life, or they need some miracle to happen, some culminating and cathardic moment of final consumation of all reasonable doubt, some dramatic thing. I didn’t. The argument made sense, that was enough. I believed in God.
But from this abstract reasoning alone we can’t be convinced of christianity. That is still a long road. What these arguments afford is belief in the theist God. In fact, from arguments like the ontological or the cosmological (whatever suits your fancy), we might even be much more tempted to assume some sort of gnostic theology. This is where the conflict between the “God of the philosophers” and the “God of the people” comes in.
The God of the philosophers is the abstract entity that functions as necessary condition for reality — the metaphysical substrate of the reasoning about the limits of our own comprehension of the world, coupled with faith on it being somehow good.
It is an intellectualization. It is eternal and unmoved, impartial and neutral, it is stems from the point of view from nowhere — which is the same as saying “the point of view from everywhere”. This is precisely why God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. The God of the philosophers is so fully transcendent, so perfectly perfect, that it seems that the best way to categorize God is as an “It”.
The God of the people, however, is clearly a “He”. A person with whom everyone has a relationship. A person that cares — a Father. He intervenes in history, he is partial (shows clear preference towards the jewish people in the Old Testament, for example). He personally gives Moses 10 very specific comandaments for his people (the jews) to follow. He picks and chooses people, in an apparently capricious manner, to be helped or damned. He cures some diseases, not all of them. He helps some fighters win their bouts, not others.
To philosophers, it seems that this historicity of God is almost embarassing. It seems to be a direct contradiction of His universality. The temptation, then, is to assume that the God of the people is fake and the real God is the one the philosophers talk about. The God of the people, after all, is a much easier target. Often, atheist polemicists hail their attacks against the God of the people. Attacking the God of philosophers is a much trickier business.
So a believer might give credence to the atheist and yet still believe. He might think:
“The atheist is right, God does not exist — if by ‘God’ we mean ‘the bearded man in the sky’. But that is not what I mean by God. The mistake the atheist makes is to assume that this is all God could be. But it is not. What I believe in is the Logos, the unmoved mover that permeates all.”
But that doesn’t really do much, does it? I mean… great, there is an unmoved mover! … So what?
That is obviously not enough to move anyone to go to church and practice charity. In fact, perhaps quite the opposite. This might be enough to lead someone to actively avoid anything parcial and circumstantial in oneself, anything that works as an embarassement to one’s aspirations of universality and true god-like wisdom and serenity. Essentially, it might lead to a rejection of the material world, in all its particularity. In a word: gnosticism.
By shaking our shakles and freeing ourselves of particularity, we cease to suffer — in a real sense, we cease to exist. We, as we are, are evil. We are stupid, illusion-bound, selfish and irrational. Only by shedding all of these things away — by not being what we are anymore, can we end this hellish state of existence that constitutes our life. Only by knowledge (gnosis) we escape the matrix.
Belief in (knowledge of) the God of philosophers is the way to realizing that the world of men is an illusion, that none of this actually matters. As beautifully said by John Vervaeke, it is the moment when relevance realization realizes its own irrelevance. It is the way out of Plato’s cave.
This insight is not that hard to reach and has been a major player in most wisdom traditions, most religions and cults. For example: Hinduism and Buddhism, in its many variations, hinge around this central idea. So do the neoplatonic philosophies of Plotinus and Proclus, and in their own way, so do the Stoics and the Daoists.
Other religions seem to take more from the God of the people, though. Islam, Rhabinic Jewish religion, some variations of christian protestantism. These hinge much more closely towards the side of tribalism, partiality and incarnation. This is why these religions are famous for including a very heavy tradition of jurisprudence: their God is political — He is not beyond our world, but rules it.
This world may seem unjust, but God will ultimately punish the bad and reward the good. Instead of denying this world, he affirms it. We must praise Him in this life, sacrifice what He asks us to, follow the path He sets us on. The God of the people is someone to have a relationship with — which is very hard to do with an abstract concept.
Belief in (devotion to) the God of the people means serfdom: recognition of a deity above and beyond ourselves, before whom we are completely powerless. It is ultimately practical and ritualistic: we must perform our duty and please God. Not ask why — just do it.
This will always focus much more on community life, good works, family values, obedience. It is a very good way to find contentment with one’s own life, regardless of how hard it may be. It helps people focus on things of true value, rather than distractions: we see that real bonds with people we love, matters more than money, status and power.
This God engages us emotionally in a way the philosopher’s could never but leave us cold. But because He engages mainly emotionally, those who engage are at great risk of deception — something that does not quite happen with the God of the philosophers, reached through the most rational and intellectual of means.
Either too abstract, or too concrete. Too intelectualized to feel real or too basic to be believable. Either denying the world in the name of reason or denying reason in the name of the world. This is the tension I believe christianity solves — especially in catholicism.
Here, through Jesus Christ, the God of philosophers and the God of the people are one. Jesus is fully divine and fully human. This is exactly what christianity has been all about since its inception. The first ecumenical council, the first time the christian faith was canonized officially, in a reunion by all the most important existing bishops of the time, in 325 in Nicea, was precisely about this tension, one could argue.
The polemic that forced a council to unite was the question of Arianism. Basically, a guy called Arius spread the idea that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, the Father, but was not coeternal with Him. This lead to more radical ideas, like anomoeanism, that said that Christ and God were not of the same nature, or Ebionitism, that claimed Jesus of Narareth, despite being a prophet, was not of divine nature at all.
Another group that was very important at the time was Docetism: they held the belief that Jesus was not human — that would undermine his divinity. All of the stories about His death and wounds were fake. Any moment that would prove his humanity needed to be fake or illusory. How could the saviour of the world be human? A mere human?
All of these heresies show the conflict clearly: it seems impossible that Jesus would have been at the same time fully human and fully divine. After all, we are all human, and we all know what that’s like: to be human is to sin. Our humanity is the source of our imperfection, the very reason why we feel incomplete. How could God be human? Either Jesus was not God, or He was not human.
But christianity showed, since the beginning, surprising insistence on the fact that He was both. In many ways, this is the whole point. If Jesus was not fully human, his life and death would never redeem us. If Jesus was not fully divine, the redepmtion would not be universal. Wouldn’t even be a redemption, really — just a life and a death. Maybe exemplar, but not redemptive.
This is the point where christianity unites abstract reasoning and concrete feeling. In my journey back from disbelief, I have been threading two continuous lines that meet here.
On the one hand, from abstract reasoning, the cosmological argument and neoplatonic arguments about the convergence of opposites and the meaning of certainty, negative theology and the contemplation and acceptance of the mystery that envelops our universe and our cognitive grasp of it. The realization that the fundamental strucute of reality transcends our abitily to envelop it fully — that the Logos must be sacred if there is to be meaning at all (and that even to say that there is no meaning, we presuppose it).
On the other, the unavoidable embodied nature of our process of getting to know anything, the inevitable partiality of all kinds of knowledge, including the scientific, the ever-presence of ritual in our activities, the attention selecting nature of our very perception and ability to discern relevance. The realization that the fundamental nature of our way of relating to the world is dictated by what we attend to, by where we find meaning, and what we ignore — and everything that comes with this.
The fundamental christian concept that unites these two, and I thank Jonathan Pageau for making this clear to me, is the concept of sacrifice. It is both an ontological necessity of existance and an epistemological necessity of humanity. The only way anything can exist is through sacrifice. The only way we can know or do anything is through sacrifice. Christians worship Christ on the cross because this is the moment He sacrifices Himself for us. Christianity is about sacrifice, at its core.
To sacrifice, essentially, is to give upwards. Not merely resign, but not quite bargain. To sacrifice is not to passively abstain, neither to invest. Faith is at the core of sacrifice, because it assumes the belief that the act itself aligns the individual with a higher order of being. It is not about expecting rewards, neither about pleasing a demanding God, but about taking part on something larger. As I will argue, the ultimate form of sacrifice is love.
The idea that sacrifice is the structure of reality lies in the necessity of determination for existence. If a chair is to exist, it must give up the possibility of being any other chair, but exactly that one. It must also give up the possibility of being any other thing. Without that “ontological sacrifice”, it couldn’t come into existence.
Essence is always discriminatory. Except when essence is the same as existence. Then, nothing needs to be sacrificed, because every potential is actualized in one single being. And this is how we reach the unmoved mover. But just like Aristotle asked, so too might we ask: if the unmoved mover is already fully realized and perfect in and of itself, why create the world? Why bother creating Multiplicity, in all its necessary imperfection, when there was already Oneness?
One thing is clear: there was no need for that. We might say, and I don’t think this is heresy, that God’s creation of the world was itself a sacrifice: He sacrificed His Oneness, completion and perfection for us. Foreshadowing a point I’m about to make: it was a loving sacrifice.
The necessity of sacrifice for our perception and behaviour flows down from its ontological necessity. The separation between “relevant” and “irrelevant” that constitutes our attention, which is mutually regulated by our behaviour through ritual, is the sacrifice of not attending to some things in order to attend to other, more important things. Every time we open our eyes, we are practically forced to make value judgements: some things are more worth looking at and attenting to than others.
We might want to attend to many things at the same time, or wish that we could, but our reality is different: we must sacrifice. Wisdom is nothing more than being able to make the right sacrifices. The need to sacrifice automatically and spontaneously forms a hierarchy of values. Some things are better than others. We can always be confronted with a choice between two things and need to decide which one is more valuable.
Ultimately, we will reach the supervalue: the thing most valued. More than that, we must also reach the thing out of which all the other things derive value from. This source of value is what we might call our “god”. Everyone is condemned to worshipping some kind of god in that way. One thing will always be valued without deriving its value from anything else — otherwise, nothing is valuable at all, since value itself would be groundless. Wisdom is worshipping the true or real God, instead of some false idol.
We know we are before our false idols when our sacrifices don’t scale up in the way we expect: instead of partaking in a greater whole, we partake in a greater hole. Instead of being filled, we are drained. Some false idols will disguise themselves better than others. Some will align better with what is higher than others, which stop scaling upwards at a very low point.
When thinking about this, we inevitably enter the realm of the social. We are forced to confront ourselves with the old argument that morality is nothing but someone’s interest disguised as law. And this is certainly true for false idols. The real claim we need to make, though, is that there is something else other than only false idols.
Let’s recap the argument, but contextualizing it in terms of unity, multiplicity and sacrifice. The fact that our world is in the domain of multiplicity means that things are different, which is only possible because none of them are perfect — that is, all of them lack existence in some sense: if they did not lack existence, they would be everything, and nothing (in particular).
This multiplicity generates impermanence and entropy. Especially in the case of human beings, the consequence is scarcity, conflict and competition. We are all different beings, with potentially different desires and goals, fighting against our natural tendency towards decay and death (which is what happens when you are not already everything — and therefore always exists).
This “struggle” happens at every level of our reality. For now, though, I will focus on people. In attempting to worship a god, we must sacrifice. These sacrifices are always performed ritualistically, and if they are to scale up at all, they must be joined by a community that reinforces this value. The hierarchy of values reinforces and is reinforced by the hierarchy of rituals (sequences of structured behaviour that affords meaning).
Let’s say, then, that we have a group of people that worship music. The reason why they get up in the morning, the reason why they eat, the reason why they might get in a fight, is music. Indirectly, music ends up being their reason for doing everything else. Grocery shopping, chit-chat, relaxing, exercise, and so on. They keep this love alive by joining together and playing music together — they have a band. The feeling is so powerful that they feel rejoiced and strenghtened to keep going after each session with the band.
But then one of the members of the band begins to do heroin. Let’s suppose he had always done so, just a little, but now it is really hindering his ability to keep joining to play. So the band, despite really liking his particular touch and style of playing drums, have to part ways with him. The band needs to sacrifice him. Put another way, the members of the band have to sacrifice their friend for the sake of the band. Ultimately, it is a sacrifice for the god of music.
He was no longer aligned with the ultimate aim, he diverged from the path that kept unity — so, he must go. It would be better for him to go, than for unity to go. The higher the unity, the more this is true.
Imagine, then, a god entrusted with keeping a whole society together. The calling card that unites thousands of people. Anyone who dares go against it, needs to be dispensed with. And the more passion that goes into this whole process, the more the union of the group is emphasized. Sacrifice is the price of unity: we sacrifice to delineate very clearly the lines between inside and outside.
To sacrifice to some god is not some stupid behaviour with no logical explanation: it is the ultimate social technology of harmony, union and cohesion. A sacrifice, in this context, is essentially a purge: we purify by getting rid of anything perceived as impure. Any misfit that fails to integrate well inside the group is liable to be cast out.
Every functioning society will have institutionalized sacrifice in order to keep itself alive (as will any living organism at all). The more multiplicity is contained within a certain union, the bigger the tensions that are bound to surface. The bigger the tensions, the bigger the need for sacrifice. Union and essence are discriminatory, as has been noted.
But any thing we put at the highest place will inevitably need to cut a lot out. Any god with specific existence will demand that you sacrifice all that he does not include in himself. If you use music as the orienting principle of your life, you might need to cut everyone you love out of your life, like that kid in Whiplash. You might need to kill someone for music. And if you are really a devotee of this god, this is exactly what you need to do.
When worshipping false idols, the need for sacrifices will always become bigger than the actual transgressive behaviour that occurs (because the inner logic of a false idol is always corrupt). Tensions rise within a group but there is no clear person to blame. How do we resolve this? We scapegoat. We find a weak link, someone who doesn’t really fit in anyway, and sacrifice him. We channel all the rage into him, rationalize a reason to find him guilty and purge.
This may seem odd, absurd or cruel — and it is. Everyone can see this now. And we can thank Jesus Christ for that. Before He began to be seen as a god, this was pretty normal and obvious. Every mythology before christianity is founded upon a sacrifice like this.
Rome was founded on the murder of Remus by his twin brother Romulus. All nations are founded after wars — first we kill or expell the enemy, the ones that don’t fit. Only then we can have unity. This sacrifice is the ontological sacrifice that affords identity. And it needs to keep happening for that unitiy to keep existing.
Often, these sacrifices are unjust. Scapegoats are the price of unity, but what is their fault for not fitting to in? What did Remus do? He was no more at fault than Romulus. But he had to die so that Rome had a solid, strong and unwavering foundation. The greatness of the sacrifice (your twin brother who wanted to build a city with you — it is hard to imagine a greater bond) speaks to the greatness of Rome, that took precedence over it. He was willing to kill his twin brother for this — this is how willing he was, this is how serious Rome is.
This is what happened with the witch hunts during the Reformation wars and the Inquisition. This is what happens now when people get canceled. It is the only way to enforce the unity of the social justice movement. Regardless of the actual blame of any individual, the perceived difference and misalignment with the group’s ideals are enough to justify the purge. And the purge needs to be real, furious and spectacular, to show that the group is not wishy-washy about its values. And the lenghts people go to in order to defend some value are a mimetic marker of their importance — which motivates others to take them seriously as well.
Even in minor ways, scapegoating is a real mechanism of group identity. Bullying is scapegoating pure and simple. That person no one talks to at the office just because it’s not cool to do it, is a scapegoat. When you quietly agree to partake in this process of letting a weird person be set aside by the cool, high status people, you are essentially scapegoating. When you agree to treat a black person worse just because they are not the same color as “our people”, regardless of how good a person they are; when you look the other way when you see a sick person, regardless of their humanity, their feelings; you are scapegoating.
“No matter what you do, we do not want you”.
This mechanism is obviously unjust, despite being the norm, not only in social behaviour, but in mythologies as well. The revolution that comes with Jesus Christ is that the scapegoating story, this time, is told from the point of view of the scapegoat Himself. Jesus is described by John, the Baptist as a sacrificial lamb, and is fully aware that He came to this world to be sacrificed.
He is in no way at fault — he is completely rid of sin. His full innocence exposes the arbitrariness, injustice and absurdity of scapegoating. And Christ goes even further: by willingly taking His role as scapegoat without ever ceasing to love, without ever being overcome by resentment, by asking for forgiveness for those who did it to Him, for they did not know what they did, Christ completely overturns the scapegoating mechanism and breaks the cycle of violence that keeps the need for scapegoating alive.
Forgiveness and love allow Christ to break the cycle of death and conflict that characterizes human culture and history. Forgiveness is to take violence without reciprocating. By allowing ourselves to be sacrificed (acknowledging our own faults and miscomings and the need for them to be purged from us), by carrying our cross and suffering in imitation of christ, we find our way out of injustice.
Tho story of Christ is an anti-myth. After Christ, no mythology could survive. Instead of obscuring and justifying the scapegoating, He destroys the collective illusion behind it. God no longer demands sacrifices for order — He offers Himself. It really is true that we have killed God. And He died to repent and consumate our sins. He shows us the way to forgiveness, through forgiveness. The way to love, through love.
In the same way Jesus conquers death, we might do if we follow His steps. This is the meaning of theosis and paradise. We find salvation through self-giving, we unite the world by self-sacrifice.
Jesus is God because His whole life was a parable on this very topic. Everything He did was to illuminate this path: to show that the world is full or sin and does not have to be. To show that the key is in our hands. We just need to open our heart and allow ourselves to be sacrificed. To let all those dark things inside us to burn, even if it hurts.
Jesus is the conversion of opposites that lie beyond meaning. He is God and Man. He is King and Crucified. He is scapegoat and principle of unity. He is Love. He is Logos (as said by John, the Evangelist). To say that is to say that all reality operates in the same way and in the same principle as Christ. Through self-sacrifice. Through giving itself upwards.
Why? Well, Logos is knowledge, language and reason. What do all those things have in common? They describe the way things operate in multiplicity. Only determined things have names. Only determined things can be known. Only determined things are accessible to reason. And all determined things ultimately rest on the undetermined: the One — God. So the essential process behind their existence is self-sacrifice.
Another way to put this is the common scholastic phrase: exitus, reditus. Everything exits, or comes out of, God; and then everything returns back to God. When they come out of God, He sacrifices Himself for them. For them to return, they must sacrifice themselves to Him. Since we exist, His sacrifice has already happened. The ball is on our court now.
This can be explained in the abstract way, or in the concrete way. Christ is God of the people and God of philosophers. He is the fundamental Logos that undergirds all. The love He teaches is the key to conquering death.
To love, in the christian sense, is to put something above yourself. “Love your neighbors as you would love yourself”. To love is to stop being at the center of your world. To love is to expand spiritual horizons, to exist in a higher plain of life, to be in a way that transcends the preocupations that would trouble self-centered people.
To love a child, for example, is to die gladly, if in the knowledge that this death will make your child safe. It is to be willing to sacrifice yourself for that child. Now imagine sacrificing yourself for the whole world. That’s too much of a heart. Humanly impossible, I would say. Even to seriously attempt it would be hubristic, to be honest.
But it really is a good ideal to aspire to. To never forget that we are not the center of the world. To try to take others into account when we act. And be especially vigilant about the people we have the most tendency to neglect: the scapegoats. Instead of sacrificing them and continuing a cycle of death, conquer it and sacrifice yourself for the scapegoat, if you can. This is what caring for the poor and sick really means. To swallow your pride. To suck up to the fact that you are not better than anyone. Your special status, talents or riches are a distraction.
Inasmuch as a story is good, it is the story of Christ. Inasmuch as anyone is good, that person participates in the story of Christ. If anyone tried to tell a different story of a prophet who found the key to conquer death, inasmuch as he would get the story right, he would just be retelling the story of Christ. Maybe a different name, maybe a different context, but the same story.
The rest — the rituals, the sign of the cross, the attending mass, the Lord’s Prayer, is our tried and true way of remaining faithful to the spirit of His story. Everything else is a way to try to keep our attention squarely focused on the truth Christ has revealed.
Everything else is our way to try to never forget it. May I not forget it.
