Who is God? - II

God, we know, has revealed Himself as completely infinite, purely spiritual, and totally transcendent. Any matter in Him, matter which is always limiting with its space, weight, etc., would mean imperfection in God, and that is impossible because it would be contradictory to the all-perfect God. Therefore, until the astounding and miraculous incarnation occurred, the conception and birth of Jesus, it would always have been utterly impossible accurately to think or speak of God as having human dimensions and organs, human emotions, characteristics, and attitudes, etc. Yet, divine revelation, especially in Sacred Scripture and particularly in the Old Testament, speaks of God precisely in that way, attributing to Him human form and dimensions, although He has no body nor spatial dimensions. Since all the words of the Bible are inspired by God and are thus inerrant, we must conclude that the sacred authors used that way of speaking as a literary form or device in order to better dramatize and depict God’s dealings with humanity. This literary form is called by theologians by the word "anthropomorphism". In the divine condescension of supernatural revelation, God, Who knows well that He is beyond all human imagining or experience and beyond created human grasp, bent down to us to speak of Himself in a literary form that would be comprehensible to finite human reason.

Throughout the Old Testament, repeatedly the faith of the Chosen People of the Ancient Covenant was expressed concretely in anthropomorphic language. God is said to have eyes (Amos 9:3; Sirach 11:12), ears (Deuteronomy 9:18), hands (Isaiah 5:25), and feet (Genesis 3:8). God molds man out of slime and clay, plants a garden, and takes His rest (Genesis 2:3-8). God speaks (Genesis 1:3; Leviticus 4:1), listens (Exodus 16:12), closes the door of Noah’s ark (Genesis 7:160, and whistles (Isaiah 7:18). He laughs (Psalm 2:4), rejoices (Sophoniah 3:17). becomes angry (1 Chronicles 13:10), disgusted (Leviticus 20:23), regretful (Jeremiah 42:10), revengeful (Isaiah 1:240, and jealous (Exodus 20:5; Deuteronomy 5:9). However, the Hebrew People periodically were warned very sternly to take these descriptions of God only as graphic metaphors and not literally (Osee 11:9; Job 10:4; Numbers 23:19). They were strictly forbidden to make or tolerate any man-made images of Yahweh, Who is all-holy, divine, unique, and different from all creatures, with no visible shape or form (Deuteronomy 4:12 & 5:8).

Since the time of the New Dispensation (the New Testament) it has become even more clear to any human intelligence, when illuminated by supernatural faith, that nothing material can be said or thought about God, except by way of what is called "analogy". Things like God’s walking and talking with Adam, changing His mind about various things sometimes in reaction to human words or acts, becoming exasperated, venting emotions, etc. can only be metaphors and understood by analogy. However, the theological matter becomes a bit more complicated when spiritual activity, similar to what His rational creatures (angels and humans) can do, are attributed also to God, for instance, knowing and loving.

Knowing and loving when attributed to God are not merely metaphors. God truly knows and loves, as do human beings. However, God’s knowing and loving, are somehow like those activities in His creatures, and yet are absolutely and totally different in Him. This similar yet utterly dissimilar concept is what theologians call "the analogy of being", something that great Thomist philosophers, like Maritain, often say must be grasped by intuition rather than reason alone. All human activity, even that which is spiritual, by definition is finite and imperfect. However, God’s spiritual acts of knowing and loving, on the contrary, are infinite and perfect. Saint Augustine of Hippo tells the story of his stroll along a beach while working on his great book on the Most Holy Trinity ("De Trinitate"), and there seeing a little boy playing in the sand with a toy shovel and pail. When asked what he was doing, the small boy replied that he was planning to put the entire ocean in a hole he was digging in the sand. Then it dawned on the Doctor of the Church that it would be easier for that boy to accomplish his impossible task, than for himself to try to insert the infinite totality of God into his finite mind.

Saint Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury and Doctor of the Church, who lived from the years 1030 A.D. to 1109, wrote this prayer when standing in awe before his study of God: "The light in which You dwell, O Lord, is beyond my understanding. It is so brilliant that I cannot bear it. I cannot turn my mind’s eye toward it for any length of time. I am dazzled by its brightness, amazed by its grandeur, overwhelmed by its immensity, bewildered by its abundance. O Supreme and Inaccessible Light, O Complete and Blessed Truth, how far You are from me, even though I am close to You. How remote You are from my sight, even though I am present to Yours. You are everywhere in Your entirety, and yet I do not see You. In You I move and have my being (Acts of the Apostles 17:28), and yet I cannot approach You. You are within me and around me and yet I do not perceive You."

"O God, let me know You and love You so that I may find my joy in You. And, if I cannot do this fully in this life, let me at least make some progress every day until at last that knowledge, love, and joy come to me in all their plenitude. While I am here on earth let me learn to know You better, so that in heaven I may know You fully. Let my love for You grow deeper here so that there I may love You fully. On earth then I shall have great joy in hope and in heaven complete joy in the fulfillment of my hope. Surely, Lord, inaccessible light is Your dwelling place and no one apart from You Yourself can enter into it and fully comprehend You. If I fail to see this light it is simply because it is too bright for me. Still, it is by this light that I see all that I can, even as weak eyes, unable to look directly at the sun, see all they can by the sun’s light."

Our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI reminds us, "God loved us first! One should take this sentence as literally as can be. For this is truly the great power in our lives and the consolation we need, and it’s not seldom that we need it. He loved me first, before I myself could love at all. It was only because He knew me and loved me that I was made. I was not thrown out into the world by some operation of chance....and now have to do my best to swim in this ocean of life, but I am preceded by a perception of me, an idea and a love of me. These are present in the ground of my being. What is important for all people, what makes their lives significant is the knowledge that they are loved." "In this is love. Not that we have loved God, but that He has first loved us and sent His Son as a propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:10).