Knowing What God Is Not

The sacrifice God accepts is a separation from the body and from the body’s passions, with no looking back. That is what real reverence is. And is this not why Socrates was right to call philosophy the practice of dying? For the man who does not use his eyes in thinking, and draws nothing from his other senses, but goes at things with the pure mind alone, is practicing true philosophy. This is the point of the five years of silence Pythagoras laid on his students: that by pulling themselves away from the objects of the senses they might look at the Deity with the mind by itself. And it was from Moses that the leading men among the Greeks got these teachings. For Moses orders the whole burnt offerings to be skinned and cut into pieces. The soul of the man who truly knows has to be consecrated to the light, stripped of the wrappings of matter, free of the body’s silliness and of all the passions that are picked up from empty, lying opinions, and stripped of the cravings of the flesh. But most people are wrapped in what perishes, the way a shellfish is wrapped in its shell, and rolled up in a ball in their excesses like hedgehogs, and they think of the blessed and undying God exactly as they think of themselves. What has escaped them, close as it lies, is that God has given us countless things he has no share in: birth, though he is unborn; food, though he needs nothing; growth, though he is always the same; long life and immortality, though he is deathless and cannot grow old. So let no one imagine that when the Hebrews speak of hands and feet and mouth and eyes, of going in and coming out, of anger and of threats, they are saying that these belong to God. Not at all. Some of these words are used in a holier way, as figures, and as this book goes on I will explain at the proper place what each of them means. [a]

Callimachus writes in his Epigrams: “Of all medicines, wisdom is the cure-all.” And Bacchylides says in his Paeans: “One man becomes wise from another, now as in times past; for it is not very easy to find the gates of words that cannot be spoken.” Isocrates puts it beautifully too, in the Panathenaic oration. He asks, “Who, then, are the well trained?” and answers: “First, those who handle well the things that come up each day, whose judgment keeps pace with the occasion and can generally hit on what is useful. Next, those who behave decently and rightly toward the people who come near them, who take the annoyances and the rudeness of others lightly and easily, and conduct themselves toward the people they deal with as carefully and as reasonably as they can. Then those who keep the upper hand over their pleasures, and are not overwhelmed by misfortunes, but bear up in the middle of them like men, in a way worthy of the nature we all share. And fourth — and this is the greatest — those who are not spoiled by success, who are not put beside themselves by it or made haughty, but stay among the people of good sense.” Then he sets the top stone on the speech: “Those whose souls are well suited not to one of these things only but to all of them — those are the men I call wise and complete, men who have every virtue.”

Do you see how the Greeks make a god of the life of true knowledge, though they do not know how to come by it? What that knowledge is they do not know even in a dream. If, then, we are agreed that knowledge is the food of reason, then, as the Scripture says, “blessed indeed are those who hunger and thirst after truth, for they will be filled” — filled with food that lasts forever. And in wonderful agreement with these words is Euripides, the philosopher of the stage, hinting somehow — I do not know how — at the Father and the Son together:

For our whole burnt offering, our fireless sacrifice, is Christ. And that he is speaking of the Savior without knowing it, he makes plain in what he adds:

Then he says it outright:

So there is good reason why, in the mysteries the Greeks keep, the purifications come first — as the washing does among the barbarians. After them come the lesser mysteries, which lay some groundwork of teaching and get a man ready for what is to follow; and then the great mysteries, where nothing is left to learn about the universe, and there is only to look at nature and at things as they are, and take them in.

We shall understand the way of purification by confession, and the way of contemplation by analysis, going up by analysis to the first notion and beginning with the properties that lie underneath. We take away from the body the properties it has by nature: first strip off the dimension of depth, then breadth, then length. What is left is a point — a unit, so to speak, that still has position. Take position away, and you have the thought of unity itself. If, then, taking away everything that belongs to bodies and to the things called bodiless, we throw ourselves into the greatness of Christ and go on from there by holiness into what has no measure, we may somehow arrive at a notion of the Almighty — knowing not what he is, but what he is not. Shape and motion, standing still, a throne, a place, a right hand or a left, are not at all to be thought of as belonging to the Father of the universe, even though Scripture is written that way; what each of these means will be shown in its own place. The First Cause, then, is not in space. He is above space, above time, above name and above thought.

That is also why Moses says, “Show yourself to me” — showing as plainly as anything can be shown that God cannot be taught by a man or set out in speech, but is known only by his own power. The searching was dark and dim; the gift of knowledge comes from him, through the Son. Solomon will bear us out most clearly when he says: “The prudence of a man is not in me; but God gives me wisdom, and I know holy things.” Now Moses, describing the divine prudence in a figure, called it the tree of life planted in Paradise; and Paradise may be the world, in which everything that comes out of creation grows. In it too the Word blossomed and bore fruit, being “made flesh,” and gave life to those who “tasted his kindness” — for it was not apart from the wood of the tree that he came to be known by us. Our life was hung on it, so that we might believe. And Solomon says again: “She is a tree of immortality to those who take hold of her.” “Look, I set before your face life and death: to love the Lord your God, and to walk in his ways, and to listen to his voice, and to trust in life. But if you break the statutes and the judgments I have given you, you will be destroyed with destruction. For this is your life, and the length of your days: to love the Lord your God.”

Again: “Abraham, when he came on the third day to the place God had told him of, looked up and saw the place from far off.” For the first day is the one made by the sight of good things; the second is the soul’s best desire; and on the third the mind sees spiritual things, the eyes of the understanding having been opened by the Teacher who rose on the third day. The three days may be the mystery of the seal, in which God is really trusted. And so it is from far off that he sees the place, for the country of God is hard to reach — the country Plato called the region of ideas, having learned from Moses that it is a place which holds all things together. But Abraham sees it from far off, and rightly, since he is still in the realm of things that come to be; and he is initiated at once by the angel. That is why the apostle says, “Now we see as through a mirror, but then face to face” — and by nothing but those pure and bodiless applications of the mind. In reasoning it is possible to make out something about God, if a man will try, without any of the senses, to reach by reason what each thing is in itself, and will not leave the things that are until, rising above them, he grasps with the mind itself what is good, moving on the very edge of the world of thought — so Plato says.

Again, Moses did not allow altars and temples to be built in many places; he raised one temple of God, and by that he announced that the world is an only child, as Basilides says, and that God is one — which does not yet seem to be Basilides’ own position. And since Moses truly knew, he did not shut inside a space the one who cannot be shut in: he set up no image in the temple to be worshipped, showing that God is unseen and cannot be bounded, and somehow leading the Hebrews toward the thought of God by the honor paid to his name in the temple. The Word, further, forbidding the building of temples and all sacrifices, shows that the Almighty is not held in anything, when he says: “What house will you build for me? says the Lord. Heaven is my throne,” and the rest. And about sacrifices in the same way: “I do not want the blood of bulls and the fat of lambs,” and whatever else the Holy Spirit forbids through the prophet in what follows. Euripides is in excellent agreement with all this when he writes:

And of sacrifices he speaks this way:

“It was not out of need that God made the world,” says Plato, “that he might reap honors from men and from the other gods and spirits, winning a kind of revenue out of creation — from us, the smoke of offerings, and from the gods and spirits, the services proper to them.” Most instructively, then, Paul says in the Acts of the Apostles: “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by hands, and is not served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all life and breath and everything.” And Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school, says in his book the Republic that we ought to make neither temples nor images, since no work of ours is worth the gods. He was not afraid to write it in these very words: “There will be no need to build temples. A temple is not worth much and should not be counted holy, for nothing that builders and workmen make is worth much or holy.” Plato too was right, then, when, recognizing the world as God’s temple, he pointed the citizens to a spot in the city where their images were to be stored away. He says: “Let no one, then, consecrate temples to the gods again. Gold and silver, in other cities, in private houses and in the temples alike, is a possession that breeds envy; ivory, a body that has left its life behind, is not a holy offering; iron and bronze are the tools of war. But whatever a man wants to dedicate, let it be wood from a single tree — and stone likewise, for the temples the city shares.” And he is right in the great Letter as well: “It cannot be put into words, as the other subjects of study can. Out of long companionship with the thing itself, and living with it, suddenly — like a light kindled from a leaping flame — it comes to be in the soul, and from then on it feeds itself.” Are these statements not like the words of Zephaniah the prophet? “And the Spirit of the Lord took me up and brought me to the fifth heaven, and I saw angels who are called Lords; and their crown was set on them in the Holy Spirit, and each of them had a throne seven times brighter than the light of the rising sun; and they lived in temples of salvation and sang hymns to the God who is beyond words, the Most High.”

“It is a hard task to find the Father and Maker of this universe, and having found him it is impossible to tell of him to everyone; for this cannot be put into words at all, as the other subjects of instruction can” — so says Plato, who loved the truth. He had heard, and heard well, that Moses in all his wisdom, going up the mountain for holy contemplation, to the summit of the things the mind can reach, necessarily gives orders that the whole people are not to come up with him. And when the Scripture says, “Moses entered into the thick darkness where God was,” it shows to those who can understand that God is invisible and beyond what words can say. The darkness — which is really the unbelief and the ignorance of the crowd — blocks the shining of the truth. And Orpheus, the theologian, helped from this same quarter, says: “One is complete in himself, and all things are made the offspring of one” — or “are born,” for it is written that way too. He adds: [x]

And he adds, more plainly:

The apostle will bear witness to all this: “I know a man in Christ who was caught up into the third heaven, and from there into Paradise, and heard words that cannot be spoken, which no one is permitted to utter” — pointing in this way to the impossibility of putting God into speech, and showing that what is divine cannot be uttered by human power; if, that is, he begins to speak above the third heaven, since it is allowed to bring the chosen souls into the mysteries there. For I know what stands in Plato. (The examples out of the barbarian philosophy are many, and they are being kept for the book which, as I promised earlier, is waiting for its proper time.) In the Timaeus, doubting whether we ought to take “many heavens” to mean several worlds or this one, he makes no distinction in the names, but calls the world and the heaven by the same name. His words run: “Have we, then, been right to speak of one heaven, or of many and endless ones? It would be more correct to say one, if indeed it was made after the model.” Further, in the letter of the Romans to the Corinthians it is written, “an ocean that men cannot cross, and the worlds beyond it.” So the noble apostle rightly cries out, “Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!”

And was this not the prophet’s meaning when he ordered hidden cakes to be made — hinting that the truly sacred, secret word about the Unbegotten and his powers ought to be kept hidden? To confirm it, the apostle says plainly in the letter to the Corinthians: “Among those who are complete we do speak wisdom — not the wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. We speak the wisdom of God, hidden in a mystery.” And in another place he says: “To the full knowledge of the mystery of God in Christ, in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden.” The Savior himself puts his seal on these things when he says: “To you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven.” And the Gospel says that the Savior spoke the word to the apostles in a mystery; for prophecy says of him, “He will open his mouth in parables, and will speak out things kept secret since the world was made.” And now, by the parable of the leaven, the Lord shows the same hiding. He says: “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in six gallons of flour, until the whole of it was leavened.” For the soul in its three parts is saved by obedience, through the spiritual power hidden in it by faith; or else because the power of the word that has been given to us, being intense and strong, draws to itself, secretly and unseen, everyone who takes it and keeps it inside himself, and brings his whole frame together into one.

Solon has written most wisely about God:

And of “the divine” the poet of Agrigentum says:

And John the apostle says: “No one has ever seen God. The only Son, who is God, who is in the Father’s bosom — he has told of him,” calling invisibility and unspeakableness the bosom of God. That is why some have called it the Depth, since it holds and embraces all things, unapproachable and without limit.

This talk about God is the hardest thing there is to handle. Since the first principle of anything is hard to find out, the principle that is absolutely first and oldest, the cause of everything else being and having come to be, is the hardest of all to set out. How can a thing be put into words that is not a genus, not a difference, not a species, not an individual, not a number — that is not an event, and not the thing an event happens to? No one can say the whole of him rightly. Because of his greatness he is ranked as the All, and is the Father of the universe. No parts can be spoken of him, for the One is not divisible; and so it is unlimited — not in the sense that you cannot think your way to the end of it, but in the sense that it has no dimensions and no boundary. And so it has no shape and no name. And if we do name it, we do not name it properly, whether we call it the One, or the Good, or Mind, or Being itself, or Father, or God, or Maker, or Lord. We are not speaking as men who can supply his name. For want of one, we use good names, so that the mind may have these to lean on and not go wrong elsewhere. Not one of them by itself says God; all of them together point to the power of the One who can do everything. For a thing is said of a subject either from what belongs to it or from its relation to something else, and neither of these can be admitted in the case of God. Nor is he taken hold of by the science of demonstration, since demonstration rests on principles that come earlier and are better known — and nothing comes before the Unbegotten. It remains, then, that we come to understand the Unknown by the grace of God and by the word alone that comes from him — as Luke relates in the Acts of the Apostles that Paul said: “Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are more religious than most. For as I went along and looked at the objects of your worship, I found an altar with this inscription: To an Unknown God. What you worship without knowing it, that is what I proclaim to you.”