Naming the Unnameable. Dr. Rev. Matthew Fox

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      Which, among the trillions upon trillions of God-names might serve us the best today? And serve the planet the best? And therefore serve God the best? That is the question that this book is presenting. Hopefully, it will be useful, for as Aquinas insisted, a “little knowledge about important things is far more important than a lot of knowledge about unimportant things.” A fresh understanding and language about Divinity may assist us to come up with fresh understandings of ourselves and thus the societies and institutions we feel called to give birth to as we struggle to assist other species to survive and to survive ourselves, to be sustainable, even to thrive and become beautiful and worthy of our holy existence.

      Meister Eckhart warns us that when we talk about God we stutter and stumble. This is important information, that no word does God justice and no person or ideology holds a trademark on the word “God.” Humility and reverence are required even to enter into the conversation. A certain receptivity is required to enter into authentic God talk. Hopefully that spirit of reverence, humility and receptivity imbues this book and those who pick it up.

      My method in this book will be to offer a useful name for Divinity and offer a modest meditation on the same. The name may come from scientists; or mystics; or Scriptures; or simply my own experience and imagination. The test is not so much its source as the use to which we can put it, the stirring up it accomplishes in our own souls and consciousness. Might new names for God open the door to new avenues of healthy and full living? One can hope so.

      In Part I we pick out 80 names for God from among the trillions of possible God-names. This is called the cataphatic tradition, the tradition of the God of light. One way to read this section is, when you see a name, pause and ask: “In what way is God….Love?….Light?….the mind of the universe?….etc. etc.” Again, “In what way is Love God? Light God? The mind of the universe God? etc. etc.”

      In Part II we pick out 9 names of the apophatic Divinity, the Unnameable Divinity. The word “apophatic” means “drawn to the dark.” Coming out of an age called the “Enlightenment,” many people today are unfamiliar with this category of God-naming that denies any name for God but rests with the experience that God surpasses all naming. In the same amazing passage where Aquinas talks about how every creature is a name for God he ends his discourse this way: “And the Divine One is none of these beings insofar as God surpasses all things.” So clearly he is urging us to name God broadly—but also to back off from any naming. Eckhart puts it this way: “All creatures want to express God in all their works; let them all speak, coming as close as they can, they still cannot speak him. Whether they want to or not…they all want to speak God and he still remains unspoken.” Thus we speak God and we fail to speak God. God is spoken and unspoken. There is paradox here, there is an invitation to see and not to see, to recognize and to let go. When it comes to things spiritual, paradox is always a good thing. It strikes at the heart of our compulsions to control. It also invites humor in and defuses temptations to excessive literalism and religious zealotry and idolatry, which gives birth to rigid fundamentalisms.

      In our time when much of God talk can be cheapened by bad religion and outright idolatry of false gods (avarice, racism, militarism, might-makes-right, excessive nationalism among them), it is especially valuable and important to consider the apophatic naming of Divinity. Divine names do not sit tidily in our left brains amidst definitions, numbers, dogmas and doctrines. As Augustine put it, “if you comprehend it, it is not God.” Also, when dark matter and dark energy and black holes characterize the scientific parlance of our time, the God of darkness may be emerging with a special role to play at this time in history. We want to leave room for that surely. This we do in Part II.

      In Part III we offer some exercises that might deepen the experience of reading and meditating on this book.

      In a challenging and provocative study by Nancy Ellen Abrams, co-author of The View from the Center of the Universe, the author has this to say about contemporary God talk: “Our thinking about God today is like a potted plant that’s root-bound and can barely grow. The pot is made of old metaphors, images, and stories. Not only are science and spirituality not necessarily antagonistic but science may be the only way to break out of the pot and put our spiritual roots into Earth and the cosmos, where they can grow freely. Where they can be coherent with reality.”

      Abrams is not trying to throw God out of the picture—quite the opposite, she insists that while science can help define good and evil, “defining the good” doesn’t necessarily make it happen; we all know that science has also enabled terrible things on enormous scales. We need our god-capacity to generate the spiritual power—the motivation, trust, and faith in each other—to bring good about. How we conceive of God will have enormous impact on how we behave toward each other, how we justify our actions, what we believe is possible, and what we find sacred and are therefore willing to sacrifice to protect….We need a new understanding of God. We need a God that can connect us spiritually to the real universe and guide our now globally conscious species toward a long-term and honorable civilization.

      Perhaps this book might contribute to stirring imaginations for a new understanding of God. I hope it does and that the reader reads it in a meditative way for that is how it was intended. Let your heart and intuitive brain ride along with the images and names presented herein.

      Finally, I celebrate the excellent work by David Bentley Hart, an eastern Orthodox philosopher, who in a more didactic study than this one is also on a quest for a more useable naming of Divinity. In his important book, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, he offers some wise observations to the topic at hand when he warns that God-talk can get easily muddled by mushy religious thinking.

      Any debate over an intelligent designer, or a supreme being within space and time who merely supervises history and legislates morals, or a demiurge whose operations could possibly be rivals of the physical causes describable by scientific cosmology…most definitely has nothing whatsoever to do with the God worshipped in the great theistic religions, or described in their philosophical traditions, or reasoned toward by their deepest logical reflections upon the contingency of the world.

      He encourages us to leave seventeenth-century deism and eighteenth-century ‘natural history’ aside today. His diagnosis of what ails us religiously is this: “The reason the very concept of God has become at once so impoverished, so thoroughly mythical, and ultimately so incredible for so many modern persons is not because of all the interesting things we have learned over the past few centuries, but because of all the vital things we have forgotten. Above all, somehow, we have as a culture forgotten being: the self-evident mystery of existence….” How has this happened? “Perhaps that is attributable not only to how we have been taught to think, but how we have been taught to live. Late modernity is, after all, a remarkably shrill and glaring reality, a dazzling chaos of the beguilingly trivial and terrifyingly atrocious, a world of ubiquitous mass media and constant interruption, an interminable spectacle whose only unifying theme is the impetrative to acquire and spend.” We have little time to reflect “upon the mystery that manifests itself not as a thing among other things, but as the silent event of being itself.” In our “quest to master beings,” we have ventured very far indeed away from being.

      That this book might bring us closer to the mystery of being and the mystery beyond mystery is my hope. That it may loosen the doors that hold us back from trusting our own deep experience of the God of mystery is my prayer.

      Matthew Fox

      Vallejo, California

      December 21, 2017

       Winter solstice, my 77th birthday and the day of

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