The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  The debate was not confined to a coterie of learned experts. Arius set his ideas to music, and it was not long before sailors and travelers were singing popular songs proclaiming that the Father was God by nature and had given life and being to the Son, who was neither coeternal with him nor uncreated. Soon the controversy had spread to the churches of Asia Minor and Syria. We hear of a bath attendant who engaged the bathers in heated discussion about whether the Son had come from nothingness; a money changer who, when asked for the exchange rate, held forth on the distinction between the Creator and his creation; and a baker who argued with his customers that the Father was greater than the Son.9 People were discussing the question with the same enthusiasm and passion as they discuss football today, because it touched the heart of their Christian experience. In the past, the creeds and explanations of the faith had often been changed to meet pastoral needs.10 The Arian crisis showed that they would probably have to be changed yet again.

  Over the centuries, Arianism has become a byword for heresy but at the time there was no officially orthodox position and nobody knew whether Arius or Athanasius was right.11 Arius was anxious to safeguard the transcendence of God. God was unique, “the only unbegotten, the only eternal, the only one without beginning, the only true, the only one who has immortality, the only wise, the only good.”12 His power was so overwhelming that it had to be mediated through the Logos at the creation, because frail creatures “could not endure to be made by the absolute hand of the Unoriginate.”13 The immense and all-powerful God could not possibly have been in the man Jesus: for Arius that would be like cramming a whale into a can of shrimp or a mountain into a box.

  Athanasius wanted to safeguard the liturgical practice of the Church, which regularly referred—albeit imprecisely—to Jesus as divine. If, he argued, the Arians really believed Christ to be a mere creature, were they not guilty of idolatry when they worshipped him?14 Like Arius, Athanasius had accepted the new doctrine of creation ex nihilo, but he argued that Arius did not understand its full implications. Creation ex nihilo had revealed an utter incompatibility between being itself and creatures that came from nothing.15 The only things that we could know by our natural, unaided reason were the objects of the material world, which told us nothing about God. Our brains were equipped to recognize only finite realities created ex nihilo, so we had no idea what the substance (ousia) of the uncreated God was like. God was not like any immense thing in our experience, and Arius “should not think of him in [such] human terms.”16 Further, being and nonbeing had absolutely nothing in common; it was impossible to speak in these human terms about the Logos, the agent of creation, “by whom all things were made”: “What sort of resemblance is there between things which are from nothing and the one who rendered the things which are nothing into being?”17 Jesus had not been linked to a very large and powerful being, as the Arians seemed to imagine; all that could be said was that there was an incomprehensible transcendence in Jesus that was entirely distinct from anything in human experience.

  The relationship between the unknowable God and the incarnate Logos, who had brought all things into existence, must, therefore, be entirely different from a relationship between two created beings. If, like the Arians, you simply thought of God as another being, albeit bigger and better than us, then it was absolutely impossible for God to become human. It was only because we had no idea what God was that we could say that God had been in the man Jesus. It was also impossible to say that God’s substance was not in Christ, because we could not identify the ousia of God; it lay completely beyond our ken, so we did not know what we were denying. Christians would not have been able to experience the “deification” of theosis or even imagine the unknowable God unless God had—in some unfathomable way—taken the initiative and entered the realm of fragile creatures. “The Word became human that we might become divine,” Athanasius wrote in his treatise On the Incarnation; “he revealed himself through a body that we might receive an idea of the invisible Father.”18 When we looked at the man Jesus, therefore, we had a partial glimpse of the otherwise unknowable God, and God’s Spirit, an immanent presence within us, enabled us to recognize this.

  Unfortunately, Constantine, who had no understanding of the issues, decided to intervene and summoned all the bishops to Nicaea in Asia Minor on May 20, 325. Athanasius managed to impose his views on the delegates, and the council issued a statement that Christ, the Word, had not been created but had been begotten “in an ineffable, indescribable manner” from the ousia of the Father—not from nothingness like everything else. So he was “from God” in an entirely different manner from all other creatures.19 The paradoxical terminology of the Nicene statement revealed the new emphasis on the absolute unknowability of the “ineffable, indescribable” God.20 But this authoritative ruling solved nothing. Because of imperial pressure, all the delegates except Arius and two of his colleagues signed the statement, but once they had returned to their dioceses, they continued to teach as they had always done—for the most part midway between Arius and Athanasius. This attempt to impose a uniform belief on the bishops and the faithful was counterproductive. Nicaea led to another fifty years of acrimony, divisions, conciliar deliberations, and even to violence, as creedal orthodoxy became politicized. The Nicene Council would eventually become a symbol of orthodoxy, but it would be centuries before Athanasius’s formula was restated in a form that Christians were willing to accept—and even then there was no uniformity.

  Eastern and Western Christians would understand the incarnation very differently. Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) defined the doctrine of atonement that became normative in the West: God became man in order to expiate the sin of Adam. Orthodox Christians have never accepted this. The Orthodox view of Jesus was defined by Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662), who believed that the Word would have become flesh even if Adam had not sinned. Jesus was the first human being to be wholly “deified,” entirely possessed and permeated by the divine, and we could all be like him, even in this life. The Word had become incarnate in order that “the whole human being would become God, deified by the grace of God become man, soul and body, by nature and becoming whole God, soul and body by grace.”21 As a result of this divine initiative, God and humanity had become inseparable. The man Jesus gave us our only hint of what God was like and had shown that human beings could participate in some indefinable way in the being of the incomprehensible God. We could no longer think “God” without thinking “human,” or “human” without thinking “God.”

  Maximus fully accepted Athanasius’s appreciation of the absolute transcendence of God. The revelation of the incarnate Logos made it clear that God must be absolutely unknowable. It was only because we did not regard God as an immense being (as Arius did) that we could say that God could remain the all-powerful God at the same time as assuming the frailty of human flesh, because any mere being of our experience could not be two incompatible things at once. It was only because we did not know what God was that we could say that human beings could in some way share the divine nature. Even when we contemplated Christ the man, God itself remained opaque and elusive. Revelation did not provide us with clear information about God but told us that God was incomprehensible to us. Paradoxical as it might sound, the purpose of revelation was to tell us that we knew nothing about God. And the supreme revelation of the incarnate Logos made this clearer than ever. After all, we have to be told about something we do not know or we would remain completely unaware of it.

  For having become man … [God] himself remains completely incomprehensible. … What could do more to demonstrate the proof of the divine transcendence of being than this? Revelation shows that it is hidden, reason that it is unspeakable, and intellect that it is transcendently unknowable.22

  These matters could not be settled by doctrinal formulations, because human language is not adequate to express the reality that we call “God.” Even words such as “life” and “light” mean something entirely different whe
n we use them of God, so silence is the only medium in which it is possible to apprehend the divine.

  But this did not mean that people had merely to “believe” these unfathomable truths; on the contrary, they had to work very hard to achieve the mental stillness that made the experience of unknowing a numinous reality in their lives. Maximus’s theology was based on a spirituality that had developed shortly after Nicaea. At a time when many Christians recoiled from the specter of primordial nothingness, others moved forward to embrace it. While some were engaged in wordy disputes and technical Christological definitions, others opted for a spirituality of silence—not dissimilar to the Indian Brahmodya. The monks had become the Christian heroes par excellence; they flocked into the deserts of Egypt and Syria to live in solitude, meditating on the scriptural texts they had memorized and practicing spiritual exercises that brought them the same kind of serenity as that sought by Epicureans, Stoics, and Cynics. The Greek fathers regarded monasticism as a new school of philosophia. The monks practiced the Stoic virtue of prosoche, “attention to oneself;” they too prepared for death and adopted a way of life that made them atopos, an “unclassifiable” breach with the norm.23 By the mid-fourth century, some of these desert monks had pioneered an a pophatic or “wordless” spirituality that brought them inner tranquillity (hesychia).

  Evagrius of Pontus (c. 348–99), who became one of the leading hesychasts of the Egyptian desert, taught his monks yogic techniques of concentration that stilled the mind, so that instead of seeking to limit the divine by confining it within rationalistic, human categories, they could cultivate an attentive, listening silence.24 Prayer was not conversation with God or a busy meditation on the divine nature; it meant a “shedding of thoughts.” Because God lay beyond all words and concepts, the mind must be “naked”: “When you are praying, do not shape within yourself any image of the Deity,” Evagrius advised, “and do not let your mind be stamped with the impress of any forms.”25 It was possible to gain an intuitive apprehension of God that was quite different from any knowledge derived from discursive reasoning. The contemplative must not expect exotic feelings, visions, or heavenly voices; these did not come from God but from his own fevered imagination and would merely distract him from his true objective: “Blessed is the intellect that has acquired complete freedom from sensations during prayer.”26 Some of the Greek fathers called prayer an activity of the heart (kardia), but this did not imply that it was an emotional experience. The “heart” represented the spiritual center of the human being, what the Upanishads called the atman, his or her true self.27

  Today religious experience is often understood as intensely emotional, so Evagrius’s prohibition of “sensations” may seem perverse. In all the great traditions, however, teachers have constantly proclaimed that far from being essential to the spiritual quest, visions, voices, and feelings of devotion could in fact be a distraction. The apprehension of God, Brahman, Nirvana, or Dao had nothing to do with the emotions. Christians had been aware of this from the very beginning; worship had often been noisy and unrestrained: under the inspiration of the Spirit, there had been speaking in strange languages, ecstatic trance, and spontaneous prophecy. But Saint Paul sternly and memorably told his Corinthian converts that these transports had to remain within due bounds and that by far the most important of the spiritual gifts was charity. In all the major traditions, the iron rule of religious experience is that it be integrated successfully with daily life. A disorderly spirituality that makes the practitioner dreamy, eccentric, or uncontrolled is a very bad sign indeed.

  In warning his monks against “sensations,” Evagrius was reiterating this central insight. Many of the disciplines of contemplation, such as yoga or hesychia, were designed precisely to wean the mind and heart away from these earthbound modes of perception and help people discover another mode of experience. To cultivate and luxuriate in ordinary feelings and sensations meant that the contemplative remained trapped in the mundane cast of mind that he or she was supposed to transcend. A contemplative must not think of undertaking this journey into the depths of the psyche without a spiritual director or guru. Plunging into the subconscious is risky, and a good director can lead disciples past dangerous swings of mood to the disciplined equanimity of hesychia, which was rooted in a level of the self that lies deeper than the emotions.

  The life of the desert monks was extremely monotonous. It is no accident that in all the faith traditions, people who wanted to engage in this kind of meditative activity organized a monastic life to cater to their needs. Details and emphases differ from one culture to another, but the similarities are striking. The withdrawal from the world, the silence, the disciplines of community—everybody wearing the same clothes and doing the same thing day after day—have been found to support the contemplative during his frequently lonely journey, to earth him in reality and wean him away from an excitement and drama inimical to the authentic religious experience. These practices provided an element of stability to counterbalance the mental extremity to which the monk, yogin, or hesychast was continually exposed. Once religious experience is equated with fervid enthusiasm, this can indicate that people are losing touch with the psychological rhythms of the interior life.

  Hesychia was not what we call “mysticism” today. It was not a specialized form of prayer, characterized by impressive spiritual visions and available only to an elite group of practitioners. The monks were the professionals, certainly, because they could devote themselves to it full-time, but hesychia was also prescribed for the laity. All the regular Christian practices—theology, liturgy, exegesis, morality, and acts of kindness—were supposed to be informed by the silent, reticent attitude of hesychia. It was not just for solitaries but could also be experienced in public worship and human relationships.28 One of the most famous exponents of the new apophatic theology was a married man who had been a professional orator until he became bishop of the small Cappadocian town of Nyssa. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 331–95) had become involved in the political turmoil of the Arian controversy with great reluctance. He was uneasy about these theological disputes, because it was impossible to adjudicate Christian teaching from a position of magisterial detachment. Theology depended on practice, and its truth could be assessed only by people who allowed its doctrines to change them. We could not speak about God rationally, as we speak about ordinary beings, but that did not mean that we should give up thinking about God at all.29 We had to press on, pushing our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing and acknowledging that there could be no final clarity. After an initial frustration, the soul would realize that “the true satisfaction of her desire consists in constantly going on with her quest and never ceasing in her ascent, seeing that every fulfillment of her desire continually generates further desire for the Transcendent.”30 You had to leave behind “all that can be grasped by sense or reason” so that “the only thing left for contemplation is the invisible and the incomprehensible.”31

  Gregory could see this process at work in the life of Moses. His first encounter with God had been the revelation of the Burning Bush, where he had learned that the God that called itself “I Am” was being itself. Everything else in the universe “that the senses perceive or intelligence contemplates” could only participate in the being that sustained it at every second.32 After this initial revelation, Moses, like the great philosophers, had engaged in a disciplined contemplation of the natural world. But while nature could lead us to the Logos, through whom the world was made, it could not bring us to God itself. When Moses climbed Mount Sinai and entered the impenetrable darkness on its summit, however, he was in the place where God was—even though he could not see anything. He had at last left normal modes of perception behind and achieved an entirely different kind of seeing. Pushing his reason to the point where it could go no further, he had intuited the silent otherness that existed beyond the reach of words and concepts. Once the hesychast understood this, he real
ized that any attempt to define God clearly “becomes an idol of God and does not make him known.”33

  Gregory knew that many Christians were confused by the Nicaean statement. How could the Son have the same nature as the Father without becoming a second God? No longer familiar with traditional Jewish terminology, they were also puzzled about the identity of the Holy Spirit. Gregory’s older brother Basil, bishop of Caesarea (c. 330–79), took time out from his diocese to find a solution. Christians must stop thinking about God as a mere being, a larger and more powerful version of themselves. That was not what God was. The new doctrine of creation had made it clear that God was unknowable; our minds could think only about beings in the universe; we could not imagine the “nothingness” out of which our world was formed, because we could think only about things that had some kind of spatial extension or qualities. It was impossible for us to understand what had happened before our world was created, because we could think only in terms of time. This was what Saint John meant when he wrote “In the beginning was the Word.”