Naming God
Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture
Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture
Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations 'Messiah', 'Emmanuel', 'Alpha', 'Omega', 'Eternal', 'All-Powerful', 'Lamb', 'Lion', 'Goat', 'One', 'Word', 'Serpent' and 'Bridegroom'. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from 'naming' to 'defining' God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energize the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.
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Theology Matters - The Unnamable God
Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture by Janet Soskice
Can we give God a name?
Why do we name God?
The naming of God was once a major theological topic. Pseudo-Dionysius (Ps-Denys) wrote a book on the Divine Names, ideas from which were incorporated into Scholasticism by St. Thomas Aquinas. Author Janet Soskice reminds of us the change in practice in the first chapter:
Generations of Christians knew and named God and Christ with many names - hundreds of them: Messiah, Emmanuel, Alpha, Omega, Eternal, All-Powerful, Lamb, Serpent, One, Goat, Lion, Word, Worm, Bridegroom. These names, all drawn from Scripture, were said, sung and chanted in plainsong and polyphony, woven into the worship of the faithful. Today, a remnant of what we might call this ‘piety of the names' remains in the popular Advent hymn, ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel', where names come from the ‘O Antiphons', each verse heralding the coming of Christ with one of the titles Christians took from the Old Testament: ‘O come, Emmanuel! O come, Rod of Jesse! O Come, Dayspring from on High! O come, Key of David! Oh come, Adonai!'
Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (p. 1). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
In the course of reflecting on the topic, Soskice takes the reader through chapters on Moses, Philo, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and Aquinas. Ps-Denys does not get a chapter but is mentioned throughout the text.
Soskice explains that a traditional critique of naming God argues that God's names can become idols. God is greater than we can imagine. To say that God is the Almighty does not do God justice. To identify him as Bridegroom is to limit God, which is, in a way, the core of idolatry. Man cannot know God's nature. Man can only have the barest sense of who or what God is; any name is insufficient.
In modernity, the naming of God runs the risk of anthropomorphizing God and, worse, creating an understanding of God that reinforces the oppression of the weak, women, and the poor. According to some like Gordon Kaufman, it is better to move beyond naming God, ideas of God, or a belief in God.
It seems to me that to name God as the Unnamable is to create an inhuman concept of God, a kind of Lovecraftian horror. As I was reading this, I was listening to an audiobook entitled In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy by Eugene Thacker[1]. I had just finished a book on the Philosophy of Dionysius.[2]
Ps-Denys went a long way to the argument that God is totally alien and unnamable. God is being beyond being. Life beyond life. God is unknowable and unnamable. God's being give the universe being but God is so far beyond being that he is properly thought of as non-being.
The Dust of the Planet book reflects on H.P. Lovecraft's idea of horror and how it relies on a lot of theology. Lovecraft's Elder Gods were pure horror because they were beyond human comprehension. Much of Lovecraft's writings are florid prose about shapes that cannot be comprehended and colors that cannot be described. Horror is founded on the other, found in pure form in the Unnamable.
Is this God? Is God a horror? A Lovecraftian Elder God?
The naming of God begins in Genesis 3, where God speaks from the burning bush and tells Moses that his name is “I Am Who Am.” When Moses asks for a name to take to Pharoah, God condescends to give Moses a name. This is the nature of naming in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Man does not impose a name, rather the name is revealed to us. Thus, God is not the Unnamable since God gives us a name.[3]
In the Old Testament, God's name becomes the Tetragrammaton (YHWH), translated to preserve the sacredness of the name as “Lord.” The name appears over 6,000 times in the Hebrew Bible, but in modern translation is replaced by LORD. Attempts have been made to correct this. Moses Mendelssohn translated the Pentateuch into German in the early 19th century, replacing YHWH with the Eternal based on the idea that “I am that am” communicated the idea of omnitemporality - of always being with His people.
Soskice argues that the purpose of naming is not a philosophical exercise. Its purpose is to pray, to communicate with God, to praise God. This is possible because God has condescended to such communication:
Augustine's recognition is that we can speak of God only because, as with Moses and Israel, God has first spoken to us.
Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (p. 36). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
Philo represents a starting point for one tradition of naming God, namely, the negative or apophatic naming tradition. Thus, we can identify God by what He is not. Words like “unnamable” and “unutterable” are part of this tradition. [4]
But there's more. Although God is transcendent beyond the imagination of most modern Christians, God is also imminent. God graces mankind with his name so that there can be a relationship between man and God. God cannot be given a common name, like dog or cat, because there is nothing to share the name with. God's names are relative to humans; they state what God is for us, not what God is. As Soskice observes:
We've seen that Philo has a special interest in naming of God. On his reckoning, God both cannot be named and yet must be named for the purposes of prayer.
Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (p. 66). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
After discussing Philo, Soskice moves to Christian theologians. She offers an interesting argument I have not seen before. According to Soskice, the doctrine of Creation ex nihilo is foundational to the Christian understanding[5] but exists in the Jewish tradition also:
A linking of Exodus 3 with the creation narratives of Genesis was embraced early on by Christian theologians. ‘The One Who Is' was understood as the one who confers being on all creation. Seeing the ‘One Who Is' as the ground of all existence should not, however, be thought of as just an imposition on the Book of Exodus by Christian theologians marinated in Greek philosophy. The Palestinian Targums, Jewish texts written in Aramaic and within the Semitic milieu, provide us with the following glosses on the ehyeh asher ehyeh (‘I Am Who I Am') of Exodus 3.15: ‘He who spoke and the world came into being, spoke and everything came into being.' (Pseudo-Jonathan 14a) ‘He who said to the world, “Be”, and it came into being, and who will again say to it: “BE”, and it will be. (Fragmentary Targum 14aV)
Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (pp. 67–68). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
Soskice defines “Creation ex nihilo” as meaning that “God from no compulsion or necessity created the world from nothing - really nothing - no pre-existent matter, space or time.” “Creation ex nihilo is not just a teaching about the created order but about God.” Central to the teaching is the power of goodness and freedom of God and the dependence of creation on God. If God were to cease holding the world in being for a moment, it would cease to be.[6]
It is a tenet of Scholasticism that the “good is self-diffusive.” After Philo, Aquinas would base the doctrine of analogia entis on the idea that there is a relationship between God and creation because God created the world. Soskice observes:
Although God does not need creation to be God, the creation stands in a real, if contingent, relation to God. God's creatures are gratuitously created from abundant love. In classical theology it is because God is always already abundance and fullness of life that creation is wholly gift and grace. It is not out of need but from pure love and delight that God creates. In sum, creatio ex nihilo emerges as a core teaching when Jews and Christians felt a need to defend their understanding of God's relation to the cosmos, God's power, freedom and love.28 This teaching became integral to Christian theology. As we have seen from Philo, one of its effects was to transform the meaning of certain divine names which had enjoyed currency in Greek philosophical monotheism - those known to us as ‘classical attributes' - and to impel the introduction of others.
Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (pp. 81–82). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
These ideas were developed through Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and Aquinas. In Aquinas, in particular, we have the idea that God is somewhat knowable because of creation's dependence on God. Because of that dependence and the fact that God is Creator, there is nothing in creation that is not in God in a fuller and more perfect way. [7]
Soskice offers an interesting way of viewing the Summa Theologica:
It is often remarked that, for all the attention they have subsequently received, the ‘Five Ways' take up little space in the Summa theologiae. Here, as in the earlier Summa contra gentiles, God's existence is taken as given, and indeed there is some debate as to whether Aquinas intended them as proofs. What is clear is that, in the architecture of the Summa theologiae, the Five Ways are used to set the stage for the extended discussion over Questions 3 to 13 as to how we can know and name God.24
Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (p. 179). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
For Aquinas the relationship of creation and God in creation ex nihilo meant that there positive things that we could say about God. When we speak of God we do not mean merely negative things:
Aquinas tells us that ‘When a man speaks of the “living God” he does not simply want to say that God is the cause of our life, or that he differs from a lifeless body.' Here he has Maimonides in mind: Maimonides, as we have seen, applies such strictures to divine transcendence, that to say, ‘God is living' could mean no more than ‘God is not like an inanimate thing.' Aquinas observes that to say, ‘God is good' cannot mean just that ‘God is the cause of goodness in things', for God is also the cause of bodies, and we don't say God is a body (S.T. Ia.13, 2). He argues that some of the words we use of God do express something of what God is. It follows that some (positive) things may be said literally of God (article 3), a point of departure from both Maimonides and Dionysius.36 Of course all our names for God are, of necessity, taken from our human speech about creatures - we have no speech but human speech. Many scriptural ascriptions are metaphors, such as that God is ‘a rock' or ‘a lion'. These are all evidently qualified by materiality. But certain perfection terms - Aquinas mentions ‘being,' ‘good' and ‘living' - are not tinged with materiality and so can literally apply to God, as long as we are mindful of the fact that ‘what' they signify belongs to God (in fact even more to God than to creatures ‘for these perfections belong primarily to God and only secondarily to others'), but our way of signifying these perfections (modus significandi) is tailored to creatures and thus inadequate.
Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (pp. 188–189). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
We speak of God in human terms because we are human. We necessarily understand God in the mode in which we exist. This is perfectly acceptable since it is not entirely wrong because created things reflect God's goodness and being in their goodness and being.
God condescends to allow us to use names in order to allow us to communicate with and about Him:
To sum up, analogy is discussed in the Summa theologiae as a semantic tool and not an epistemological strategy. It does not to determine what we can say positively of God, still less what we can know of God - above all Scripture does that. An epistemology is present - of course we must know about God - but it is a Christian epistemology, grounded in the doctrine of creation.42 Aquinas' account of analogical predication shows how our names, even scriptural names, which derive their meaning from what we know of creatures, may be ordered to the God who brings about creation. It is thus a way of explaining how our terms signify in this unique situation of metaphysical dependency. Here semantic and metaphysical points fuse.
Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (p. 195). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
Naming God, then, is about prayer more than knowledge. It is possible because God allows it and because we can understand God in a limited sense because He is the creator and every created thing stands in a relation of dependence on Him.
I've recently gone through the Summa Theologica chapter on God's name. So, this was a welcome commentary and background for what I read. Also, there was information here that I didn't know but very much appreciate knowing. I think Soskice writing is accessible and straightforward. The topic is worth reflecting upon. I think I would recommend it to anyone with a serious interest in theology.
[1] Dust of the Planet by Eugene Thacker.
[2] Theophany by Eric D. Perl
[3] Actually, a name of God is “unnamable”:
Philo is our first source for certain distinctive divine epithets, for instance ‘unnameable' (akatonomastos), ‘unutterable' (arrhêtos), which subsequently find their way into Christian and pagan philosophical writings. We will find in Philo argumentative strategies that will subsequently characterise the ‘divine names' tradition in Christian writings and which will reappear in the work of Moses Maimonides in the twelfth century and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth.
Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (p. 45). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
[4] Philo also makes a point that will be central to Aquinas:
The cosmos is totally dependent on God and God is in no sense dependent on the cosmos. And finally, ‘God, being One, is alone and unique, and like God there is nothing' (L.A.. II.1).23 This last is an altogether critical point for Philo when it comes to naming God. Since God cannot strictly be like any created being, we cannot class God or insert God into any category appropriate to our created kind.
Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (p. 50). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
[5] “[F]or Aquinas, the theology of participation spills out from the biblical name, ‘the One Who Is'.” [Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (p. 212). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.]
[6] Aristotle rejected Creation ex nihilo, believing that the “notion that something could come from nothing” was absurd (Physics 187a333–4).
[7] Concerning Ps-Denys, Soskice observes:
Yet for all his deference - and Aquinas cites Dionysius some 1,700 times - there is little in the Summa which marks him strictly as a disciple, and at times Aquinas introduces Dionysius' views only to qualify, if not apparently to contradict them.
Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (p. 171). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
This confirms my recent reading of Aquinas.
