Seeking the God Beyond: A Beginner’s Guide to Christian Apophatic Spirituality
J.P. WILLIAMS
(SCM Press, 226 pp, £19.99)
In this life we can see many things, but God is not one of them. Indeed, God isn’t any “thing” at all: which, of course, doesn’t mean that God is nothing, as the late Herbert McCabe – priest, theologian and philosopher – was always keen to point out. All we ever see or ever can see of God in this life is his Creation. The Greek Father of the Church, St Gregory of Nazianzus, speaking of Moses’ attempt to see God, says that he was permitted to see only God’s back; and Gregory adds that God’s back is the world. God himself remains concealed in inaccessible light.
That was how all Christian theists understood things until relatively recently: until, that is, what’s been called the “domestication of transcendence” happened when, from the seventeenth century onwards, the inconceivable God of classical Christian theism gave way to the celestial engineer of deism. The God who created everything from nothing was supplanted by a heavenly architect.
The cost of failing to understand what we mean – and, even more importantly, what we don’t mean – by the word “God” is fundamental and far-reaching misunderstanding of everything, not least of ourselves. It’s precisely misunderstanding of this kind, for instance, that leads many to assume that the deliverances of Christianity and of science are ineluctably and implacably opposed. It’s also what lurks in the metaphysical undergrowth of much conscientious atheism and agnosticism.