Who doubts God? Understanding God for the Religious and the Secular Seekers

God is, according to a great medieval sage, What is. It would converge with what Ibn Arabi would call the Real and Wittgenstein would phrase as what is the case and from another angle, Simone Weil would call as “attention without distraction,” and another mystic as “choiceless awareness.” The Quranic claim that there can’t be entertained any doubt regarding Allah (afillahi shakkun) is echoed in an old Asante proverb stating that “No one needs to show God to a child”–the point is that some things are quite obvious. Stace has identified God with the Mystery that wells up everywhere and in everything – the depth of anything that fails to be penetrated in conceptual terms. Pannikar has identified the divine with the “dimension of more and better” of being or “the infinite inexhaustibility of any real being, its ever-open character, its mystery . . . its freedom.” For him God is a symbol for the whole reality and approvingly quotes a definition stating that “God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere.”

    Peter Berger, one of the most influential modern sociologists, has observed that “Homo Sapiens have always been homo religiousus” and “a human existence bereft of transcendence is an impoverished and finally untenable condition.” For Eric Voegelin, who has been called a modern Plato, the most fundamental human experience is, in the words a Voegelin scholar, “an experience of tension toward the divine, which finds its expression in symbols, which lie at the root of all the mythological, religious, philosophical and even political worldviews ever produced by mankind.” Noting the fundamental characteristic of consciousness as luminosity and that as an experience of participation to what is ultimately a transcendent reality (“the divine ground of existence”), this means that “man is not a self-contained spectator. He is an actor, playing a part in the drama of being.” We are not alone or in an indifferent universe but dialogic selves hounded or sought by, open, creatures. 

    “People have only one task – to grow spiritually” Tolstoy wrote in his dairy.  Recalling Wittgenstein’s portrayal of one’s being ‘addressed’ by God, it has been noted regarding the ‘calls’ of both Heideggerian Conscience and the Levinasian other that they have “authority due to their capacity to summon and accuse the ‘I’ in its particularity.” Man can’t escape from God as God is in search of man as Heschel and also Iqbal would put it. The Sufi metaphor of seeking the lost home and the meaning of symbolism of exile from the Garden of Eden and quest for regaining Paradise has a similar import. Heschel has noted: “For God is not always silent, and man is not always blind. His glory fills the world; His spirit hovers above the waters. There are moments in which, to use a Talmudic phrase, heaven and earth kiss each other; in which there is a lifting of the veil at the horizon of the known, opening a vision of what is eternal in time. Some of us have at least once experienced the momentous realness of God. Some of us have at least caught a glimpse of the beauty, peace, and power that flow through the souls of those who are devoted to Him....The voice of Sinai goes on for ever: ‘These words the Lord spoke unto all your assembly in the mount out of the midst of the fire, of the cloud, and of the thick darkness, with a great voice that goes on for ever.’

    Heschel makes another important point. “God is of no importance unless He is of supreme importance.” And quotes Maimonides, "It is well known and quite evident that the love of God cannot strike deep root in the heart of man unless it occupies his mind constantly so that nothing in the world matters to him but this love of God." None who thus loved God failed to find Him. Since prayer meets God, the question is do we pray. Prayer as likes of Ibn Arabi, Shayk Alawi and Shaykh Isa Schuon would have it, can’t fail to find God. Saints routinely converse with God in prayer.

    For our concluding reflections, let us note how Islam’s greatest Master, Ibn Arabi, who, in his Al-Futûhât Al-makkiyya, by understanding God as Reality and our only concern, made it, much before Tillich, impossible to be an atheist and thus denied the atheists their God-given right to deny Him as one professor in the audience of Tillich’s lecture “Symbols of Faith” put it.

If we gaze, it is upon Him; if we use our intelligence, it is towards Him; if we reflect, it is upon Him; if we know it is Him. For it is He who is revealed in every face, sought in every sign, worshipped in every object of worship, and pursued in the invisible and the visible. The whole world prays to Him, prostrates itself before Him and glorifies His praise; tongues speak of Him, hearts are enraptured by love for Him, minds are bewildered in Him.

    Thus understood none is excluded from the feast God is/God has arranged. We are here on a sacred ground, invited for a royal feast, as Hafiz would say and  how unpleasant if guests would fight in the presence of the Host.  In this background we can also better understand such statements as “God is the Manifest Truth” (Al-Quran) “The more they blaspheme, the more they praise God” (Meister Eckhart) and “Man can’t exist where there is no God.” (Berdyaev). And echoing both Ibn Arabi and Mulla Sadra, Gilson’s “great syllogism”: “God is existence itself, and existence itself is most intimately present at the heart of every being. Therefore God is most intimately present at the heart of every being.” Or in Kreeft’s crisp presentation:

1. Being is innermost in each thing;
2. But God is Being (His essence is existence);
3. Therefore God is innermost in each thing.

    Nothing is more inner, present, and intimate to every being than God. God activates every being from within, so to speak.
    God as what is irresistible, the sweetness of every sweet thing, the beauty of every beautiful thing, the joy the pursuit of which moves every creature, the love that drives every movement, the goodness that all aspire for, the pole of non-self/Other in relationships or the Self in itself, reality-truth and light of awareness that is presupposed in every denial and thus really treasured by all, believers and sceptics alike though the later hesitate to fully open to/trust it.