The Negation of God

 

In the East and the West, there is a long tradition of what they call negative theology, and this is just the tip of that empyreal iceberg. Writing in the fifth century, and pseudonymously for reasonable fear of persecution and even execution, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite took one of the most assertive positions in this manner of comprehending God. Essentially, this theological approach attempts to define God indirectly, by saying what God is not, rather than trying in vain to pin down what exactly God is.

“He is neither number nor order; nor greatness nor smallness; nor equality nor inequality; nor similarity nor dissimilarity; neither is He still, nor moving, nor at rest; neither has He power nor is power, nor is light; neither does He live nor is He life; neither is He essence, nor eternity nor time; nor is He subject to intelligible contact; nor is He science nor truth, nor a king, nor wisdom; neither one nor oneness, nor godhead nor goodness; nor is He spirit according to our understanding, nor a son, nor a father; nor anything else known to us or to any other of the beings or creatures that are or are not.”  [from Mystical Theology]

Four centuries later, the Irish theologian John Scotus Erigena (c. 815-877) worked hard to revive this mystic approach to philosophy. “We do not know what God is,” said Erigina. 

“God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being" ...

God, in the extraordinary category of his own, does not exist. He does something altogether different, and we don’t even have the language to say what that is. But whatever that is, it’s the only thing comparable to what we do before and after we exist in this short stretch of time we call life. Furthermore, I think the Way of Negation actually raises God even higher than traditional theism, by placing him beyond our reach and conceding that he transcends any attempt at a straightforward definition in ordinary affirmative terms, regardless of how many superlatives are sprinkled in.

~ The Tao of Fred 

“The Tao which can be expressed in words is not the eternal Tao; the name which can be uttered is not its eternal name. Without a name, it is the Beginning of Heaven and Earth; with a name, it is the Mother of all things. Only one who is eternally free from earthly passions can apprehend its spiritual essence; he who is ever clogged by passions can see no more than its outer form. These two things, the spiritual and the material, though we call them by different names, in their origin are one and the same. This sameness is a mystery,–the mystery of mysteries. It is the gate of all spirituality.”

 ~ The Tao Te Ching, Chapter One

"Tao cannot be defined. You can not define something according to itself. If you can define a principle, it is not Tao." 

~ The Tao of Leadership by John Heider, Chapter One