SikhSpectrum.com Quarterly Issue No.18, November 2004
Speaking about God
by Eliot Deutsch
In no other scriptural writing (that I, at least, am familiar with) is the impossibility of man's speaking truthfully about God made as forcefully and clearly as in Guru Nanak's morning hymn (the Japji), the most revered writing in the Guru Granth. Guru Nanak states:
To sing truly of the transcendent Lord
Would exhaust all vocabularies, all human powers of expression..1
And
If as many people as lived in all the past
Were now to describe Him each in his own way
Even then He would not be adequately described..2
I propose in this paper to examine briefly the philosophical basis for this inability of man to speak truly about God and also, taking my clue from Guru Nanak, to look at what would seem to be the proper primary function of language in religious consciousness and experience.
For Guru Nanak (as for Socrates and Plotinus, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, Yajnavalkya and Sankara, Maimonides and Meister Eckhart, and for countless other seers and sages in the East and West) the state of divine consciousness is incommensurable with the finite, empirical world of our ordinary sense and mental experience. Divine consciousness is a state of fullness, a plenitude of being; it is a state of profound silence.
Overturning all distinctions that obtain in the phenomenal world, the Divine thereby condemns the world to a kind of unreality or relative phenomenality. It demands that the world no longer be seen as self-sufficient and independent. The Divine discloses the insubstantiality of all phenomenal being. For Guru Nanak, the Divine is one and integral; it is a state of pure consciousness and unalloyed being.
Now for most persons the first and most natural attempt to speak about or to praise this state of consciousness and being would be to compare it with what one is already familiar with in one's common experience. But being different in kind from the world, the Divine cannot be compared truly or adequately with any object, event, quality, or process in our ordinary rational and sense experience.
If, for example, when saying that the Divine is infinite, one imagines "infinite" to be just the boundless extension of an objective state (and how else can one imagine it?) then one has clearly made the Infinite part of a finite series and has negated thereby precisely the incommensurability of the Divine and the world that one was purportedly trying to express. Nicolas Cusanus, a great Renaissance thinker, puts it accurately in this way:
From the self-evident fact that there is no gradation from infinite to finite, it is here that the simple maximum (the Divine) is not to he found where we meet degrees of more and less; for such degrees are finite, whereas the simple maximum is necessarily infinite...
A finite intellect, therefore, cannot by means of comparison reach the absolute truth of things. Being by nature indivisible, truth excludes ''more" or "less'' so that nothing but truth itself can be the exact measure of truth.3
And in the apprehension of this self-certifying truth, that finite intellect which would make any comparison between the Divine and the world simply no longer is. In the immediate apprehension of divine consciousness, the finite intellect has no function to perform, it has no purpose to fulfill; it is overwhelmed by a spiritual silence. As Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth-century German mystic, writes:
The central silence is there, where no creature may enter, nor any idea, and there the soul neither thinks nor acts, nor entertains any idea, either of itself or of anything else.4
The further one is from truth, the more one is compelled to talk about it. The closer one is to the Divine, the less one is capable of uttering any name. When one inwardly possesses some thing or state of being, one has no need to objectify it. The finite intellect, it seems, works only upon what is essentially absent for one.
In short, in the depth of experience there is no one to speak. Guru Nanak states:
Where self exists
God is not;
Where God exists,
There self is not.5
But, one might respond, admitting that the Divine is incommensurable with all empirical being, and admitting that all comparisons between them are, in the last analysis, futile, one should still be able to speak truly about God in a direct way, if indeed such a state of being exists. In the depth of experience silence reigns; but apart from that depth there is all manner of sound. What, then, prevents one who has had intense spiritual experience from subsequently speaking truly about the content or object of that experience?
The answer to this would have to be that there are several easily recognized features of our human language (whatever particular language it may happen to be) that prevents this language from being an adequate means for one to speak truly about God.
All language is grounded in distinctions. Being an intermediary, as it were, between the self and other selves, and the world, language or a speech-act presupposes the distinction between subject and object. To name some thing, to describe some event, to express some feeling or emotion, to explain some process --all necessarily presuppose the existence of radical subject-object distinctions.
To speak meaningfully requires a consciousness that intends objects. Words are themselves objects and can stand only for other objects or objectived states. But the Divine is not an object among objects: it resists all separation and overcomes all distinctions, and can thus never be a proper referent of a language-act naming, describing, expressing, explaining, and so on.
All language is time-bound. One cannot speak comprehensively all at once; one can only speak word by word successively; heaping-up meaning to be sure as one progresses gestalt-wise into structured patterns, but always in time. It takes time to think and to speak. But the Divine is timeless; it is an "eternal now" that defies all temporal categories. Hence no speech-act can truly refer-to it.
Similarly, all language is grounded in spatial relationships. As Kant (and before him Sankara and other Vedantins) pointed out we can think of something only in terms of spatial categories: Try to think of something that is nowhere! Our minds, our intellects are at home only in some kind of spatially ordered world. But the Divine is nowhere and everywhere -- and, consequently, no language can be wholly adequate to it.
Language is static, and thus obscures as much as it reveals the world to us. As the French philosopher Henri Bergson has shown, in our use of conceptual, abstract language and categories we classify, we put up, we analyze and we miss thereby the dynamic stuff of life and its divine creative ground. Through language we freeze experience; we lose its warmth and glow.
Further, all language is culturally conditioned. Language does not exist In the abstract but is employed by men in a culture, with a history. And no single culture, and indeed no merely additive combination of cultures, exhausts the rich potentiality and actuality of human experience. Being culture=bound, a human language cannot as such be the language of the Divine.
Logically, or in terms of a kind of inherent epistemology of language we also have the fact that it is impossible to affirm anything or something without, at the same time, implicitly asserting or acknowledging the possibility of its denial. To say that the Divine is omnipotent, for example, carries along with it the implicit acknowledgement of the possibility of its powerlessness. “All determination is negation,” according to Spinoza: every description implies a limitation. But nothing can be excluded from divine consciousness and, hence, nothing can be asserted adequately or properly about it.
The considerations that we have dealt with so far have been basically epistemic or poetic in nature: that language is grounded in fundamental distinctions, that it is time-bound, spatially ordered, static, and culturally conditioned, that it involves negation as well as affirmation. These factors explain why one cannot speak truly about God, but they don't seem, from the standpoint of the speaker, to get to the heart of the matter. For this, I think, we must look to an axiological or value dimension.
For one who has encountered the Divine in the depth of his consciousness and being, most god-talk--i.e., questions about God's attributes, arguments for His existence, etc.,-- is simply irrelevant. It provides no intellectual stimulus, it evokes no thoughtful response. It is irrelevant precisely because a greater, overriding value of being has been grasped; a value which renders all other satisfactions of the mind (or body) as superficial and trivial. One who existentially possesses, who subjectively is, a living quality of being, regards as worthless and somewhat naive all questions which would detract from that authentic quality of being. Mere intellectual concern with the question (e.g., of God's "existence") only keeps one from giving the answer.
But this still is not the whole story, for there is a vast literature associated with religion: a literature which, while not exactly true or adequate when it speaks about God, is nevertheless highly meaningful. Also a great deal of religious writing was written in a manner that was very much aware of the limitations of language that we have briefly outlined. This awareness produced the fascinating symbols, metaphors, paradoxes, parables and myths that abound in religious writings. And these modes of language seem to have an appropriateness about them, and at limes a remarkable spiritual efficacy. This leads to our final consideration; namely, the proper primary function of language for religious consciousness.
Guru Nanak writes:
Countless are Thy names, countless Thine abodes;
Completely beyond the grasp of the imagination
Are Thy myriad realms;
Even to call them myriad is foolish.
Yet through words and through letters
Is Thy name uttered and Thy praise expressed;
In words we praise Thee,
In words we sing of Thy virtues.
It is in the words that we write and speak about Thee,
In words on man’s forehead is written man’s destiny.6
This verse suggests, and I believe rightly so, that the proper primary function of language in relation to spiritual experience is to lead others to the experience. Exhortations to perform various good deeds or various rituals and ceremonies, descriptions of historical and semi-historical events, codifications of community belief, etc., are all secondary functions of language in religion.
Primarily, in relation to the spiritual experience that is of the essence of religion, the function of language is to awaken in others the realization of the possibility of religious life. It is to point a way to that life, to guide others to it, to indicate its incomparable splendor. It is man's destiny to speak, to articulate experience, to form a culture through language: and it is man's highest destiny to realize the ground of his own being. And here, for most persons, language is indispensable. Plotinus, the great Neoplatanic philosopher, expresses it exactly in these words:
[The Truth is] 'Not to be told; not to be written:' in our writing and telling we are but urging towards it: out of discussion we call to vision: to those desiring to see, we point the path: our teaching is of the road and the traveling; the seeing must be the very act of one that has made this choice.7
Religious language is a teaching language; it doesn't so much reveal the nature of the Divine as it communicates to others the fruit of experience. It addresses itself to the spirit seeking its way. Guru Nanak, and here especially let us place emphasis upon the term guru, spoke this language, and all of us, Sikh as well as non-Sikh, are richer because of the power and authority of his speaking.
REFERENCES
1Selections from the Sacred Writings of the Sikhs, trans. by Dr Trilochan Singh and others, revised by George S. Fraser; UNESCO Collection of Representative Works; Indian Series (London): George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1960, verse 3, p. 30. (Hereafter as Sacred Writings).
2Sacred Writings, verse 26, pp. 43-44.
3 Nicolas Cusanus, Of Learned Ignorance, trans. by Fr. Germain Herson, London: Routeledge & Kegan Paul, 1954, p. 11.
4 4. Meister, Eckhart, trans, by Raymond Blakney, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941, p. 96.
5Sacred Writings (Rag Maru), verse 44, p. 106.
6Sacred Writings, verse 19, pp. 38-39.
7 Ployinus, Enneads IV, 8, 4, trans. by Stephan Mackenna.
