Preamble: the incomprehensibility of God

God is incomprehensible. The uninitiated might suppose this is an objection to theism raised by modern secularists, but it is of course a completely mainstream theological doctrine within the Abrahamic tradition. In Judaism, God is utterly unlike the gods of the gentiles: too sacred even to be named – God is simply ‘I am that I am’ (Exodus 3:14), and transcends all human comprehension.Footnote ¹ In Islam, Allah has no less than ninety-nine names, but though we may be able to glimpse something of the attributes to which these names refer, it is held to be impossible for our limited human capacity to comprehend the essence of God.Footnote ² And in Christianity, as emphasized by the doctors of the Church from Augustine to Aquinas and beyond, God cannot be grasped or comprehended by the human mind – any attempt to suppose we had grasped God's nature would be a form of idolatry.Footnote ³

The God of traditional theism is thus not merely unimaginable in the sense that we cannot form a mental picture of God (and of course both Judaism and Islam prohibit any pictorial representation of God), but is beyond the bounds of human comprehension. So there seems to be at least a prima facie problem for the theist here: we are asked to believe in something that we cannot understand or conceive of. As Descartes puts it, when discussing his arguments for God's existence, we cannot conceive of God (Latin concipere), since by its very nature the finite mind cannot conceive of the infinite (Descartes (Reference Descartes1648), 14).

So far from being daunted by this idea of God as infinite, Descartes embraced it – possibly influenced by the fact that the infinite in the mathematical sphere, the numerical infinite, is an object of rational inquiry. Mathematicians would be the first to admit that infinity is not imaginable or even conceivable in any straightforward sense; yet they nonetheless discuss its properties, and indeed demonstrate things about it. Admittedly, mathematical reasoning about the infinite turns out to be beset with formidable paradoxes, starting with the simplest, the so-called Galilean Paradox, namely that some infinite sets appear to contain fewer members than others (for example, the set of even numbers contains fewer members than the set of positive integers); and similar paradoxes, from Zeno's onwards, have been seen to arise from infinite divisibility. The resulting labyrinth of puzzles and contradictions generated by mathematical infinity may not seem a promising model for how the human mind might approach the absolute infinity that is God. Nevertheless, the idea of infinity plays a key role in Descartes's account of the mind's journey towards knowledge of God in the Meditations, and I think his approach has something to teach us. I want to suggest that it can be a starting point for deepening our understanding of the religious quest – the paradoxical human search for that which, by its very nature, is incomprehensible to the human mind.

Descartes on infinite aspiration

‘By “God”,’ declares Descartes in the Third Meditation, ‘I understand a substance that is infinite . . .’ Most analytic treatments of the subsequent proof of God's existence focus on the technical terminology that is deployed – the distinction between ‘formal’ or intrinsic reality and ‘objective’ (or representative) reality, for example, or the scope of the so-called causal adequacy principle (that there must be at least as much reality or perfection in the cause of a given effect as can be found in the effect).Footnote ⁴ But although Descartes was obviously interested in this logical apparatus (indeed he was subsequently persuaded by some of his readers to recast his arguments formally, in strict ‘geometrical fashion’),Footnote ⁵ he nevertheless stressed that the formal validity of the arguments was not the whole story. The arguments were not to be construed simply as abstract patterns of inference, to be studied on the blackboard, as it were. On the contrary, Descartes insisted that in order fully to grasp what is involved, each of us must put him- or herself in the place of the meditator, take up the first-person perspective, and individually tread the path from self-awareness to awareness of God.Footnote ⁶ This goes at least some way to support the interpretation of the Third Meditation offered by Emmanuel Levinas (Levinas (Reference Levinas1961), sect. I, pt A, §5), according to which what is going on is not so much a series of inferences as a direct personal encounter – what Levinas calls an ‘interruption’ of thought, when the finite mind comes up against the infinite – something it cannot include or contain (ibid.).Footnote ⁷

It is important to see that the experience that Descartes's meditator undergoes here is not a matter of passive intellectual contemplation, but comes about through a conative or desiderative movement, a dynamic forward thrusting of the mind. ‘When I turn my eye upon myself,’ the meditator says in the Third Meditation, ‘I understand that I am a thing which is incomplete and dependent on another, and which aspires without limit to ever greater and better things’ (Descartes (Reference Descartes, Cottingham, Stoothoff and Murdoch1641), AT VII 51: CSM II 35). The res cogitans, the ‘thinking thing’ that is me, is not merely an intellectual being with certain cognitive properties like ideas and beliefs, but also a desiderative being, a being with aspirations and desires – desires, moreover, that stretch forward without limit. Descartes underlines the fact that as soon as I become aware of my own existence, through the Cogito, I become aware of my imperfection; for obviously there are many things I don't know, and can't achieve, but which I should like to know and to achieve. And here Descartes's meditator dwells on how the very fact of my doubting and of my desiring presupposes that I lack something (AT VII 46: CSM II 31). Awareness of my deficiencies is, for Descartes, implicit awareness of my creatureliness, awareness of my dependence on something of which I fall short. And in an important but often overlooked passage in the Third Meditation the meditator reflects on what it would be like if he were not a creature, not dependent in this way: ‘If I derived my existence from myself and were independent of every other being then I should neither doubt nor want, nor lack anything at all; for I should have given myself all the perfections of which I have any idea, and thus I should myself be God’ (AT VII 48: CSM II 33).

There is a faint echo here of the temptation described in Genesis (3:5): ‘ye shall be as Gods’. But perhaps what we have here is just an extreme form of a primal yearning that is inseparable from our human nature. To be human is to be dissatisfied – not merely to be subject to urgent specific needs and desires that need assuaging, like the other animals, nor even just to be reflectively aware of those needs and desires. To be human is to be, in a certain sense, insatiable: to know that that even when all those specific needs are met we will still lack something, will still be incomplete, reaching forward towards something more than we now are (see Ellis (Reference Ellis2013) ).

And yet, paradoxically, that towards which we consciously reach out is something we can never fully grasp or comprehend. Descartes dealt with this apparent paradox by invoking a distinction in mathematics between the infinite and the indefinite. We cannot conceive of the infinite, but we can certainly conceive of a series stretching on indefinitely. If you recite the sequence of positive integers you know you could go on counting indefinitely – you would never reach the largest number. The process is, so to speak, open-ended. Similarly, as Descartes observed in an interview he gave to a young Dutchman, Frans Burman, in 1648:

So as a finite and incomplete being, who knows himself or herself to be finite and incomplete, I have a sense that it would always be possible, and desirable, to add a bit more to my resources. I would like to have a bit more knowledge, or a bit more benevolence, than I now possess; and then a bit more than that, and so on indefinitely. But behind this indefinite process, dimly grasped in its very open-endedness or incompleteness, we seem to glimpse the shadowy eminence of infinite perfection – or, as Descartes expresses it in the penultimate paragraph of the Third Meditation, ‘the very one of whom the idea is within me, that is, the possessor of all the perfections which I cannot grasp, but in my thought can somehow attain to, and who is subject to no defects whatsoever’ (Descartes (Reference Descartes, Cottingham, Stoothoff and Murdoch1641), AT VII 52: CSM II 35, emphasis supplied).

We cannot, says Descartes in the original Latin, grasp or comprehend (comprehendere) this infinite perfection, but we can somehow reach out to it, or in a certain manner attain to it (quocunque modo attingere). He elsewhere compares God to a mountain which you cannot ‘comprehend’, or put your arms round, but which you can approach and touch.Footnote ⁸ This is not an article on Cartesian interpretation, so I will not here spend more time unravelling what exactly the historical Descartes might have meant by this. What I want to do instead is to explore a thought that is perhaps hinted at in Descartes's account of the finite mind's open-ended aspirations to reach towards infinite perfection The thought is this: that something prima facie non-cognitive and non-epistemic, namely the desire for God, might have a cognitive and epistemic role to play. To put it crudely, perhaps desire can be our human way, or a human way, whereby our mind can ‘in a certain manner attain to’ the infinite perfection that is God.

Insatiable desire?

Many of our desires are what one might call rationally grounded – they relate to needs that must be satisfied if we are to survive either individually or as a species (desire for food, for example, or the desire to reproduce). Others are irrational – either pathological urges for what is downright harmful to our flourishing, or else akratic lapses that make us sacrifice our true long-term welfare for specious or evanescent gratifications. Perhaps psychotherapy could help us deal with the former, and good old-fashioned training in Kantian or Aristotelian virtue help us master the latter. But as we have already noted, there are deeper, more restless, more intractable, more existential longings that seem inseparable from our very humanity. If all our rational wants were satisfied, and all our irrational urges were either cured, or else virtuously controlled or retrained, we would still, it seems, feel the pounding of the ‘unquiet heart’, as Augustine called it,Footnote ⁹ that is our human birthright. We would still reach forward and long for that which, however far we progress, will still be just beyond our grasp.Footnote ¹⁰

For Augustine (as emerges in the famous passage in the Confessions where he speaks of the unquiet heart), this insatiable desire is a function of our creatureliness, and can be assuaged or quieted only through union with our creator. Such union, by its nature, lies on the very horizon of human existence (hence in standard Christian theology the beatific vision remains a destination to be sought in faith rather than brought into view by reason or observation).Footnote ¹¹ And yet – though Augustine himself never explicitly put it this way – it may perhaps be that in the very character of this strange open-ended longing we humans experience, we are able to attain to a kind of awareness of the divine.

Before developing this thought, I want first to take a critical look at alternative, secular ways of coming to terms with the deep existential yearning that is the signature of our humanity. Friedrich Nietzsche has, for better or worse, come to be stereotyped as the prophet of the modern secularist world-view, though whether he is actually best thought of as a non-religious thinker is a moot point. What is true is that he was perhaps the first fully to realize the existential horror that awaits humankind in a world where the sun has been unchained from its moorings (as the madman's story in The Gay Science puts it (Nietzsche (Reference Nietzsche and Williams1882), bk III, § 125), and all hope of an ultimate divine centre or gravitational anchor for our human existence has been abandoned. This may be the meaning (or part of the meaning) of the ‘Roundelay’ in Zarathustra, where mankind wakes up in the deep midnight and realizes that the world is no longer a secure home for us. We are left with a pain, which is also a strange joy or longing, ‘deeper than heart's agony’:

And here in the final two lines is the yearning for joy that reaches on for ever, to ‘deep, deep eternity’. The late romantic period is in many ways defined by this strange, eternal longing, which is now directed not to God, but to finding an alternative source of ultimate meaning within the merely human world. Erotic love typically emerges as the prime candidate here, and what Nietzsche's contemporary Richard Wagner depicts in Tristan und Isolde represents perhaps the most extreme version of this idea, where only death can satisfy the insatiable erotic longing of the lovers.

But of course Isolde's Liebestod is nothing short of insanity, however beautiful the music, however brilliantly the unresolved mounting cadences capture the ecstatic madness of an indefinitely deferred climax. For the idea of suicide as the only fit culmination of erotic longing, when looked at simply as an idea, shorn of the transfiguring power of Wagner's musical genius, is a reductio ad absurdum of the concept of insatiable erotic longing. Eros, to be sure, is a vitally important and awesomely powerful force in human life, but (as is brilliantly explored the great literary giants from Euripides in The Bacchae right down to Tolstoy in Anna Karenina) it cannot in itself provide a secure grounding for human existence. It is too unstable, too extreme, to subject to what the literary critic and translator J. B. Leishman called ‘intense one-sidedness’.Footnote ¹³ Not for nothing does Shakespeare's Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet warn the lovers:

There is, as so often in Shakespeare, a deep ambivalence here. Part of us wants to say that the Friar is being rather staid, too cautious, too like the caricature Aristotelian, with his allegiance to the golden mean, aurea mediocritas, a kind of dreary mediocrity to which our ‘romantic’ side wants to retort, on Romeo and Juliet's behalf, ‘No! Go for it!’. But at another level we also sense that the issue here goes much deeper than the rather banal question of whether the passions need to be moderated. The key sentence is in the final line of the quotation – ‘Long love doth so’ – which reminds us that loving, truly loving, cannot be understood in purely episodic terms, as a crisis, as an explosion, as the earth moving, but concerns two human beings who, in order really to love each other as opposed to merely being erotically intertwined, need to learn and grow together, over time, in joy and sorrow, in conflict and reconciliation, in ‘the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other’ as Thomas Cranmer's resonant wording has it.Footnote ¹⁵

One of the costs of deifying Eros is to ignore this vital ‘diachronic’ dimension of love. I say ‘deifying’, which is not quite the right word, since of course Eros is a god already; the danger is rather that of elevating him to the status of supreme god. The Greeks and Romans were wiser than the Wagnerian romantics by representing Eros or Cupid as an irritating little boy with bow and arrows.Footnote ¹⁶ Perhaps that's going too far the other way, but the point is that Eros is a power that needs to be respected at our peril, but which cannot carry the weight of being the ultimate repository of meaning, or the best expression of our insatiable human longing.Footnote ¹⁷

Some prosaic facts are in order here. Biologically speaking, erotic desire is very far from insatiable – it culminates in satisfied coition; and again, biologically speaking, the telos of coition is reproduction; and the telos of reproduction is the birth and raising of children. This reminder should not be construed in a rigidly prescriptive way: erotic passion can of course be a valid element in a flourishing human life when it is not playing its biological role as an engine of procreation. But it cannot retain this validity if it is decoupled from the wider moral context of human caring, commitment, and responsibility. From the moral point of view, Eros has to been seen as but one component in the larger scheme of things; and this larger scheme of things is irreducibly diachronic. Sustaining a psychologically and physically intimate human relationship is a long and complex undertaking, requiring effort and sustained sacrifice, and the ever-present risk of pain, only made possible because it is an enduring expression of love – and indeed, in the paradigm case of a spousal relationship, an expansion of love, so as to embrace children and, in due course, children's children.Footnote ¹⁸ The ideal of the Liebestod is the opposite of this, not an expansion of love but an introverted – albeit mutually introverted – contraction, a contraction so extreme that it ends in mutual self-annihilation.

More might be said about the need for a corrective to the destructive erotic romanticism that, in the century and a half following Wagner, has seemed so alluring to those enmeshed in our increasingly egocentric culture. But it would also be a mistake to suppose that love in its more outgoing and diachronic manifestation, as organically growing and evolving marital and family love, or perhaps as Aristotelian affection-friendship or philia, is qualified to serve as the ultimate vehicle for the insatiable existential longing that is so deeply ingrained in the human make-up. Noble ideals though conjugal love or close friendship at their best may be, it would equally be a mistake, a piece of idolatry, to deify them. For, as Nietzsche surely saw, the deep longing that ‘wants eternity’ is an expression of the search for a metaphysical grounding for our existence, a longing for ‘ontological rootedness’, as Simon May has aptly called it (May (Reference May2011), ch. 1); and to suppose that spouse, or family, or friends can supply this need is a kind of category mistake. It puts a monstrously unfair weight on the flawed and fallible and purely human recipients of our devotion, whether erotic, or familial, or friendship-based, to suppose that they can be suitable addressees for the cry heard in countless pop songs: ‘you're all I'll ever need’. In effect, it places them in the false position of having to sate a longing that cannot be satisfied, so that even were they to meet all the human needs that can possibly be expected of them, they have still not done enough.

Encountering the infinite

The erotic model of infinite longing which I have just been criticizing can, as we have seen, be associated with the late romanticism of Wagner. But there is another, and much older, conception which gives us, I think, a better model for understanding the strange human quest for the infinite. What I have in mind has to do with ‘spiritual experience’, or the experience of what is sometimes called the ‘sacred’. What is characteristic of such experience, as described in many religious and literary sources, is a an intense and ecstatic focusing on a particular aspect of the world, but in combination with a profound sense of this particular moment being as it were a window through which we can glimpse something infinitely greater, something eternal or transcendent. A devotional example can be seen in the fifteenth-century carol to the Virgin ‘There is no rose of such virtue’, where we find the lines:

Or in less explicitly religious terms, William Blake, in his well-known poem ‘Auguries of Innocence’, speaks of how in such moments we are able

I have elsewhere discussed how such experiences are only very inadequately characterized by the modern jejune label ‘aesthetic’, one reason for this being that they have an inherently moral dimension.Footnote ²⁰ Blake's poem is a good example, since the poem soon passes from extolling our awestruck responses to the beauty of the natural world to a fierce prophetic denunciation of what happens when the natural and human world is not properly respected:

In mistreating our fellow-creatures we violate something sacred. In using others as instruments for our gratification, in our failure to respond to the ‘face of the other’, we enact a kind of desecration, a trampling on the sacred (a theme eloquently explored in Levinas – though for reasons I won't go into here he prefers to talk not of the ‘sacred’ but the ‘holy’ (see Caruana (Reference Caruana2006) ). If we employ Kantian terminology, what confronts us here is that which inspires awe, what Kant called Achtung (Kant (Reference Kant and McGregor1788), pt 1, bk 1, ch. 3). Another way of putting the idea is to say that we have a sense of being confronted with something that demands a response from us. The modern notion of ‘normativity’, beloved of professional philosophers (who nevertheless struggle to explain it in naturalistic terms), is but one way of trying to get at the notion of this kind of authoritative demand – something that exerts a pull on us, whether we like it or not. We may turn away, we may resist the pull, we may even ignore it, but the pull remains (see Cottingham (Reference Cottingham and McPherson2017) ).

It is important to stress that this cannot plausibly be explained merely as a motivational pull – like an urge to eat, or to scratch an itch. For a motive, even if it is a rather exalted one, like a wish to serve others, or to contemplate a magnificent landscape, is essentially contingent on my subjective preference schedule. If that schedule were adjusted – for example because I am tempted or become corrupted and feel a stronger urge in another direction – the motivational force would diminish or disappear. But the type of pull we are talking about in the case of our responses to the sacred is a normative rather than a purely motivational pull. It retains its full force even if my inclinations change. Footnote ²²

There is nothing in the natural world as studied by science that is remotely like this kind of normative pull. It is true that there are many forces in nature that are mysterious or that we do not fully understand: the force of gravity, familiar from physics, and from daily experience, is a classic example. But the kind of pull involved in such natural phenomena is a causally efficacious one – if we step over a cliff we fall to the bottom, like it or not. Human inclinations and motivations as studied in the psychological sciences fall into the same general category. It is true that they can be resisted – at least for a while – but they still exert a causal power. A thirsty man is motivated, ‘moved’, to pick up the glass of water; and scientists can study how the fluid deficiency in the body sends signals to the brain in such a way as to produce a powerful tendency to drink. So in the normal case, where there is no impediment or countervailing motivation (such as fear, as when an animal is scared to go the river because it smells a predator), then the desire is causally efficacious: you feel thirsty, and this moves you to drink.

But the call of normativity is completely unlike this; and we recognize this, in part, by the special character of the human desire or longing to respond to it. In the case of the thirsty man there is a biological telos or goal, the slaking of the thirst, and an internal mechanism which generates a desire to drink, which in turn moves us towards that goal. But in the case of a normative call, there is on the part of the subject a recognition of a good towards which we ought to move, which we ought to pursue, whether in fact we actually do so or not. We humans seem to have some ability to recognize, and to feel the pull of, genuine, objective, ‘irreducibly normative’ reasons,Footnote ²³ which retain their force whether we are motivated to pursue them or not. If the naturalistic world as studied by science cannot accommodate such reasons, and if alternative non-naturalist accounts are implausible (one reason for their implausibility, being that, as Tim Mulgan puts it, they make genuine objective value an ‘isolated anomaly’ in the cosmos),Footnote ²⁴ then the theistic alternative seems at the very least worthy of consideration. For theism presents a cosmic picture in which there is something ‘not of ourselves’ as Matthew Arnold puts it,Footnote ²⁵ which continues to call us even though we may want to stop our ears – as in the story of Samuel in the Hebrew Bible, who tries to go back to sleep, but is constantly awakened by the insistent demand to respond, until he finally answers ‘Speak Lord, for your servant heareth’ (I Samuel 3:10).

The story could be interpreted in very straightforward terms – the young man just hears the voice. But the experience of the divine that is implied in such narratives is no mere passive reception of data, but involves a forward accepting movement of the will, a readiness to respond and to align oneself with the good that is offered. Perhaps the paradigm case of such a response in Scripture is that of Mary, as narrated in Luke.Footnote ²⁶ It is equally important that the kind of ‘desire’ we are talking about is not (as we have seen) an endogenous wish, or a mere motivational thrust, but arises out of a dynamic two-way process. As we are ‘drawn forward’, we feel an awe or longing which, quite unlike that of an ordinary motive or appetite, directs us towards something we do not fully grasp, and which exceeds our capacity to grasp. We are back with the logic of the Third Meditation in Levinas's illuminating reading of Descartes, where the meditator's thought is ‘interrupted’ by an infinite presence it cannot contain.Footnote ²⁷ Or as Levinas expresses it,

This brings us back to the restless human desire for the infinite, with which we began. We yearn for something beyond ourselves which we can never reach. Perhaps this is in one way reminiscent of what happens in an erotic relationship. For notwithstanding my earlier rejection of the romantic notion that eros can function as a grounding for our human existence, there is at least this much analogy between erotic desire and the desire for the infinite. In desiring another person, you are desiring something irreducibly other – that is, an independent, autonomous subject of consciousness that you can never encompass or fully comprehend. In the same way, in our desire for the good, we recognize that the object of our desire is independent of, and wholly irreducible to, our subjective set of desires or inclinations. And what is more, we respond to it by implicitly acknowledging its authoritative power: we recognize it as something that calls us forward, requires us to change, to reach towards something better than we now are.

So what I have been calling the ‘desiderative’ movement of the mind is bound up with the recognition of an authoritative power, and hence can described, as it is by Descartes in the (often overlooked) final paragraph of the Third Meditation,Footnote ²⁹ as a kind of passionate ‘adoration’ or awe. Why do I use the (in English) relatively unfamiliar adjective ‘desiderative’? This is partly to draw attention to the original Latin noun desiderium and its cognate verb desiderare, perhaps familiar from several famous choral settings of Psalm 42: Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum (‘Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks, so longeth my soul after thee, O Lord’). Desiderare has special connotations that are absent in the ordinary Latin words for wanting (cupire) or appetition (appetere). Desiderium, corresponding to the term πόθος in Classical Greek, or Verlangen in German, signifies not just wanting something but yearning for what is absent or just out of reach (one of its earliest uses was to refer to the painful yearning of the bereaved for a departed loved one). Iain McGilchrist has pointed out in connection with the corresponding Anglo-Saxon term langian, ‘to long for’, that there is something about longing that distinguishes it from mere wanting. Longing is ‘not an aim, with the ultimate goal of acquisition’, and it does not necessarily involve ‘an explicit vision of what it is that is longed for’ (McGilchrist (Reference McGilchrist2009), 208).

St Augustine is fully alive to this dimension when he describes the longing for God not as a nagging internal appetite, but as a free, expansive yearning that reaches a crescendo only after many long days of eager expectation:

The biblical quotation about seeking the face of the Lord in this passage is from the Psalms (Psalm 27 [26]: 8), and Augustine's reflections on the verse in question are partly prefigured in St Paul's speech to the Athenians about the ‘unknown God’: ‘God made human beings so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, for he is not far from each of us’ (Acts 17:22).

But the search involved here is not to be conceived as if we were setting out like scientists, looking for evidence and eventually finding it. That is not at all what religious experience is like. In many of the Old Testament prophets (examples include Isaiah, Amos, and Hosea),Footnote ³¹ the repeated message is that the task of human beings is not to satisfy themselves of the evidence for God, or to test the hypothesis that there is a God, but, rather, earnestly to seek him. This earnest longing, as I have been arguing, is bound up with our keen awareness of our finitude and our weakness. In our insatiable yearning to become better, in our reaching towards the infinite, we already are (in Descartes's phrase) ‘in a certain way attaining to’ (quodammodo attingere) the divine, even though we cannot fully comprehend what it is we are yearning for.Footnote ³²