God in Proof. Nathan Schneider
What, then, does God do? The most perfect thing one could do, says Aristotle: God thinks. But God can’t think about just anything. This perfect God can only think about what is perfect. “Therefore,” he concludes, “it must be of itself that the divine thought thinks, since it is the most excellent of things, and its thinking is a thinking on thinking.”18 With this formulation comes the ultimate apotheosis of the philosophers’ logos culture, a mind without a body, a selfthinking thought. At least so far as we mortals can know, this God is proof and nothing else.
∴
The Gospel of John, written toward the end of the first century, starts out this way: “In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God.” It is a passage, with logos translated as “Word,” that I first discovered in high school, in the pages of an old King James Bible my mother had been given by her father in his late-life pious phase—compact and quaintly illustrated, between beige leather covers that could zipper closed. These peculiar phrases caught me with their poetry and what I could make of their meaning. Recalling the first words of Genesis, the act of creation, the language of John’s Gospel implies that the whole fabric of the universe is reason, language, and logic—what the Greek philosophers were talking about. I kept reading more and more from the Bible and its exotic promises. A few verses later: “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!”19
A problem with trying to record this “history of my religious opinions”—in John Henry Newman’s phrase, betraying the narcissism of the task—is that they disappear. I began keeping a journal only a few days after my sixteenth birthday, which is the beginning of a record that can confirm or deny what fragments I actually remember. It started as an assignment in my first writing class. At night, before bed, I would sit with that spiral-bound blue notebook and do battle against the pages, scribbling one claim and denying it a sentence later, or twisting what was at first dead serious into a bad joke. I had something to say that only writing could draw out—something important, it felt like—but I didn’t know what yet. Day after day I tried.
God was a question I kept clear of at first. When forced to consider religion by something I had read or seen, the sentences became even more contorted than usual. Once, I went to a concert at a local Baptist church with a friend and wrote, I felt like we had just entered hostile territory. But the place reminded me, if only by contrast, of a thick book I had just read and barely understood, The Brothers Karamazov. I remembered some things the monk Zosima said about his love for his God. Maybe they should read this shit, I cussed. Believe in it or not, it is as true as anything could ever be. What in the book is true exactly, or how, I don’t say.
One of the very earliest entries I find in my journals opens bluntly: Today, my parents told me they are separating. They had brought me to my father’s office in the basement of our house to say so. I sat in the squeaky leather chair and listened as my father, mainly, talked from the far corner of the room and my mother, beside me, mainly stayed silent. That night my world bifurcated.
This was on top of the already shaky foundations of an uncomfortable body, an erratic mind, and the malaise of suburban life. I wrote about having this feeling of “skin hurting”—when I feel like there’s absolutely nothing I can do to make my life bearable again. It came and went, without warning or good reason, except adolescence. It’s a story familiar to many of us in this generation, we “millennials”: two houses, lonely neighborhoods, and the feeling of being at the mercy of forces beyond our understanding. From initial conditions like these, spelled out in the details of each particular case, each of us has our own story. Really—divorce or not, millennial or not—nobody evades this basic problem: out of the multitude of stage sets, other people, and stray ideas, a person must be made and a mind must be made up.
I could recognize myself in that word from John’s Gospel, sin; it was my private shame about one thing or another, and the universal but surprisingly difficult process of discovering that I was a mess. Through all this, I wrote and wrote in my journal. I’ve been playing with ideas of sin, I recorded one day. I never liked to say anything too specific, for fear of who might someday read it, but you can imagine. Religious words started becoming a code to myself. In confession, in absolution, and in starting anew I am recognizing with every moment my sins and my failures and my own cruelty to myself in expectation and of the world—and so on. These pages are tough going. Why do I burn so unsatisfied? I beg. I cannot imagine what satisfaction I require, what could possibly soothe my desires, what could bring me some peace.
I wasn’t sure I believed in God, exactly, but I could say “God” this and “God” that, writing to the word, with it, and through it. God, as logos, was a word before becoming a being or a belief. It was infinite love, the opposite of that irrepressible sin. Somehow the theological idiom started to work. It gave me a license to forgive myself that I didn’t have otherwise, and to keep trying to be better. Scattered pieces of thoughts coalesced into sense, and into sentences, making the entries gradually more readable to my eye today. It was as if John’s promise were coming true; there really was hope against sin to be found in a certain divine Word and, through it, a means of expression.
In early Christianity, Greek philosophy found both a challenger and a new lease on life. This new religion had one God (kind of like Aristotle’s unmoved mover) who created the world (kind of like Plato’s dēmiourgos) and promises eternal life (as, much of the time, did Plato). It became a popular speculation that the pagan philosophers, aided by the divine logos, must somehow have perceived the truth that Christ would reveal. But philosophy alone was not sufficient.
“Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom,” the apostle Paul wrote to his followers in the Greek city of Corinth, “but we proclaim Christ crucified.” 20 So there, he’s saying, love unto death. The image is shocking. It’s hard to do ordinary philosophy with a bloodied and tortured and executed God, one who forgave his executioners, who commands us to love our enemies. This is seemingly unthinkable. Yet, for Paul, “We have the mind of Christ.”21 Mind, logos—he’s preaching philosophy, crucified. Its first axiom is that act of self-sacrifice, made out of love.
∴
The new Christian synthesis found decisive expression in Augustine of Hippo, a fourth- and fifth-century North African bishop. He would become the most influential theologian of Latin Christendom. Augustine ended up placing grace-given faith on a pedestal above reason, but he didn’t do so for lack of thinking. In his Confessions, we meet a man who searches for truth through intellectual mazes, reading this, hearing that, and discussing this. Before becoming a Christian, Augustine had been a follower of Manicheanism, whose adherents professed to believe about God only what could be known through reason. But after meeting the famous Manichean leader Faustus, Augustine decided this claim was a fraud. “Nothing,” he wrote, “would remain stable in human society if we determined to believe only what can be held with absolute certainty.”22 Life cannot be lived by proof alone.
The Confessions itself attests to this. It takes ideas seriously but refuses to wrest them from personal history. It begins with his childhood and ends with a commentary on Genesis. Memories mix with a treatise about memory. He comes to his God by seeing what is so fragile and disordered in himself. Sound familiar? I can’t help but imitate it.
In one essay, “Concerning Faith of Things Not Seen,” Augustine compares believing in an unseen God to trusting a friend. We trust our friends because we want to and have to, before we really know they’re as good as their word. If we didn’t, they would have no chance to prove themselves. “And thus,” he writes, “when you commit yourself in order to prove, you believe before you prove.”23 He wanted to tame the longing for proof, to temper it.
This doesn’t mean, though, that there’s nothing to go on at all. In The Free Choice of the Will, he offers something more like an actual, and actually quite detailed, argument for God’s existence.24 It’s written as a dialogue. Like Plato’s cave, it takes the light of the sun as a metaphor for the one truth—and good and beauty—that illuminates the world. This truth must be a reality higher