Adrian B. Smith argues that divine energy does not come from a Being above, outside the Universe, but from an influence, a power, within it.
Throughout human history there has been an evolution in all cultures of humanity’s perception of the Ultimate Reality. The image of God as a transcendent superlative human being, with which we in the West are most familiar, is that of the Judeo-Christian tradition. But since images change with the advances of human knowledge, no one image can be set in concrete for all time. Not even that used by Jesus: God as Father.
Human beings think of gods as having been born, wearing clothes, speaking and having bodies like their own.
Ethiopians say the gods are black with snub noses.
Thracians say they have blue eyes and red hair. If cows and horses had hands they would draw pictures of the gods looking like cows and horses.
So humans can only think of God as having all the human attributes of love, justice, forgiveness, mercy, etc, to the ‘nth’ degree. As humans we can do no other. However, while God may not be beyond our experience or imagination, God, as the Ultimate Reality, is completely beyond our intellectual comprehension.
In the Middle Ages, the German mystic Meister Eckhart made the distinction between God and the Godhead. As a semi-non-realist I find this an essential distinction. The Godhead is way beyond our human comprehension, but as Christians we need some way of relating to the Divine and so we create an image of God with superlative human attributes.
In our own time the same distinction has been made by the theologian Paul Tillich writing of ‘the God above God’ as ‘the object of all mystical longing’. We find the same distinction made by Hindu teachers over two millennia ago who speak of ‘God Unmanifest’: Nirguna God, the eternal self-existing divine reality, and ‘God manifest’: Saguna God. This latter is God in relation to his creation expressed with human attributes but to a superlative degree: personality, omniscience, goodness, love, omnipotence.
The idea of God as Trinity (with God the Father ‘on top’) I understand as a sociological pattern, as just one more attempt to comprehend God. The infelicitous aspect of the Father image, is that it portrays a God who looks after us: an interventionist God. The notion favoured by those who like to imagine God as ‘sitting up there in a celestial phone booth’ to answer human prayers, does also evoke such questions as why God does not intervene to prevent natural disasters such as the tsunami, a drought, a flood; why are some people chosen to be rescued while others are allowed to perish; why is this young person taken in her prime, and why does another have to endure a prolonged agonising death? Why indeed does a Father God allow his children to suffer? Does God have favourites?
Gregory Baum wrote in Man Becoming: ‘God is not an object of which man may have an observer knowledge.
Why? Because God is present in the very man who knows God and in the very process of knowing God.’ Today we need a third way between the inaccessible, transcendent Godhead and the immanent human-like Father God: the next stage in God’s ‘evolution’. We need to let go of images and start from our human experience. We need a new name for God. ‘Man’s last and highest parting occurs when, for God’s sake, he takes leave of God’, wrote Meister Eckhart. With our expanded human knowledge of the Universe and its vastness, recognising that time and space are elements of creation, that in the sub-atomic field effects can come about without a cause, that everything in the Universe is in perpetual motion, nothing is still and everything is in constant change, we are led to ask where does the energy, the power driving this evolution come from? Not, as we have said, from a Being above, outside the Universe, but from an influence, a power, within.
Divine energies are not an intermediary between God and humanity, not a ‘thing’ that exists apart from God. They are, on the contrary God himself, God in action, God in his self-revelation, God indwelling his creation through his direct and unmediated presence. Meister Eckhart in the 14th century commented in an imaginative way: ‘What does God do all day long? God lies in a maternity bed giving birth’. In other words, God Manifest is energy.
Adrian B.Smith is a Catholic priest and member of SOF,author of 16 books among which are The God Shift:our Changing Perception of the Ultimate Mystery and most recently God,Energy and the Field.