Tag Archives: Credo in unum Deum

Words Fail: Thinking the Divine Name(s)

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“… “to think God without any conditions, not even that of Being.” — Jean-Luc Marion

It seems that we can use no words at all to refer to God.

— Thomas Aquinas [i]

As soon as there are words … direct intuition no longer has any chance. 

— Jacques Derrida [ii]   

Dionysius the Areopagite, a sixth-century Syrian mystic, made the classic case for theological modesty. We should not presume to say too much about God. When it comes to what he called the “Unutterable,” he said, words fail. An encounter with divine reality leaves us speechless. 

“Reject all that belongs to the perceptible and intelligible … and lift yourself as far as you are able to the point of being united in unknowing with the One who is beyond all being and all knowledge.” [iii]

Dionysius’ insistence on divine ineffability was a subversive counterbalance to the theological project of the ancient ecumenical councils, which devoted intense intellectual energy to the pursuit of dogmatic precision. Words, phrases, even individual letters had been fiercely debated over the course of several centuries. With the stakes so high, no one wanted to get it wrong. But Dionysius’ caution about saying too much would have a lasting influence on both mystics and theologians from the Middle Ages to post-modernity. 

Thomas Aquinas, whose exhaustive systematic theology, Summa Theologica, used 1.8 million words to speak of God, issued a striking caution in one of his shorter works: “as to the mode of signification [for God] goes, every name is defective.” [iv] A modern Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, agreed, since transcendence “presents itself to us in the mode of withdrawal, of silence, of distance, of being always inexpressible, so that speaking of it, if it is to make sense, always requires listening to its silence.” [v]  That kind of listening without making words is hard, when our heads are so full of ideas. But if we desire accuracy, we must try, as Jean-Luc Marion has said, “to think God without any conditions, not even that of Being.” [vi]

It’s not just that God is unknowable; language itself is chronically imprecise—“a raid on the inarticulate,” T. S. Eliot called it, “with shabby equipment always deteriorating.” [vii] But of the One who is “the Wholly Other, for whom we have no words, and whom all our poor symbols insult,” can we say anything at all? [viii]

The “veil” before the Altar of Presence in the author’s worship installation, “Via Negativa.”

Even Dionysius admitted the necessity of God-talk. We need to understand something about ultimate Reality if we are to be in relation with it. In Divine Names, Dionysius wrote at length about the attributes of God, and so have countless Christian thinkers before or since. While God is always beyond our conceptual reach, we still have religious experiences through which we learn something of who—and how—God is for us. Sometimes we speak in literal terms, as when we say that God loves us. God’s love may be more perfect than human love and mediated in a different way, but it’s love all the same. 

Metaphors, on the other hand, use something familiar to tell us about the unfamiliar. God is not literally a shepherd, a shield, or shade from the heat, but God has been known to be like these things in some way. Those three are all biblical images, but every age provides new metaphors. A British youth minister told me that skateboarders use their experience of what they call “flow” as a kind of divine name. But metaphors are only provisional—“scaffoldings around invisible reality,” in Jerzy Peterkiewicz’s aptly metaphorical image, “liable to vanish” when pressed to become literal. [ix]

What can I say, my God, my life, my holy joy?
Or what can anyone say who speaks of you?”

— St. Augustine, Confessions [x]

St. Augustine’s questions were on my mind when I composed an experimental “creed” for an alternative liturgy at our local Episcopal parish.[xi] The Nicene Creed, crafted by the fourth-century Council of Nicaea to be a concise summary of orthodox belief, is still recited in the Sunday rites of most liturgical churches. Its insertion into the liturgy 150 years after the Council resulted from a now-forgotten doctrinal quarrel, and some of today’s liturgical theologians question its continued use in the rite. [xii]

My own intent, however, was not to critique the Nicene Creed per se, but to explore God-talk in terms of the One and the Many, drawing upon something Thomas Aquinas said about the names of God:

“[We] see the necessity of giving to God many names. For, since we cannot know Him naturally except by arriving at Him from His effects, the names by which we signify His perfection must be diverse, just as the perfections belonging to things are found to be diverse. Were we able to understand the divine essence itself as it is and give to it the name that belongs to it, we would express it by only one name. This is promised to those who will see God through His essence: “In that day there shall be one Lord, and His name shall be one” (Zech. 14:9). [xiii]

I divided the assembly into three parts. Each droned the same Latin text, slowly, in 4 beats: Crèdo in ùnum Dè-ùm (“I believe in one God,” the opening words of the Nicene Creed). They sang on a single tone in unison, but in three harmonizing pitches, with a 2-beat silence between the repetitions. As they continued their droning ground, I both chanted and spoke a descant of divine names.

The people’s repeated line was the One; my recitation of diverse names was the Many. The division of parts was a reverse complementarity: many sang the One and one sang the Many. I drew the names from many sources—hymns, prayers, theologians, mystics, poets, and one filmmaker—absorbed into my own prayer and preaching over the years. I can’t remember exactly where all of the names came from. Some you will recognize. A few sprang from my own religious experience. 

A divine name?

The torrent of words, coming and going so quickly, evoked multiple associations, perspectives and meanings without letting any single “name” linger long enough to permit an idolatrous fixation, as if it alone were the one most accurate or true. No sooner did a “name” appear than it was replaced by another—affirmation and negation in a perpetual dance, just the way Dionysius liked it. People told me later that they stopped trying to grasp individual words and simply sank into the flow, surrendering to the meditative state generated by their repetitive chanting and silent breathing. 

If any liturgists and musicians out there want to try your own variations, please feel free. Trained singers might add more complex harmonies (think Arvo Pärt), and a speech choir could explore creative arrangements of the many names. And of course, you or your community might want to compile a fresh list of names from your own traditions and personal experiences. That this particular list is woefully incomplete is part of the point.

Credo in unum Deum …

Holy and eternal God, 
Beauty so ancient and so new,
Source and sustainer of everything that is. 

Author of life, mender of destinies, 
desire of every heart, the meaning of every story.

Mystery of the world,
most deeply hidden and yet most near,
fount of our being, inexhaustible and overflowing. 
Grace abounding.

Constant and just, wiser than despair, 
joyful Yes against all negation.  

The great I am, beyond all knowing,
yet called by many names:

Creator, Sustainer, Pardoner, Gift-giver,
Goodness, Wisdom, Mercy, Truth, Faithfulness, Blessing,
Alpha and Omega, Ruler of time and history,
ineffable and untamable Spirit.

Presence. 
The depth in every moment.

Eloquent silence, dazzling darkness, blinding radiance,
so far beyond us—and so deep within us, 
in whom we live and move and have our being.

Holy One: Thou—Abba! Thou—Amma! 
Love who loves us. 

Our true and lasting home. 

+

Jesus Christ, the Given One, eternally begotten,
who by the power of the Holy Spirit
became incarnate from the Virgin Mary:
fully human and fully divine.

Word made flesh, to live and die as one of us,
that we might see and know the self-diffusive love of God,
and realize the fullness of our humanity. 

As God’s icon, the face of love for us, 
Jesus renounced privilege and power,
living without weapons or self-protection,
giving himself away for the sake of others:
servant and sufferer, healer and helper,
Savior and friend! 

Handed over to the enemies of life,
Jesus died on the cross.
But on the third day he rose again,
breaking the power of death,
opening the way for us
to live in God forever.

+

Holy Spirit, Love’s consuming flame,
the eager, wild wind of divine surprise: 

Quickening power, creative energy, inner light,
divine imagination, disturber of the peace,
dearest freshness deep down things,
the strong force of love, drawing the universe into communion.

Sustainer, Sanctifier,
Counselor, Comforter,
Dancer.

The breath in every prayer, 
the longing in every heart.

+

Holy and undivided Trinity, 
your catholic and apostolic Church belongs to you alone.
We give thanks for the renewing power of our baptism,
making us Christ’s own forever—forgiven and free.

Grant us to live always in the light of resurrection,
overflowing with love and steadfast in hope.

May the faith we confess in this assembly
be visible in the lives we lead and the choices we make. 

Let all the people say: Amen!

Photographs by the author. The view of the sky through the arch of the south porch baldaquin of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Cecilia in Albi, France, is an image for the limits of theological speech: the stairs of language take us upward, but only so far. After that: a wordless sky. You can read about the “Via Negativa” installation here. Arne Pihl’s “Gentle” sculpture (2014-15) was part of an installation in a razed lot in Seattle, responding to questions about the future of a changing neighborhood.

[i] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1a.13.1. Thomas quotes from Dionysius to support this statement.

[ii] Jacques Derrida cited in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Religion, ed. William J. Wainwright (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 489.

[iii] Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology 1.1, cited in Olivier Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1993), 247. The anonymous mystic’s name is a pseudonym taken from Acts 17:34 to suggest apostolic authority.

[iv] Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles 30.3. Italics mine.

[v] Karl Rahner, S. J., Foundations of Christian Faith (1983), p. 64, cited in Thomas M. Kelly, Theology at the Void: The Retrieval of Experience (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2002), 130.

[vi] Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being (1991), p. 45, cited in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Religion, 484.

[vii] T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” in Four Quartets.

[viii] Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (Oxford: Oneworld Publications 1999/2008, orig. published 1911), 337.

[ix] Jerzy Peterkiewicz, The Other Side of Silence: The Poet at the Limits of Language (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 45.

[x] St. Augustine, Confessions 1.4. The full passage has a wonderful list of divine names: Summe, optime, potentissime, omnipotentissime, misericordissime et justissime, secretissime et presentissime, pulcherrime et fortissime; stabilis et incomprehensibilis; immutabilis, mutans omnia. Numquam novis, nunquam vetus, … Semper agens, semper quietus; colligens et non egens: portans et implens et protogens; creans et nutrigens et perficiens: quaerens cum nihil desit tibi … Quid dicimus, Deus meus, vita mea, dulcedo mea sacnta? Aut quid dicit aliquis, cum de te dicit? (“Highest, best, most potent, most omnipotent [transcendent], most merciful and most just, most deeply hidden and yet most near, fairest, yet strongest, steadfast, yet ungraspable, unchangeable, yet changing all things; never new, yet never old.… ever busy, yet ever at rest; gathering yet needing not; bearing, filling, guarding; creating, nourishing, and protecting; seeking though you have no wants … What can I say, my God, my life, my holy joy? Or what can any say who speaks of you?”).

[xi] St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, WA.

[xii] In his 1995 commentary on the liturgy at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, Richard Fabian writes that Peter the Fuller, Patriarch of Antioch, whose Monophysite party was defeated at the Council of Chalcedon (451), inserted the creed into the cathedral liturgy to show his loyalty to the earlier Council of Nicaea (325). Though he was soon deposed, the creed remained, “a massive monument to doctrinal quarrels ever since.” Its inclusion was resisted in the western church, especially in England, but slipped into English worship in the 15th century, and incorporated into the Book of Common Prayer in the 16th. Today, some question its lack of inclusive language as well as the ancient Greek terminology whose original meanings are obscure to many. And some liturgists wonder about its effect on the natural flow of the rite. (Worship at St. Gregory’s, All Saints Company, 25-26).

[xiii] Summa contra Gentiles, 31.4. As to just how many names there are, I’ve always liked the number from Arthur C. Clarke’s short story, “The Nine Billion Names of God.”

The Names of God

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Emperor Constantine and bishops holding the Nicene Creed.

Many years ago, on the slopes of Mt. Sinai, I met a monk from the Orthodox monastery at the foot of the mountain. Michael was a young American, but he rebuffed my curiosity about his journey from a Pennsylvania childhood to an ascetic community in the Egyptian wasteland. “A monk’s past is meaningless,” he said brusquely. Embracing the desert spirituality of renunciations, he had little patience for the inessential. He was terse, acerbic, and opinionated, as harsh and unyielding as the landscape. I was intimidated by this strange and demanding figure. My own thoughts and questions began to seem weightless and trivial in the face of such passionate certainty.

Michael reassured me that Anglicans were his favorite schismatics, but our novelties and lack of theological rigor were clearly not up to his standards. “We do have the Nicene Creed in common,” I said, trying to find a point of agreement. “We recite it in the Sunday liturgy.” I was wrong about that, Michael insisted. Since we use the western aberration of the Filioque clause, we are not really saying the Nicene Creed, but only a defective imitation of it.[i]

In an ecumenical spirit, I said I was happy to defer to the eastern Church on the matter of the Filioque. “Not the eastern Church,” Michael shot back. “It’s the undivided universal Church.” He was fond of absolutes. But what did I expect to find in the wilderness––comfortable small talk?

I thought of Michael last Sunday when I experimented with the creed at an outdoor eucharist on the shore of Puget Sound. We wanted to minimize the use of printed texts, so that the people could keep their eyes on their surroundings rather than the pages of a bulletin. That was easy in the case of repeated chants or choruses, but reciting a long text like the Nicene Creed posed a challenge.

Summary statements of the faith have been a part of Christian practice from the beginning. We are bound together by a shared story and shared understandings. St. Paul proposed a creed of exemplary brevity: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will find salvation” (Romans 10:9). Over the ensuing several centuries, creeds would grow longer and more controversial. The more they tried to say about the mysteries of faith, the more they became subject to critical scrutiny and debate.

Although the liturgical use of creeds remains obscure in its origins, making common declarations of belief eventually came to seem a natural function of the worship assembly as a way of self-definition and communal bonding: “This is why we’re here. This is the story and the reality we belong to.”

Even though individual worshippers may quibble about language and terminology, or differ in their precise understandings of creedal formulations, the fact that we recite a creed together is perhaps more important than its content. What we say about our faith certainly does matter, but unanimous agreement about mysteries beyond all human knowing is not what binds us together. Faith is more relational than propositional. As the Byzantine preface to the Nicene Creed puts it:

So, brothers and sisters, while we have time,
let us love one another,
that we may with one heart and mind
confess our faith.

My concept for the creed in the beach liturgy was to have the assembly chant, slowly and repeatedly, the first words of the Nicene Creed: Credo in unum Deum (I believe in one God). Over this unifying sonic ground a cantor would utter a diverse series of words and phrases expressing the names, attributes and activities of the Holy Trinity.

In one sense, the attempt was pure folly. The God greater than anything we can conceive cannot be captured in language. As the Tao says, “One who knows does not speak. One who speaks does not know.” But God, however hidden, wants to be known. God reveals. God addresses. God responds. And we in turn make our “raid on the inarticulate, / with shabby equipment always deteriorating / In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.”[i]

Creeds are communal work, hammered out in conversations and councils over time. And I, writing in my study, am no Nicaea. But there is still a certain collectivity in my Credo, a diversity of voices either consciously borrowed or lodged deep within me from forgotten sources. You will hear the Bible and Nicene Creed, Augustine, Bonaventure, Henry Vaughan, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Eberhard Jungel, Dorothee Soelle, John Bell, Terrence Malick and others. You may wish to differ, delete or add. Consider it a work in progress. Your reactions and reflections are welcome.

In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 short story, “The Nine Billion Names of God,” several American computer scientists are hired by a Tibetan monastery to program a computer that will speed up the spiritual labor of listing every one of the divine names. It’s a huge number, but the computers can make it happen in a matter of weeks.

‘Well, they believe that when they have listed all His names – and they reckon that there are about nine billion of them – God’s purpose will be achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won’t be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy.’

‘Then what do they expect us to do? Commit suicide?’

‘There’s no need for that. When the list’s completed, God steps in and simply winds things up … bingo!’

‘Oh, I get it. When we finish our job, it will be the end of the world.’

Chuck gave a nervous little laugh.‘That’s just what I said to Sam. And do you know what happened? He looked at me in a very queer way, like I’d been stupid in class, and said, “It’s nothing as trivial as that.”’

Clarke’s story ends with the scientists fleeing the monastery in the dark, just before the computers list the nine-billionth name. Dismissive of the “superstitious” beliefs behind the project, they were afraid the monks would blame them when the world failed to end as predicted. As they hurry down the mountain, one of them happens to look up. “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”

Well, for better or worse, I list my tentative and infinitely incomplete “names of God” below. Brother Michael of Sinai would undoubtedly disapprove. But I am not presuming to supplant the Nicene Creed. I only want to explore the possibilities––and the boundaries––of Christian language in liturgical and poetic forms. How can we make the naming of God a prayerful, contemplative and formative experience in a communal setting? What words take us deeper into the Mystery? Do any of them go astray, or have an expiration date when they become no longer fruitful? How do we recognize and welcome the divine names yet to be revealed?

 

Credo in unum Deum

Holy and eternal God, without beginning or end,
Beauty so ancient and so new,
Source of all that exists and the ground of all possibility.

Hidden yet revealed, author of life and mender of destinies,
desire of every heart, the meaning of every story.

Mystery of the world, fount of our being,
inexhaustible and overflowing, grace abounding.

Constant and just, wiser than despair,
the joyful Yes negating all nothingness.

The great I am, beyond all knowing,
the Unnamable whose names are many:
Creator, Sustainer, Pardoner, Gift-giver,
Goodness, Wisdom, Mercy, Truth, Faithfulness, Blessing,
Alpha and Omega, Ruler of time and history, ineffable and untamable Spirit.

Eloquent silence, dazzling darkness, blinding radiance,
so far beyond us and yet so deep within us,
in whom we live and move and have our being.

Abba, Amma, Father and Mother of us all: personal, relational, intimate;
Love who loves us,
our true home.

+

Jesus Christ, the Given One, eternally begotten of God,
who by the power of the Holy Spirit
became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
fully human and fully divine,
Word made flesh, living and dying as one of us,
that we might see and know
the self-diffusive love of God,
and at the same time
realize the full and perfected form of our humanity.

As God’s icon, the face of love for us,
Jesus renounced privilege and power,
living without weapons or self-protection,
giving himself away for the sake of others:
servant and sufferer, healer and helper,
shepherd and Savior, repairer of this broken world.

Handed over to the enemies of life,
Jesus died on the cross.
But on the third day he rose again,
breaking the power of death,
opening the way for us
to live in God forever.

+

Holy Spirit, Love’s consuming flame,
the eager, wild wind of divine surprise:

Quickening power, creative energy, inner light,
dearest freshness deep down things,
the strong force of love drawing all things into holy communion.

Life-Giver, Sustainer, Sanctifier, Counselor, Comforter, Awakener,
disturber of the peace, tender bond of affection,
voice of the voiceless, empowering fire of prophetic imagination,
the breath in every prayer, the longing in every heart.

+

Holy and undivided Trinity,
your catholic and apostolic Church belongs to you alone.
We give thanks for the renewing power of our baptism,
marking us as Christ’s own forever, forgiven and free.
And we pray that we may always live in the light of resurrection,
with steadfast hope for the glory to come.

May the faith we confess in this place
be made known in the lives we lead and the choices we make.

Amen!

 

 

 

 

 

[i]Filioque(“and the Son”) was added to the words, “who proceeds from the Father” in describing the “procession” (the movement of self-giving and receiving among the persons of the Holy Trinity––it’s complicated!) with respect to the Holy Spirit. The original Nicene Creed names the Father as the sole source of the Spirit’s procession, but “Filioque”––making the Son a partner in the Spirit’s procession––was later added to the text by the Western Church, creating a major source of conflict with the Eastern Church which continues to this day. The first draft of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer of 1979 tried to drop the Filioqueclause as a gesture of Christian unity with the East, but traditionalists voted it back in (later conventions have signaled the intention to omit it from any futurePrayer Book). I was present for that debate at the 1976 General Convention, which seemed more orderly and polite than what I’ve heard about the Council of Nicaea! My own practice is to omit the clause when I say the Creed. I guess I still haven’t gotten over that conversation with Br. Michael.

[ii]T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets,