The philosopher has noted amply:

It is often said that God is all-knowing, which is to say: omniscient, which is to say: impertinent to the confining auspices of presence, which is to say: everywhere, everything, and therefore beyond everywhere, everything, beyond comprehension.

It can be said in conjunction with any words about omniscience that such talk may signify a profound intellectual necessity, a mysterious, even vertiginous urge to understand the incomprehensible as being reasonable according to wisdom and virtue more powerful than all human evils, confusion and despair among them.

There is an extension of this intellectual necessity which leads us to many dubious but productive statements about extra-essential relations, existential relations, or: ethics. Why is there such a thing as the sacred other, the Other which deserves a maximum of consideration, and yet in doing so restricts in no way my own existential freedom?

Because, all knowing is God, because God is unknowable, and only by way of the unknowable can we arrive at 'knowing'.

Knowing is therefore 'unknowable' as well, even to itself. Knowing is beyond even its own grip, a 'thing' consummately not-itself, constituted by otherness, by extrinsics, a node of inter-essence so much made by its own aspiration to converge with itself that it cannot fall into any ontological category (cannot prove its being, be proven to be as such), and so does not revert to an affirmation (rhetorically, without proof) of God's being, of presence as omni-Presence as God.

Life is lived, 'had', 'found', in the distance between "questions awaiting answers". (GGP 21) These 'questions' may be not merely more or less secure bases for experiential expansion, but also the very summons of Being (in beings) to beings (in Being), each of us both summons and summoned.

© 2002 Joseph Robertson

 

BEYOND COMPREHENSION
JOSEPH ROBERTSON

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