 The Unknowable God |
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Attributelessness is an attribute . . . meaning, of course, that even saying that "the Deity is beyond the power of the human capacity for attributing characteristics" is itself a characteristic we attribute to the Deity. And of course, any such attempt to convey the thought that "the Deity is beyond describing" immediately turns into the opposite act of describing--thereby describing Its indescribability. Perhaps the Qabbalists put it the best way by saying that the Eyn, or Nothing, is so called because when humans attempt to think of It their attempts come to nothing! The best that we can do, when contemplating the Eyn, is to comprehend It as Eyn Soph (with a long 'o' as in 'poke') or Infinitude, what Simon called the Boundless Power. And of course even this state of comprehending is at best a rational analogue to the actual Infinitude. |
The Unknowable God--whom Poimandres calls "the God beyond all name", Marcion "the Alien or Other", and Simon "an incomprehensible Silence"--was known to the Qabbalists, much later, as the Eyn (where 'Ey-' is pronounced as it is in 'they') or Nothing. This Unknowable God is, it would seem, the purest form of any concept of the Deity, since--as all Its epithets imply and all Its proponents insist--It is beyond the range of all thought. As evidence of just how ineffable It really is, note that even saying that It is beyond all thought involves the speaker in a contradiction. For is not "It is beyond all thought" a thought? This, in fact, is the gist of the poem