A few evenings ago, while talking with a friend, we arrived at a question that seems to have accompanied humanity from the very beginning and that, precisely because of this, we tend to take for granted: what is God, really? Not who God is according to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or any of the countless religious traditions human beings have developed over thousands of years, but what God actually is, beyond our representations, our symbols, our doctrines, and even our words.
The distinction is enormous, because when we ask, “Who is God?” we are already operating within a relationship, a narrative, a tradition. We can answer that He is the Father, the Creator, the Supreme Being, the One, the Absolute, Love, the Trinity, the God of Abraham, or the God proclaimed by Jesus. But when we ask what God is, the question changes completely, because we are immediately confronted with the limits of human knowledge itself. We are finite beings trying to understand the infinite; we are immersed in time and attempting to think about what is supposed to exist beyond time; we are part of the universe and yet try to understand what, according to our own definitions, would be its origin and foundation.
So I find myself wondering: are we really sure that the categories through which we think about God are adequate to God?
The problem is not only God, but man
Perhaps the question of God cannot be approached without first passing through an even more difficult question: what is a human being?
It sounds like a simpler question because we have direct experience of ourselves. Yet it only takes a moment of reflection to realize how difficult it is to answer. We can say that a human being is what he thinks, what he does, what he desires, what he loves, what he creates, what he remembers, what he dreams. We can define humanity through reason, consciousness, language, or the ability to create culture and art. But every definition inevitably captures only a part.
We might say, for example, that a human being is what he does. It is an attractive definition and, to some extent, a convincing one. We reveal ourselves through our works: music, literature, science, technology, religion, war, architecture, politics, love. But is that enough to define us? Obviously not. Human beings build cathedrals and atomic bombs; they write love poems and organize wars; they save lives and can, at the same time, destroy other human lives. If we define humanity through what human beings do, we obtain an image of humanity, but not necessarily its essence.
And this is where a word that may seem unnecessarily technical becomes useful: synecdoche. We take a part and use it to represent the whole. The problem is that when we speak about humanity and then use humanity as a means of speaking about God, we risk constructing what might be called a synecdoche of synecdoches: one part of the human being becomes the whole human being, and that partial image of humanity then becomes, in turn, our image of God.
At that point, we may have the impression that we have found an answer, when perhaps all we have done is multiply our representations.
Is the God we name really God?
This, to me, is one of the fundamental problems of every religion.
We cannot speak about God except through human language. We call Him Father because we know what it means to be a father; we call Him Creator because we know what it means to create; we call Him Judge because we know what judgment is; we call Him Love because we have experienced love. Even when we use apparently more abstract terms such as Absolute, Infinite, or Being, we are still using concepts created by the human mind.
That does not necessarily mean they are false. It means they are ours.
And I think that distinction is crucial.
When someone says, “God is love,” are they necessarily telling us something about God, or are they telling us something about their own understanding of love and, through that understanding, attempting to approach God? When we call God Father, are we describing a reality we know directly, or are we using a human metaphor to indicate something we cannot otherwise define?
I do not think these questions destroy faith. On the contrary, they might make faith much more conscious, because they force believers to distinguish between God and the image of God they have constructed.
And the same distinction applies to those who do not believe.
Because even an atheist, when saying that he does not believe in God, must first establish which God he is rejecting. The personal God of a particular religion? The Creator God of classical metaphysics? An anthropomorphic God who intervenes in history? The Absolute of philosophers? The God of Christian tradition? Rejecting one representation of God does not necessarily demonstrate the nonexistence of everything that the word “God” has attempted, throughout history, to indicate.
And what about Jesus?
The issue becomes even more delicate when we arrive at Jesus, because we are no longer dealing merely with a philosophical concept, but with a historical person around whom one of the greatest religious experiences in human history developed.
My friend reminded me of something that I consider far from insignificant: Jesus speaks of the Father, speaks of unity, speaks about the relationship between human beings and God, and, above all, makes statements that Christianity has come to regard as extraordinary. But precisely here, I think, we need to distinguish the historical Jesus from the theological development that subsequently grew around his figure.
I am not saying that Christian theology is false. I am saying that it is something different from simply recording the words of a man who lived two thousand years ago.
When we read the New Testament, after all, we are not listening to a recording of every word Jesus ever spoke. We are reading texts that emerged within the earliest Christian communities, were transmitted and interpreted within those communities, and eventually became part of the tradition of the Church. Paul of Tarsus played an enormous role in the spread of Christianity and in its theological development, but he did not know Jesus during Jesus' earthly life. The councils of the following centuries then formulated fundamental doctrines concerning the nature of Christ and the relationship between his human and divine natures.
All of this belongs to the history of Christianity and cannot simply be erased. But precisely because it belongs to history, it should remind us that there is a historical process between Jesus and the theological image of Jesus, and that this process deserves to be studied and understood.
In the Gospels, Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” That is an immense statement, but it is not the same thing as literally saying, “I am God.” Christianity has interpreted this and other statements in light of the whole story of Jesus, his death, the resurrection believed in by his disciples, and the subsequent reflection of Christian communities. The divinity of Christ is therefore not simply the result of one isolated sentence, but of an entire theological construction based on the interpretation of his person and his life.
And here, personally, I find the question more interesting than the answer.
What did his first disciples see in that man that led them to recognize in him something beyond a man?
It is a fascinating question even if, for a moment, we put faith aside.
Perhaps art knows something reason cannot express
Art also came up in our conversation, and I don't think that was incidental.
Art has a peculiar quality: it can often suggest what it cannot explain. Music can communicate something that cannot be translated into a definition; a painting can make us perceive a dimension of existence that no description could completely reproduce; poetry can connect experiences that ordinary language would otherwise keep apart.
Perhaps this is also why religions have always needed art. When reason reaches something it can no longer contain through precise concepts, symbols, parables, rituals, images, and songs appear.
Not necessarily because the symbol is more truthful than reason, but because sometimes a symbol can point toward something that reason cannot fully circumscribe.
An arrow is not the thing toward which it points.
Perhaps much of religious language works in precisely this way: it does not necessarily claim to be the object itself; it attempts to point toward it.
The problem begins when we forget the distinction and turn the arrow into the target.
The temptation of dogma
This is where, paradoxically, I think both traditional religion and certain forms of esotericism and Gnosticism can fail.
Historically, Gnosticism emerged through many different movements and experiences, and it would be simplistic to reduce it to a single system. Yet whenever the idea of a higher knowledge becomes the conviction that one finally possesses the key to the Absolute, the risk is that one dogma is simply being replaced by another.
The priest says, “The truth is this.”
The initiate answers, “No, the true knowledge is this.”
But if both believe they have definitively possessed something that no finite being should be able to possess in its entirety, the distance between them may be much smaller than they imagine.
The words change, the symbols change, the hierarchies change, the sacred books change, but the temptation remains the same: to turn a possible path toward the Absolute into the Absolute itself.
And this is where, in my view, humility should enter the picture.
Not the humility of someone who gives up searching, but the humility of someone who continues searching while knowing that every answer may contain only a fragment of the truth.
Perhaps the problem lies in our very concept of “existence”
There is an even more radical question.
We ask whether God “exists,” but what does it mean to exist?
A tree exists. A person exists. A galaxy exists. An atom exists. These are realities that we can, at least to some degree, place within space and time and subject to different forms of observation.
But if God is truly what some philosophical traditions call the Absolute, the foundation of being itself, can we use the same concept of existence for God that we use for things that are part of the universe?
Perhaps the question itself is badly framed.
It is somewhat like asking where the origin of space is located. The question appears meaningful because we are accustomed to thinking that everything must be “somewhere.” But if we are speaking about space as a whole, that “where” no longer has its ordinary meaning.
Likewise, if God were that upon which being itself depends, asking whether God “exists” in the same sense in which a thing exists might mean applying a category to something for which that category was never designed.
This is not a proof of God's existence.
But neither is it a proof of His nonexistence.
It is simply an acknowledgment of a conceptual limit.
Perhaps the most honest answer is a question
In the end, perhaps the real issue is not finding a better definition of God, but understanding why human beings have always felt the need to ask the question in the first place.
Why have human beings, in every civilization we know, looked beyond themselves?
Why have they built temples, prayed, sacrificed, painted gods on cave walls, written prayers, developed cosmologies, invented myths, and searched for a meaning that extended beyond their individual existence?
We could explain all of this as fear of death, the need for order, the desire for consolation, social construction, or psychological illusion. Some of these explanations may certainly capture part of the phenomenon. But even then we return to the original problem: we have explained one manifestation of humanity, not necessarily its essence.
And so we are back where we started.
What is a human being?
And through the human being, what can we really know about God?
Perhaps not much.
Perhaps far more than we imagine.
But certainly not everything.
That is why I am less interested in deciding which religion has “won” the contest for truth and more interested in observing the mechanism through which human beings construct their certainties, because that may be where the greatest error is hidden: confusing what we have understood with what actually exists.
The word “God” is ours. The symbols are ours. The theologies are ours. The philosophies are ours. Even the concept of the Absolute is formulated by our minds.
And so the question remains, apparently simple and perhaps impossible:
What is God, really, once we remove everything human beings have said about God?
I do not know whether there is an answer.
But perhaps that is precisely the point.
As long as we continue searching without turning every intuition into a dogma, we remain within the search.
The moment we believe we have finally possessed the Absolute, perhaps we have stopped searching for God and simply begun worshiping one of our own representations of Him.
