The Unknown God and the order of being

(Since posting this on Sunday, I’ve added a further point to the original entry.)

In a previous entry, “Poe versus the Hillarycons,” I made a word play on the phrase, “the unknown god,” from Paul’s sermon to the Athenians as told in chapter 17 of the Acts of the Apostles. I didn’t remember the passage offhand so I looked it up, and it’s one of the more inspired utterances of Paul. Also it’s much more direct and less convoluted than many of his writings, and thus readily understandable even in the King James Version.

Reading it (see text below), you realize that there was something providential about the fact that among all their gods and goddesses of myth, the Athenians also had this traditional “unknown god,” without a name, without stories connected with him, without a father and mother and siblings, without wives and consorts, and this unknown god, this god without qualities, supplied the perfect opening for Paul to tell the Athenians about the God who does not have a human form, who does not have a finite personality, who is not part of the cosmos but who created the cosmos. (Paul wasn’t just bringing Christ to the gentiles, but the Jewish Creator God as well.) And this God who “made the world and all things therein,” and who “giveth to all life, and breath,” also made human beings of one species, yet distributed them over all the earth in distinct places, for he “hath determined … the bounds of their habitation.” Thus in a few phrases Paul lays out the entire order of being: God; the natural world (meaning the cosmos, the earth, and living things); man as God’s culminating creation; and, finally, society, a particular place for particular men to dwell in. Or as Eric Voegelin puts it in the opening sentence of Order and History. “God and world, man and society, form a primordial community of being.”

But then what is the purpose of this order of being? The New International Version puts it like this:

he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. “For in him we live and move and have our being.”

Thus God created the world, and all things in it, including men, who have their life in this world which is delimited by a set time and a set place, in order that, being finite human beings created by the infinite God, they would seek God and find him. The fulfillment of God’s creation is that man, living in the world and in society, live also in God who always surrounds him and is near to him, and thus find his true self as a son of God.

A further point. In telling the Athenians that “in [God] we live and move and have our being,” Paul clearly suggests that this is true, whether we seek and find God, or not. Which means that our whole being is immersed in the being of God, even if we don’t know it, don’t care about it, and don’t even believe in God. Which means that, while all men have their being in God, only those who seek him and find him have their being consciously in God, which is the way of life to which Paul calls his listeners. Further, not all people who have sought God and found him remain focused on him. They easily slip back into the ordinary human state of being focused solely on one’s own experiences, desires, and concerns. Such people believe in God, but are not following him and are not living in relation to him, which is what the Bible tells us to do: “Abide in me, and I in you.” (John 15:4) And that condition of sloth and forgetfulness describes the ordinary condition of the majority of believers. It certainly describes the ordinary condition of the person who is writing this.

The KJV translation of the passage is below, followed by the NIV:

Acts 17:19-31, King James Version

And they took him, and brought him unto Areopagus, saying, May we know what this new doctrine, whereof thou speakest, is? For thou bringest certain strange things to our ears: we would know therefore what these things mean. (For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.)

Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars’ hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you. God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; Neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device. And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent: Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.

Acts 17:22-17:31, New International Version

Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man’s design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.”

- end of initial entry -

Brandon F. writes:

Great post! When I finished reading I automatically sang to myself something we sing every Sunday (Orthodox Christian) after hearing the word:

“Glory to Thee O’ Lord, Glory to Thee!”

Mark W. writes:

I just read your post re the unknown god, in which you quote Eric Voegelin: “God and world, man and society, form a primordial community of being.” My point has nothing essential to do with yours, with which I agree, but with Voegelin.

Many Christians, myself among them, have enormous respect and gratitude for Voegelin’s work. However, in using his work it is important to remember that he comes from a neo-Kantian/phenomenological point of view. Therefore the quote, “God and world, man and society, form a primordial community of being,” should be understood in a neo-Kantian sense. Voegelin did not accept Christian style natural theology or metaphysics, although he may have flirted with it in his middle period. His statement, therefore, should be seen as indicating that man is such that he “experiences” cosmos and history as framed by those four elements: God/World, Man/Society. These are the essential categories (a word Voegelin does NOT use) within which man’s experience is framed, but they are not arrived at by a rational process as in the Christian thought of Aquinas. This, I believe, is why Voegelin uses the word “primordial”: this “primordial community” is, for Voegelin, an irreducible given in a sense similar to the Kantian categories are or the irreducible experience of phenomenology; the “primordial community” is not the reasoned expression of intellectual insight of Thomism or the traditional Christianity of the creeds. Thus, Voegelin is no orthodox Christian, as Fred Wilhelmsen realized late in the day when the fourth volume of Order and History came out, with its talk of “The Pauline Vision of the Resurrected”—divorced from history and concrete reality.

LA replies:

First, Voegelin told over and over how the beginning of his own philosophy was his rejection of the orthodox, academic neo-Kantianism in which he had come up in favor of a philosphical language of experience.

Second, of course Voegelin was not personally a Christian, as is evident from the abstract, distant way he discusses Christianity in Vol 4 of O&H, as you’ve pointed out. But his personal beliefs are irrelevant to the discussion, as is the fact that he doesn’t refer to the Christianity of the Creeds. What Voegelin does is to describe the structure of the world in philosophical terms, using the (I guess you could call it phenomenological ) language of experience, which helps articulate the variety of human experiences of truth that men have had, chiefly the cosmological (as in Sumeria and Egypt), the Hebraic, the Christian, and the philosophical. According to Voegelin, the structure of the world that he outlines in his opening sentence has been increasingly differentiated across different cultures, starting with the least differentiated view, which is the cosmological, then moving to the Greeks’ discovery of the philosophical transcendent and the Hebraic revelation of the transcendent God, and reaching the most highly differentated state with Christianity. (I’m not sure if he ever says that Christianity is the most highly differentiated understanding of truth; that may just be my opinion.)

In any case, I don’t see any contradiction between his sentence about the primordial community of being and Christianity. What contradiction do you see?

If Voegelin were to say, “God exists, the world exists, society exists, and man exists,” or if he were to say, “human beings look at the world through their eyes,” I suppose those would not be Christian statements per se in that they do not come from the Creeds. But how would they be in contradiction with Christianity?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 02, 2008 06:16 PM | Send