The Impossibility of Divinity
Divinity, The One, The Absolute, The Infinite, God. When we want to talk about such high concepts, we are often at a loss for words. They seem simply indescribable. How do you put the absoluteness of all existence and beyond into the limitation of signs? You simply can’t. By its definition, it must escape those. But this problem is not merely one of limitation of language but of limit in itself. What divinity is supposed to describe is a thing that is truly absolute, it is “above and beyond” all things and all limitations. But how can a thing “be” without limitation when existence itself is a limit? To exist is to be within existence, to be “something” is to have a nature, a context, a way of “being”. In a strange way, even divine nature compels divine things to be specifically of divine nature and not otherwise. To be is to be limited by being. Even an all-encompassing “everything” is still a “something” ; it cannot escape the fact that it exists and that it exists as itself. Is God free of their own nature as God? A trivial paradox perhaps, just like asking “does a set containing all sets contain itself?” but it illustrates a point. Existence in itself is a limit. Divinity is thus, by its very nature, impossible to exist. God cannot “be” because if they existed, they wouldn’t be God since they would be limited by the nature of their existence. It should not surprise us that words can’t describe them.
But this isn’t the whole story now, is it? After all, if all things that do exist, even existence itself, are limited by the way they exist, then how could they arise in the first place? The universe itself appears to have a beginning, so it couldn’t arise from nothing. Or could it?
The Absent God
“The universe couldn’t arise from nothing” is a common argument to justify the existence of God or some other divine “something” out there that could serve as the first cause. But what if we’re approaching this with the wrong assumption? In our universe, events seem to be caused by other events. You drop a stone into a puddle, and it creates waves on the water surface; you push over a cup of coffee, and you spill the contents all over your table; you put a bullet through your head, and you die - simple. Obviously, then, we think that it’s always a “something” that must be what causes all “something”. So when we seek to imagine what could possibly cause “everything,” we tend to guess it must have been some kind of “super-something”, the essence of existence itself. What is forgotten in that line of thought is that real nothingness, not simply emptiness in relation to surrounding existence, but true Nihil, must mean that the principles of causality or anything else that determines “how things work” don’t exist either. The absence of existence means the absence of its limits. Only then, when there’s nothing, everything “can be”. It conditions a limitless contingency.
It isn’t that divinity simply doesn’t exist. It not-exists, it can only be divine when it isn’t there. God can only be God when they’re absent. They escape the trappings of their existence only by not being there. They are not divine but un-divine, divine only when they “are-not”. In such conditions of complete not-existence, the possibilities are endless, and thus only then anything can truly happen. From this endless possibility of infinite contingency, Time and other principles of existence can arise, introducing first limitations to the absolute contingency. Those, in turn, would start shaping the direction of the universe's development as each particular something comes into existence determined by and contained within limits created by other things that exist. Things that exist contextualize being; their existence creates relations to everything else that exists, and vice versa. Those relations then determine the particular nature of being for all objects connected by them. As reality grows in complexity, it becomes increasingly entrapped by the limitations those relations produce. The more defined things are, the more limited they become. It is not a coincidence that it is destruction that remains at the core of so many religious rituals through sacrifice. Annihilation is the only way to get closer to the only not-thing that resembles the divine.
Alas, not everything can be returned to ruin so easily. The more things have happened through history, the more things they have prevented from happening by existing in a specific way and thus creating a specific context for all other things. It is as if, from an endless sea of possibility, the universe was pulled into a vortex of the future, increasingly impossible to turn away from as existence itself works against it. What will happen when it gets pulled beneath the waves? Will it freeze there in eternal being? Or will it somehow break, dissolving again into nothing from which it came from and opening the floodgates to the infinite once more?
God remains silent, they simply aren’t there…