Deus Absconditus and Deus Incognito

By Matthew Claridge–

photo source

When the Roman general Pompey conquered Jerusalem in 63 BC, he entered the Holy of Holies expecting to find, if not a great deal of loot, at least a dazzling image of the deity worshiped there. He was astonished to find absolutely nothing at all, indeed, nothing but a bare room in the sacred space of perhaps the most religious and zealous people in all the Mediterranean world.

Compare this historical anecdote with a more recent example, as humorously portrayed in this parody of America’s obsession with all things Apple:



 In both cases, the tantalizing “sacred” room that promises to unravel the mysterious attraction so many people experience contains literally no answers at all. The emptiness, though at first profoundly anti-climatic, does not represent a dead-end but actually a further invitation down the rabbit hole; to something far deeper and mysterious than any palpable idol or confidential file of Macintosh secrets could explain. Indeed, the light at the end of this tunnel will probably be more disturbing than satisfying. Despite superficial similarities, two vastly different routes into Wonderland are represented here—routes I’ll define in terms of two different theological traditions, Deus Absconditus (the hidden God) and Deus Incognito (the unknown God).

These two terms do not represent any particularly theological tradition per se, more like theological trends. Generally speaking, Deus Incognito was a term used most often in the medieval mystical tradition. Perhaps the choice of this term was purely conventional, but it nonetheless carried certain implications. The unknown God captured a core theme of this mystical tradition, born in the pagan school of Plato’s academy and maturing in the salons of the French enlightenment. What holds these disparate epochs together was a conviction that God, or ultimate Reality, was not fully knowable. All language used to describe this God is inadequate. If anything, the best way to understand the world is through a series of conflicting even contradictory statements. This method was called dialectic by ancient philosophers, came under the title of via negativa in the medieval world, and ended in various positivistic approaches in Modern times. Yet, whereas in the medieval and ancient world, the unknowability of God was held in check by an optimistic view of human nature, in the Modern world that naïve confidence has been lost. Man is a purely temporal, physical epiphenomenon. There is no ‘divine’ spark resident in his bosom. As such the unknowability of God has significantly hardened. Theology is simply reducible to anthropology. If anything, the study of theology, of whatever stripe, reveals more about ourselves and our little world than anything cosmic and ultimate. The undergirding ethos of this Modern Deus Incognito is fundamentally pessimistic, cynical, and Darwinian.

This is the meaning of the empty room in Apple’s factory of wonders. Charlie is not the happy go-lucky chap of the original film, he is a cynic seeking to expose and penetrate the dazzling veneer behind Apple’s pretentious claims and promises. And that’s what he finds—it’s all showmanship and we, the consumers, are gleefully lead along even when we know, deep in our hearts, this is all façade and cannot deliver what it promises.

Thankfully, that’s not the only option left open to us. The other route, though ultimately more satisfying, is fraught with far greater difficulties to traverse. Deus Absconditus was simply the Vulgate translation of a phrase found in Isa. 45.15. Luther, however, picked it up and fashioned it into an entire theological perspective. For Luther, the notion of God as Deus Incognito smacked of everything wrong with the Medieval theology on which he was reared. Within this tradition, which drank deeply from pagan springs, mankind’s separation from God is conceived purely in terms of epistemology, misinformation, or ignorance—that much is obvious from the phrase “unknown God.” In the original pagan metaphysic, creation itself is a kind of Fall and mankind is separated from God purely by accident. Being a heavenly spark imprisoned in earthy matter, man must work diligently to ascend back up to the Source from whence he came. This is described as a process of “enlightenment.” We are born into a world where God is distant and unknown, and we must find him out. Luther also called this approach a ‘theology of glory.” By it, he meant to describe the medieval project to grasp God purely by natural reason alone—an ascent back to “glory.”

For Luther, this was a doomed quest because it fundamentally misunderstood why God appears absent from our lives. God’s absence is not a matter of distance, intellectual or otherwise, but  a matter of relational estrangement. The problem is not epistemological but ethical or soteriological. We haven’t fallen out of remembrance but fallen out of favor. As such, God is hidden from us, but certainly not unknown.

In the tradition of Deus Incognito, God is fundamentally passive, a Being whom we must approach. Often in this tradition, God is envisioned as the One—a Being beyond personality or feeling, mercy or wrath. Whatever its liabilities (already noted), this approach gives humanity the controlling position in the relationship while God stands idly by, waiting for us to make up our minds what to do with Him. God may strike us with awe, but never terror.

By contrast, the God of Luther’s Deus Absconditus is very much an active agent who considers us not only as objects of his thought but also objects of his affections, for better or worse. The empty temple, unlike Apple’s counterpart, does not indicate God’s non-existence (or unknowability), but his absence. And absence is not a passive stance, but an active one. That is, God’s absence from the temple is intentional and ethical—God cannot stand us, and, in some sense, we cannot stand Him. His absence is an indication of an estranged relationship between the Creator and his creatures. From our exile from Eden, to God’s refusal to journey personally with Israel into the promised land, to the departure of his glorious presence from the temple in Ezekiel’s day—the dramatic conflict of Scripture is driven by God’s gradual retreat from the circle of the world.

But this absence also produces, paradoxically, a disturbing sense of God’s presence in judgment. In the absence of his personal love and affection, we face a God of inscrutable terror and darkness—not unlike, though far more terrible, the icy glance of a spouse who refuses to speak to us. As Luther said, “Every creature seems like God and God’s anger, even though it be but a rustling leaf . . . we do not stand in awe of God’s anger but remain unmoved, and yet we fear and flee from the anger of a frail, withered leaf” (LW 19:75-76; Luther applies the image of a withered leaf from Lev. 26.36). Thus the author of Hebrews characterizes God’s ambivalent presence under the Old Covenant in terms of Mt. Sinai wracked with fire, thunder, and darkness.

At the same time, this disturbing absence also points us in the right direction, a path through the valley of the shadow of death. For it is only when we fully and totally come to grips with this absent God, and all that it implies about our estrangement from Him that hope is born—“thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: ‘I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite’” (Isa. 57.15). This is Luther’s “theology of the cross,” for it is as we gaze on the God hidden in a crucified, naked Christ, that we are healed. We must, like Jill in the Silver Chair, drink deep from the stream in the presence of the wild and unpredictable Aslan. Where God’s wrath and absence was most profound, God’s mercy and grace was most present.

Thus God’s absence in the temple of Israel was both a negative and a positive absence. It was positive in the sense that it indicated that our salvation could never come by our own hands. Something alien to our experience and our efforts must arrive and put our souls at peace and satisfy our restless hearts. The empty temple proclaims that only something larger than life, or larger than Apple for that matter, can fill the void—“Thus says the LORD: ‘Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for me, and what is the place of my rest?  ² All these things my hand has made, and so all these things came to be, declares the LORD. But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word’” (Isa. 66.1-2).

Apple claims for itself a place in our hearts that only God can fill. As Andy Couch has recently noted, Macintosh’s logo—an apple with a bite taken out of it—is highly suggestive of the fruit that brought the fall of mankind. The fruit represents an act of defiance, a statement that mankind can find deification, or spiritual contentment, in materialism. Yet like the glistening forbidden fruit, the showmanship goes all the way down.