Can God Exist Without a Name?

Cultural relativism of language is a historically new idea. Rabbinic Judaism taught that Hebrew was the language of Adam, God, the Angels, and all humanity before the Tower of Babel—a view accepted by Christian scholars through the Renaissance, though Adam’s naming the animals suggests that the divine tongue was incomplete. In the Book of Genesis, words are God’s tools of creation, and his coeternal Word (allegorically, at least, a unit of speech) is a person of the Christian Trinity. Language is in God's innermost nature. Ptah, the Egyptian craftsman god, also created the world using language. He spoke words and the world came into being.

Sacred words—sound patterns perceived as instruments of power rather than just as tokens for ideas—are deeply imbedded in religion. YHWH really is God’s name in orthodox Judaism, not a noun like the other words he is called by. Vedic tradition considers Sanskrit the language of the gods, and an Arabic Quran is believed to co-exist with God in heaven. Latin and Aramaic Greek were scriptural tongues of Christianity long after those ceased to be spoken.

Even in non-sacred tongues, spoken words are ascribed supernatural effects. Trinitarian words, whatever the language, perform the rite of baptism, and in Catholicism the words this is my body, spoken by a priest in the context of a mass, transform bread into the “real” body of Christ regardless of the language. Even in "religions of the book,” there is magic in speaking aloud. No amount waving of a printed missal over bread and wine seems able to transubstantiate, though I wonder if sign language might. It’s not the writing of the Name in a scroll that is prohibited in Judaism, but its pronunciation. The power of the spoken word is so engrained in human nature that a popular movie series worked on the premise that Candyman appears if you say his name five times in front of a mirror. A search of Amazon for “magic spell books” turns up more than thirty volumes apparently sold for practical use—call it occult prayer—not counting Harry Potter spinoffs and and fiction. The age of magic has not passed. Grimoires sell.

A rose, as Juliet says, may smell as sweet by any other name, but gods are name-sensitive. The God of Abraham is called by many names, but Satan and Hitler are not among them—not even Vishnu and Zeus for most Christians. English speaking Christians may even find Allah distracting even though it is the term for God used by Arabic-speaking Christians. Worshippers cannot associate God with all speech sounds. The fact and fragrance of a rose, once it is waved under your nose, is a Kalashnikov truth, so you can call it a pog if you please, and it’s still there, unchanged in odor as Juliet says. You can even just grunt and point at it, bypassing names altogether, but the human experience of God and gods clusters around names like Homer’s shades around blood. Names give them substance in the human imagination. Words are the substance of public worship, the Food of the Gods. A rose can be enjoyed nonverbally by an insect or infant, but an unnamed god is a ghost without honor, incapable of worship until she is named. There may be an altar to the “Unknown God” such as Paul found in ancient Athens (Acts 17:23), but an altar with no words is not an altar at all, but only a rock or table.

Over a century ago by Ferdinand de Saussure made a powerful distinction between sign, signified, and referent in his Courses in General Linguistics. A word, printed or spoken, is an arbitrary sign, its meaning depending on the conventions of the language in which it functions. Incidentally, it isn't a physical object, but a collection of them, some quite distinct but all read as cases of a single meaning. Thus, the sign etc. may be written et cetera, set in various typefaces or scribbles, print or cursive, even mumbled as, say, eh-cetuh, and still be one and the same sign. The only essential is that it not be confused with competing signs in the language, a distinction that may be achieved by context without any physical difference. For instance, in dialects that pronounce mere and mirror identically, the sounds a mere mere signify “a mere mirror,” not “a mirror mere.” The hearer constructs a single sign out of a range of dissimilar events. Saussure’s breakthrough is that neither the sign nor the signified (the idea it represents) is ever a physical object. Both are psychological events, human patterns of reaction. So God, G-d, and GOD (even Deus) are dissimilar patterns of ink or light but spell one sign, and, like all signs. they do not directly refer to an object, but rather are to a signifier, a cluster of associations in a language system that may represent a range of different but related objects in a hearer's imagination.

In Saussure’s three-part distinction between sign, signifier, and referent, the first two are immaterial, but the third—especially in the case of nouns—may be a concrete object or event. Saussure’s contribution was to contradict the naive sense that the word means the object, a misconception that Jonathan Swift undermined in his fantasy of people who communicated silently with bags of tiny objects. Rose in English is the sign of a signifier, the idea of a category of flowers, but if I hold up one flower and you say, “Thank you for the rose,” the speech act zooms down to a material referent, say, a wilted Mr. Lincoln hybrid tea that would smell as sweet by any other name. We can say the rose in that context and mean only one referent. There can be no doubt that roses exist, that ours smells and has rose-traits regardless of the viewer’s belief-system. Our talk about our Mr. Lincoln—which vase to put it in, whether its stem needs trimming—is grounded in a common experience. In what sense can this be said to be true if we talk about God?

One difference here is that God is immaterial, not an object we can point to, put in a vase, or smell. It's a signifier without a concrete signified. The problem is not unique to deity or even to religion, but plagues political discussion too. You can be pretty sure that, if one person strongly condemns capitalism and another strongly supports it, they have different referents. They may agree on a definition: a system of private ownership of capital and market-based distribution. But one person may imagine corporate concentrations of wealth and power that exploit workers and monopolize markets, while the other may imagine the set of all incentive-based economic systems, including small entrepreneurs serving face-to-face markets. The two may condemn many of the same abuses, one calling them "capitalism," the other "corruption."

“Capitalism” is not something concrete like a rose. It’s invisible. It’s an abstraction extrapolated from a set of examples, perhaps a different set for a different speaker. Thus we are in the situation of blind men asked to describe an elephant. One says it's like a hose, another like a wrinkled wall, another like a spear, and another like a tree trunk. All of them are all right. They’ve just grabbed different parts of the beast. But at least we can analyze economies and all agree that they do have elements of capitalism, some more, some less. There's no doubt that capital is sometimes privately owned, thus capitalism has a real referent. Capitalism exists.

God presents a deeper problem. Aside from a very spare core definition, something like “a supreme supernatural being,” its signification is unclear. For some, it signifies a person, for some three unified persons, for some an impersonal force. For some, it signifies a lawgiver who punishes sin with eternal fire and “hates fags,” while for others it signifies universal love. According to Augustine of Hippo, the most influential of all Christian theologians, “If you comprehend it, it is not God” (Sermon 117), and this has been echoed through the centuries in the orthodox doctrine that the Trinity is a mystery incomprehensible by human reason. God’s traditional traits of omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, and eternality are, in this view, negative statements—refusals to define (that is, to limit) God in terms of power, place, knowledge, and time. John Scotus puts this provocatively: “We do not know what God is. God himself does not know what He is because he is not any [created] thing. Literally, God is not because he transcends being.” So God is, in theological tradition, the sign of a uniquely empty signifier, a (no)thing defined as impossible to define. Christian theology, of course, doesn't stop here, with emptiness, but insists that finite human beings can comprehend the Incomprehensible analogically, in terms of comprehensible things that give us a not-inaccurate sense of what cannot be sensed. For instance, God is more like, say, human good than human evil, more like human love than human hate, or (controversially) more like human male than human female.

If theological statements are analogical, this means that they are figures of speech, metaphors or similes that suggest the indescribable. To the extent that they act onstage, they gesture toward a producer forever in the wings—the type of language associated with poetry, not philosophy. “God is love” is thus not a definition or literal description, but a trope like “my love is like a red, red rose.” If a poet describes a beloved woman as a rose, he isn't stating a proposition on which to base logical deductions such as, “A rose is X; therefore, my love is X.” The comparison is implicitly limited. Its poetic effectiveness depends on our knowing how far to take it. The poet is not saying that his love has an eyeless, scarlet face and green, thorny lower parts. Beyond the botanical facts of the flower, he extrapolates a set of human facts such as beauty, delicacy, and fragrance. Similarly, basic assumptions about the Judeo-Christian God—traits such goodness, love, forgiveness, justice, power, and knowledge—are not definitive. They do not draw lines around God any more than our wilted Mr. Lincoln is a portrait of the poet's beloved, but rather are like signposts pointing toward the divine—or perhaps like rafts to be abandoned on reaching a destination. After a visionary experience, Thomas Aquinas stopped writing and described his great works—still foundational to Catholic theology—as “straw.”

In the same stanza, Burns compares his love to a melody, and a literal-minded person might challenge him, “Well, Bobby, make up your mind. A flower’s not a tune, so one of your two statements has to be false.” That’s not, of course, how poetry works, but some imagine that’s how religion does. They suppose that if doctrines contradict each other, one must be false. Granted, for a sect to maintain its cohesion, it may ground its practice on particular formulae rather than randomly oscillating between flowers and tunes—crosses, crescents, and mandalas—but that may be just trademarking. All sorts of images in love poems validly communicate the experience of love, and, similarly, all sorts of texts and rituals may validly express religious experiences that are equivalent but—and this, at least, is orthodox Christian theology—impossible to capture in words.

If we call upon God-N for comfort and feel comfort, it's natural to assume that God-N comforted us, but we’ll never know whether, if we had called on God-P, we might have been equally comforted. It’s even possible that God-P answered generously to God-N’s name. But if our culture forces us see N and P as mutually exclusive—like Christ and Vishnu—then we can’t possibly to run a good-faith double-blind experiment, so we are stuck assuming that N is the One True Letter, unlike P. We can't afford to lose that comfort. A mighty fortress is our N. The fourteenth letter becomes sacred, so any dishonorable use of it (unlike the sixteenth) is anathema.

Stated this way, it seems almost silly, but if the name N, three lines orthodoxly angled, becomes for us the door to peace and transcendence—the almighty signifier of our help in ages past, our hope in years to come—we may desperately defend this holy nasal hum. A name is a phantom of wind, vulnerable to other winds like a candle in breezes of doubt. And so, I suppose, sacrilege creates itself: the need to defend God N from P, and Q, a need inconceivable if N were, in fact, an omnipotent force, in which case N would be perfectly capable of defending herself.