Jesus and the Unknown God

Even today, however, when this unfortunate separation is recognized as one of the great causes of the modern spiritual crisis; when energetic attempts are made to cope with the problem through a variety of crisis and existential theologies; and when there is no lack of historical infor­mation about either the revelatory process leading up to the epiphany of Christ, or about the loss of experiential reality through doc­trinization; the philosophical analysis of the various issues lags far behind our preanalytical awareness. It will be necessary, therefore, to reflect on the danger that has given the Unknown God a bad name in Christianity and induced certain doctrinal developments as a protective measure, i.e., on the danger of the gospel movement derailing into gnosticism.

In his Agnostos Theos (1913; rpr. 1956, pp. 73ff.), Eduard Norden has placed the problem in its historical context and refers back, on this occasion, to its first presentation by Irenaeus in Adversus Haereses (ca. 180). Irenaeus lets the doctrinal conflict between gnosticism and orthodox Christianity turn on the interpretation of Matt. II:25-27:

At that time Jesus declared:

“I humbly acknowledge, Father, lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to the simple; be it so, Father, for so it seemed good to your sight. All these things are delivered to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”

In orthodox doctrine, the God revealed by Jesus is the same God as the creator god revealed by the prophets of Israel; in Gnostic doc­trine, the Unknown God of Jesus and the Israelite demiurge are two different gods.

Claimers of Divine Sonship

Against the Gnostics, Irenaeus proposes to prove by his work that the god they distinguish as the Bythos, the Depth, is indeed “the invisible greatness unknown to all” and, at the same time, the world creator of the prophets (I.19.12). They make non­sense of the logion, when they interpret the words “no one knows the Father but the Son” as referring to an absolutely Unknown God (incognitas deus), for “how can he be unknown if they themselves know about him?” Should the logion really give the absurd coun­sel: “Don’t seek God; he is unknown and you will not find him”? Christ did not come to let mankind know that Father and Son are unknowable, or His coming would have been superfluous (IV.6).

Neither Irenaeus’ presentation of the issue, nor his argument for the orthodox side, is a masterpiece of analysis. If the Father and the Son in the critical logion be conceptualized as two persons who know one another to the exclusion of everybody else, then the statement would indeed be no more than a bit of information that one can believe or not. Nothing would follow from it for either orthodoxy or gnosticism.

Moreover, if Jesus could advance this conceptualized statement about himself, anybody could; we might expect the sons of the Father to become numerous. In fact, something of this sort seems to have happened, for Irenaeus enumerates as Gnostics, “Marcion, Valentinus, Basilides, Carpocrates, Simon, and the others,” implying that they claimed this status by adding: “But none of them has been the Son of God, but only Jesus Christ, our Lord” (IV.6.4).

The Symbolic Deformation of Experience

The situation must have resembled the modern outburst of new Christs in the persons of Fichte, Hegel, Fourier, and Comte. At least one important cause of the confusion, thus, is the conceptual and propositional deformation of symbols which make sense only in the light of the experience which has engen­dered them. Hence, I shall first place the logion in the experiential context of Matthew, recalling for this purpose only the most im­portant passages; and, then, analyze the structure of the problem that may lead to the various doctrinal derailments.

At a time when the reality of the gospel threatens to fall apart into the constructions of an historical Jesus and a doctrinal Christ, one cannot stress strongly enough the status of a gospel as a sym­bolism engendered in the metaxy of existence by a disciple’s re­sponse to the drama of the Son of God. The drama of the Unknown God who reveals His kingdom through His presence in a man, and of the man who reveals what has been delivered to Him by deliver­ing it to his fellowmen, is continued by the existentially responsive disciple in the gospel drama by which He carries on the work of de­livering these things from God to man.

The gospel itself is an event in the drama of revelation. The historical drama in the metaxy, then, is a unit through the common presence of the Unknown God in the men who respond to his “drawing” and to one another. Through God and men as the dramatis personae, it is true, the pres­ence of the drama partakes of both human time and divine time­lessness, but tearing the drama of participation asunder into the biography of a Jesus in the spatiotemporal world and eternal ver­ities showered from beyond would make nonsense of the existen­tial reality that was experienced and symbolized as the drama of the Son of God.

The Unknown God Reveals Jesus

The episode on the way to Caesarea Philippi (Matt. 16:13-20) may be considered a key to the understanding of the existential context into which the logion 11:27 must be placed. There Jesus asks the disciples who the people say the Son of Man is, and re­ceives the answer that He is variously understood as an apocalyptic of the type of John the Baptist, the prophesied Elijah, a Jeremiah, or one of the other prophets.

His questioning then moves on to who the disciples think He is, and He receives the reply from Simon Peter: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (16:16). Jesus answers: “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona; for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.” The Matthean Jesus, thus, agrees with the Johannine (John 6:44) that nobody can recognize the movement of divine presence in the Son unless he is prepared for such recognition by the presence of the divine Father in himself. The divine Sonship is not revealed through an information tendered by Jesus, but through a man’s response to the full presence in Jesus of the same Unknown God by whose presence he is inchoatively moved in his own existence.

The Un­known God enters the drama of Peter’s recognition as the third per­son. In order to draw the distinction between revelation and infor­mation, as well as to avoid the derailment from one to the other, the episode closes with the charge of Jesus to the disciples “to tell no one that he was the Christ” (Matt. 16 :20).

The Silence that Guards the Truth

The motif of the silence that will guard the truth of revelation against abasement to a piece of knowledge available to the gen­eral public is carried by Matthew with particular care through the story of the Passion. In the trial before the Sanhedrin, Jesus does not answer the peripheral charges at all (26:13); the central charge of having proclaimed himself the Son of God he brushes aside with his “You said so,” not committing himself one way or another; but then, speaking as a Jew to Jews, He reminds them of the apocalyptic Son of man who will come on the clouds of heaven.

In the trial before Pilate, the apocalyptic threat would be senseless; when the representatives of the Sanhedrin repeat their charges, Jesus remains completely silent, “so that the governor wondered greatly” (27:11-14). In the mockery scene before the crucified, then, the vicious resistance is victorious: “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross” (27:40). But ultimately, when Jesus sinks into the silence of death, with the cosmos breaking out in prodigies, the response comes from the Roman guards: “This really was the Son of God” (27: 54).By the time of the Passion, it appears, the great secret of Caesarea Philippi, the so-called Messiasgeheimnis, has become a matter of public knowledge after all.

In the present context, I must confine myself to a brief enumeration of no more than the principal questions:

1. The various problems transmitted to us through two thou­sand years have their center in the Movement in which man’s con­sciousness of existence emerges from the primary experience of the cosmos. Consciousness becomes luminous to itself as the site of the revelatory process, of the seeking and being drawn. The experi­ence of a cosmos full of gods has to yield to the experience of emi­nent Divine Presence in the movement of the soul in the metaxy. Hence, all symbolization of truth about reality, about God, man, society, and the world, must from now on be filtered through, and be made compatible with, the eminent truth of existential consciousness.

Moreover, since the place of truth is historically pre­empted by the more compact symbolizations of the primary experience, existential consciousness is historical consciousness in the sense that, on the occasion of its differentiation, the truth of reality is discovered as an event in the process of a reality whose truth ad­vances to higher stages of realization.

History Must be a Revelatory Process

If history is to be compatible with the truth of existence, it must be symbolized as a revelatory process: the Cosmological past of experience and symbolization must be intelligibly related to the differentiated consciousness to which it has given birth; and the vision of the future must bear some intelligible relation to the insight into the double meaning of life and death. The responses to this problem have a wide range.

Its amplitude can be gauged if one confronts the Augustinian con­ception of history, with its patient waiting for the eschatological events, with the Hegelian speculation, which enacts the eschato­logical event through the construction of the system; or if one con­fronts the position of a contemporary existentialist theologian who rejects the Old Testament as irrelevant to Christian theology, with the position of Clement of Alexandria who insists on adding Greek philosophy as the second Old Testament for Christians. Regarding visions of the future, one may confront the millennium introduced by an angel of the Lord in Revelation 20 with the millennia intro­duced by Cromwell and the Puritan army or by Lenin and the Communist party.

The Success and Limitation of Plato

2. The cosmos does not cease to be real when the consciousness of existence in the In-Between differentiates; but the emotional re­sistance to, and technical difficulty of, resymbolizing the order of the cosmos, which on its compact level had been quite adequately symbolized by the intracosmic gods, in the light of the new insight is enormous; especially because the new historical consciousness requires the older gods to be resymbolized as symbols of earlier stages in the process of revelation.

In the movement of classic phi­losophy, as I have shown, the noetic analysis of the metaxy has gone as far as in the gospel movement, and in some points is supe­rior to anything we find in the gospel, but the decisive step of making the experience of man’s tension toward the Unknown God the truth to which all truth of reality must conform was never taken.

Monogenes as Cosmos

To Plato, the monogenes of the Unknown God is, not a man, but the cosmos. In the myth of the Phaedrus, then, he explicitly deals with the relation between the Unknown God and the intra­cosmic gods: on festival occasions, the Olympians rise steeply toward the top of their heaven; “there the utmost (eschaton) toil and struggle await the soul” when it wants to pass beyond and reach the outer surface of the vault; but when they take this stand, they can contemplate the things outside of heaven. The human fol­lowers of the gods are variously, but never completely, successful in achieving this state of contemplation, so that no poet in this world has ever worthily praised the hyperouranion, the region beyond the heaven, or ever will (247).

Plato’s mythical imagina­tion, thus, endows the intracosmic gods with a tension of their psyche toward the Unknown God and lets them transmit their true knowledge to man. In the language of the Cosmological myth, these Olympian god-seekers and mediators are the equivalent to the Son of God who alone knows the divine Father in the pleroma of presence, and mediates his knowledge to his followers according to their human receptiveness.

This Platonic resolution to the prob­lem had a durable success in philosophy: six hundred years later, when the Unknown God had been further differentiated as the Monad epekeina nou (Enneads V.iii.11), Plotinus still went back to the myth of the Phaedrus, in order to symbolize the relation between the intracosmic gods and the Unknown God (Enneads V.viii.10). Moreover, he used the argument of the gods who look up to the “king of the realm beyond” in his polemic against the Gnostic “sons of god” who want to elevate themselves above the gods of the cosmos and speak of this, world as “the alien earth” (II.ix.9).

The Danger of Losing the Future and the Past

3. The area of existential consciousness, though eminent of rank, is only one area of reality. If it is overemphasized, the cosmos and its gods will become the “alien earth” of the Gnostics and life in the despised world will hardly be worth living. The tendency to­wards this imbalance is certainly present in the gospel movement. When Jesus prefers the plain people to the wise and the public au­thorities, he does not want to start a revolution that will bring the plain people to power, but judges the kingdom of God more easily accessible to the “poor” than to men who have vested interests and positions of responsibility in the affairs of this world.

His appeal is entirely different from Plato’s who addressed himself to the sons of the ruling class, in order to make them existentially fit to be rulers in the paradigmatic polis that was meant to supersede the corrupt polis of the day, for the kingdom of God will have no social organization or ruling class in this world. In Matthew 16, Jesus concludes his analysis of existence with the assurance: “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (16:28)–a vision that probably appeals to members of an establishment no more than to revolutionaries who want to establish themselves in their place.

Moreover, not only may the future of history be lost, if one takes “no thought for the morrow”(Matt. 7:34), but there is also the danger of losing its past. The Matthean Jesus, it is true, has not come to destroy the law or the prophets but to fulfill them (5:17), but the fulfillment is difficult to distinguish from apocalyptic de­struction. We have noted the subtle conversions of the malak of Yahweh into the forerunner of Jesus, as well as of the Messiah into the Son of God; and the Unknown Father of 11:27, whom nobody knows but the Son, is hardly the well-known God who thundered from Sinai and spoke through Moses and the prophets. Would not the Yahweh of Israel also have to become a god-seeker and medi­ator like the Olympians of the Platonic myth?

Presence of the Unknown God in Jesus

4. Because the issues of this type were insufficiently clarified in the gospel movement, the derailment into gnosticism became pos­sible. The strength of the gospel is its concentration on the one point that is all-important: that the truth of reality has its center not in the cosmos at large, not in nature or society or imperial rulership, but in the presence of the Unknown God in a man’s ex­istence to his death and life.

This very strength, however, can cause a breakdown, if the emphasis on the center of truth becomes so intense that its relations to the reality of which it is the center are neglected or interrupted. Unless the Unknown God is the un­differentiated divine presence in the background of the specific in­tracosmic gods, he is indeed a god unknown to the primary experi­ence of the cosmos.

In that case, however, there is no process of revelation in history, nor a millennial Movement culminating in the epiphany of the Son of God, but only the irruption of an extracosmic god into a cosmos to whose mankind he hitherto had been hidden. Moreover, since the revelation of this extracosmic god is the only truth that existentially matters, the cosmos, its gods, and its history become a reality with the index of existential untruth.

In particular, the Yahweh of Israel is imagined as an evil demon who has created the cosmos, in order to indulge his lust of power and to keep man, whose destiny is extracosmic, prisoner in the world of his creation. This god of the Gnostics is certainly not the God of the gospel who suffers death in man to raise man to life, but he is a god who can emerge from the Movement, when the con­sciousness of existence isolates itself, through an act of imagina­tion, from the reality of the cosmos in which it has differentiated.

An Outgrowth of the Gospel: Gnosticism

I say advisedly that the Gnostic god can emerge from the Movement at large, for he is not necessarily bound to the gospel movement as one of its possible derailments. The historians of religion who find the “origins” of gnosticism in Hellas or Persia, in Babylon or Egypt, in Hellenistic mystery religions or Jewish sectarian movements, and who diagnose the Gnostic elements in the New Testament it­self, are not quite wrong, for the structural possibility of the derail­ment is present wherever the existential Movement of differentiat­ing the Unknown God from the intracosmic gods has begun.

One should be clear, however, that the presence of the structural possi­bility is not itself gnosticism; it would be better to apply the term only to the cases where the imaginative isolation of existential consciousness becomes the motivating center for the construction of major symbolisms, as in the great Gnostic systems of the second century A.D. These systems, though they are products of mythical imagination, are neither myths of the intracosmic type, nor are they philosophers’ myths like the Platonic or Plotinic, nor do they belong to the genus of New Testament Gospels. They are a sym­bolism sui generis which expresses a state of alienation from real­ity, more precisely to be characterized as an extracosmic isolation of existential consciousness.

Though the possibility of the Gnostic derailment is inherent to the Movement from its beginning, only the full differentiation of the truth of existence under the Unknown God through his Son has created the cultural field in which the extracosmic contraction of existence is an equally radical possibility. With the gospel as the truth of reality, Western civilization has inherited extracosmic contraction as the possibility of its disruption.

I have already inti­mated the cultural pattern of the new Christs in the late eigh­teenth and the early nineteenth centuries which repeats the pat­tern of the “sons of god” who aroused the wrath of Irenaeus and Plotinus. But on this occasion I cannot go beyond such intima­tions. We do not know what horrors the present period of cultural disruption has yet in store, but I hope to have shown that philoso­phy is not quite helpless in the noetic penetration of its problems. Perhaps its persuasion can help to restore the rule of reason.    

This excerpt is from Published Essays: 1966-1985 (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 12) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1990)

Print