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The Nearness of God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Charles Taliaferro
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‘God is closer to me than I am to myself’

Meister Eckhart

Can God be closer to you than you yourself are? I believe that the answer to this question is ‘yes’. Indeed, God is such that it is impossible for you to be closer to yourself than God. Surely this is a paradoxical claim. It would be paradoxical to maintain that something could be closer to, say, a stone than a stone. Not even God could get closer to the stone than the stone itself. How then could God be closer to you than yourself? In part, I believe that the answer lies in appreciating the nature of what it is to be psychologically present to someone, including oneself. There is more to ourselves than meets our eyes, but not the eyes of God. A rich appreciation of personal identity and psychological presence can illumine the sense in which God is supremely present in our lives, indeed closer to us than we are. I spell out the nature of this Divine human proximity and conclude with reflection on what it is for someone to be indwelt by God.

I shall be assuming the intelligibility of certain classic tenets about the God of Christianity. God is the all-knowing, all-powerful, loving Creator of the cosmos. I shall also help myself to some garden-variety claims about persons. Persons have beliefs, emotions, desires, and sensations. They have a conscious and unconscious life. They act (or are capable of acting) in the world. They often have a past and future. These are not to be taken to be necessary conditions for personhood.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 69 , Issue 815 , April 1988 , pp. 181 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 German Sermon 69 (Walshe, M.O'C. tr., Meister Eckhart: Sermons & Treatises Vol. II, London 1981, p. 165Google Scholar).

2 I have defended the coherence of such traditional Divine attributes in ‘Divine Cognitive Power’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Vol. 18, 1985, pp. 133–140CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘The Magnitude of Omnipotence’, IJPR, Vol. 14, 1983, pp. 99–106Google Scholar; ‘The Art of Creation and Conservation’, New Blackfriars, July-August, 1986, pp. 315–323Google Scholar.

3 Cf. Morris, Thomas’The Logic of God Incarnate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. I believe the considerations I have cited here would be accommodated within Morris’ two minds theory of the incarnation.

4 Cf. work by William Hasker and J.R. Lucas.

5 ‘Divine Cognitive Power’.

6 I articulate features of what it means for God to be omnipresent in ‘Kenny and Sensing God’, Sophia. Vol. 25, no. 2, July 1986, pp. 11–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Cf. Adams, R.M.’ fascinating discussion of saints in ‘Saints’, Journal of Philosophy, 1984Google Scholar.

8 Eckhart, Meister, Meister Eckhart translated by Blakny, R.B. (New York: Harper and Row, 1941), p. 88Google Scholar.