Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.
You’ve heard people say things like “God speaks to me” or “Jesus told me to bring my dog to the vet last night“ and you scoffed because there was no conceivable world where such events could ever happen to you. Or to anyone. In the most charitable reading they must have been hallucinating some imaginary friend they “talk” to which tells them what’s already on their minds, and obviously two different people must imagine two different people, no one’s idea of God is the same.
What was absolutely beyond the pale, though, was audible speech coming from the sky saying “This is my son in whom I am well pleased” in the presence of hundreds who could confirm to each other they heard exactly what they did and that it was the same. If iPhones existed in the early AD’s they could all point theirs at the clouds and it’d be indisputable, yeah? And now so many more people exist yet you’ve never seen one video recorded where “God” speaks or is purported to save those of actual schizophrenics so far gone they record the ambient air believing they can bridge the gap that separates souls.
But you… maybe because you wanted to feel understood, something in you had also always desired to understand others, and so you never wrote those people off completely, instead you believed, for the longest time unconsciously, that you lacked the means of understanding them. How lucky that you don’t need to look anymore, since it’s here, all here, as it was written: there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed. So, what does it mean when people say they hear God1? And what is God?
You would figure, observing how others used the word, that God was coextensive with Fate, or more accurately the Universe, or even moreso that which is, for “I AM THAT I AM.” Spinoza’s monad - not some big guy in the sky. Of course things happen in the universe, 'in God', which people are free2 to interpret as 'signs' of some or other sort. So if your idea of 'speech' was 'plain, audible, intersubjectively verifiable English', of course you would be disappointed.
This conception of God does not, however, demand one behave in any particular way; that requires goals, and even should the universe be teleological, its goals are not necessarily yours. Furthermore, if God is precisely everything, then he is also precisely nothing and it becomes redundant to 'hear him' (or want to) since one is always already doing so. But, were we to include more terms and expand into panentheism, teleology can enter the mix. And so: God encompasses, but is not limited by: what is, what is not, what can be, what should be, and what ties these together.
What should be is the operative term, the moral term, that asks you to tune in so you can clue in. Before proceeding let’s answer a few objections.
Given what’s been laid out it would indeed be tautological to say “the origin of morality is God”, but even to the secular some introspection should reveal that we all have ideas of what should be- however misguided- which mirror God’s self-reproducing, autopoietic, equally tautological but nonmoral dimensions, in which we definitionally also participate, that characterize God as God.
A more rigorous challenge is why Christianity in particular should be the religion or framework through which morality is taken, but for our purposes the voice of God as outlined is distinctly a Christian phenomenon insofar as it is Christians3 who claim to hear it. And being genealogically Christian, the ideas of God mentioned here never truly discard their provenance like science does incorrect hypotheses, but instead integrate into greater holisms upon reflection and re-reflection.
Accusations of anthropomorphism rarely acknowledge how our faculties of apprehension, perception, reasoning, and sensing- whether as individuals or as a species- are ineluctably human from the start, so the pretension rests rather with those who claim to speak elsewhere than sub specie humanitatis. Just as we are made in God’s image, nothing we make is not in some fashion, however dim, a reflection of us and our dreams, tools, desires, ends.
And so Christ- as Son of God; Man and God; Man yet God- embodies those aspects of God most relevant for flourishing on all domains, from the individual to the societal to the cosmological, in human-imitable form. In fact (impossible to overstate how big this is) you don’t need to have faith to realize the truth of this, you just need to put into practice or even seriously consider the precepts contained in e.g. the parables, upon which- how strange- you might find yourself beginning to develop and understand faith. Here indeed action speaks louder than words, and would you look at that: “speaks”, as God speaks.
So imitating Christ will causally attune you to, let us call it the Good, of which I believe every human has an internal idea and the ability to choose no matter where he is in life. And God is always speaking in this way, hearing is simply a matter of attunement where “The limits of your language mean the limits of your world” and you should want to listen so your world is not so delimited. Similarly, God is always listening, or witnessing, all that the faculty which experiences presents to him; this is the key divergence between God and secular analogues such as the Superego or the Big Other, which have some phenomenological overlap but are domain limited, respectively to the psyche and the unspoken social contract. In any case the intellect must identify and partition aspects of experience for any of these terms to manifest an isolable personal reality, but only the one belongs properly to the religious domain.
I take my idea of the religious from Kierkegaard, who fruitfully separates it from what he calls the Ethical in a way that should become intuitive: the Ethical is precisely the universal, i.e. the communicable, finally the verifiable, whereas the Religious is a purely private relation one as an individual has with God. Rituals such as graduation and marriage belong to the Ethical because of their consensus recognition within a social register, and it is the Ethical through which history is digested and acknowledged. In contrast, no one can ascertain to the Bible Camp Jesus Freak that the quiet inclinations of her soul, the whims and volitions she notices only upon praying are not God, for then they presume to speak on behalf of authority they do not possess. So the Religious can be described as a private “Sprache” (extant precisely here) through which God evokes an absolute morality for the attuned subject, whom Kierkegaard deems the “knight of faith” to the extent she follows his will.
Together now: you should want to hear God because this points you toward the Good, whose self-evidence becomes increasingly perceptible all while begetting more of itself the more you orient yourself and practice towards it. From this follow “life”, “meaning”, and other such terms, not as broad and weighty abstractions but as experienced realities you learn to sense and cultivate as you continue heeding the call. Practically speaking this might mean getting a gym membership, or spending a few minutes reflecting on how you reacted to the day’s events and setting intentions to catch yourself before acting like that next time. Practically speaking this might mean sacrificing your miracle-begotten son on a mountaintop, no one said God had to be reasonable or ethical by any social standard, many monks who left their professions and possessions behind to heed the call would seem completely insane to the wannabe bourgeois whose intergenerational dream may be to obtain what the monk once had and understandably so, were they to attempt an explanation as to why they chose to say goodbye.
We do not know if Judas is smoldering in Hell or vibing alongside the highest angels, as Abraham atop Moriah did not, could not know that one of them would stay his hand. It is precisely because the Religious is not verifiable that you cannot know- because there is no standard of knowledge- whether what you hear is truly God, some appel du vide, or the devil disguised. But, based on how much goodness listening to and heeding it has brought into your life and those of those around you, you can guess, and you can update accordingly. But, no matter how sympathetic you consider yourself there will always be personalities, reasons, and actions inconceivable to you, and neither do you stand so high you can proclaim that they, the remorseless deviants and vilest pillagers too, lack their own God-ordained location in the arrangement of the cosmos; are Antichrist, or knights of highest faith…
In summary, in repetition, the voice of God is audible but not shareable, at least not nowadays, but nevertheless worth hearing and heeding for all the reasons above and more, and the more you live in accordance with Christ the more you train your ear (heart) to hear it and this is Good actually regardless what you’re tasked with, for
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.
No one can speak on behalf of the lion, yet we can say: he roars.
No one can speak on behalf of the Lord, yet we can say: He speaks.
If you (me) write anything always assume your audience (you) is smarter than you but be relieved, my conclusion won’t be “beauty is truth and truth beauty” nor will this purport “Nature is God’s language” where if you pay close enough attention to raindrops sliding down a car window or the sound of bees buzzing you can Hear God unlike the rest of us smartphoned zombies woefully misattuned to the poetic sensuality of Being. Though there’s nothing new under the sun, the clichés we call cliché like Ecclesiastes 1:9 are existentially inoperative for the overwhelming majority whose unspoken consensus deems them such, an idea I independently invented years before discovering Pascal said the same. Haha, QED, there is nothing new under the sun. But you are not the sun.
They are not exactly free, conditioned by what they bring (by way of knowledge, experience, history etc) to whatever the situation calls for, but there is also no strict necessity requiring them to take a certain thing a certain way.
Although I was not born into the faith, when I speak of or about God with active Christians in colloquial settings it is quite effortless for them to understand me and vice versa, whereas this would not have been the case a decade ago.