18. Is God alive?
18. IS GOD ALIVE?
Is God alive, or is He just an idea, an ideal, an essence, a nature, a Platonic Form, a principle, a formula, something abstract? Is He more like the Idea of an alligator or more like an alligator? Is God something that would act on you and interrupt you and interfere with you and creep up on you and surprise you, like a live alligator? Can you meet Him? Can you say “Look out! It’s alive!”?
Life in the highest degree belongs to God. In proof of which it must be considered that since a thing is said to live in so far as it operates of itself and not as moved by another, the more perfectly this power is found in anything, the more perfect is the life of that thing . . . But although our intellect (too) moves itself to some things, yet others (things) are supplied (to it) by nature, (through sensation and by) first principles (like the law of non-contradiction) which it cannot doubt, and (by) the last end, which it cannot but will. Hence, although with respect to some things it (our intellect) moves itself, yet with regard to other things it must be moved by another. (But) that Being whose act of understanding is Its very nature, and which . . . is not determined by another, must have life in the most perfect degree. Such is God; and hence in Him principally is life (I,18,3).
We tend to reduce “life” to “biological life” or at least “human life”. But what is essential to life, and common to all life, is not necessarily molecules, or mortality, but self-movement, movement from within rather than merely from without. Even plants grow from within, unlike rocks.
There are various levels of life: plants, animals, men, angels, God. All are active from their own nature, all do something. When we say to a rock “Don’t just stand there, do something”, it does not obey. But even a plant does: it grows. And an animal moves around and desires things. And a human being makes free choices. And an angel contemplates God. God too, in the supreme sense, acts, does things. He is more like an alligator than a rock, or an idea. Ideas can’t act; only real things can act.
C. S. Lewis says that speaking about “man’s search for God” is like speaking about the mouse’s search for the cat. We don’t creep up on the Hound of Heaven; He follows us. (But He has gentle feet, withdrawn claws, and merciful eyes.) Here is Lewis’ unforgettable description:
“Men are reluctant to pass over from the notion of an abstract . . . deity to the living God. I do not wonder. Here lies the deepest tap-root of Pantheism and of the objection to traditional imagery. It was hated not, at bottom, because it pictured Him as man but because it pictured Him as king, or even as warrior. The Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you. There is no danger that at any time heaven and earth should flee away at His glance. If He were the truth, then we could really say that all the Christian images of kingship were a historical accident of which our religion ought to be purged. It is with a shock that we discover them to be indispensable. You have had a shock like that before, in connection with smaller matters—when the line pulls at your hand, when something breathes beside you in the darkness. So here; the shock comes at the precise moment when the thrill of life is communicated to us along the clue we have been following. It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. ‘Look out!’ we cry, ‘it’s alive.’ And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back—I would have done so myself if I could—and proceed no further with Christianity. An ‘impersonal God’—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (‘Man’s search for God!’) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?” (Miracles, 11).