27 Aphorisms for Knowing God in the Present World
1. In the end
Every word is a response to the Word.
2. The cult of false strength, i.e., those who profess to be beyond the need for consolation
Those who criticize belief in God for being a consolation know this better than anyone. To them, acknowledging God would be misery, and so they console themselves with the consoling thought that belief in God is just a consolation.
3. If Plato had read the Old Testament
Plato said that thinking is the soul speaking with itself. This is superior to only letting others speak within oneself, which is to go through life thoughtlessly. But still better to have silenced everyone, including oneself, so that the soul only hears God. Beyond thinking, and speaking, there must be listening. That is its own form of thoughtlessness—the highest one imaginable, known only to faith.
4. A good man out of the treasure of his heart brings forth what is good
When you feel that you are in danger of losing your way, listen to your heart. Those who think they know their Bible will tell you that such a phrase—“listen to your heart”—is nowhere found in the Scriptures. Typically, such an observation is made with the idea in mind that listening to your heart would entail indulging your desires, your whims, your lusts—in short, not listening to God. But that is not what it means to listen to your heart in the sense worthy of being recommended. Listen to God—yes, above all, always listen to God! But how else will one so listen but in the heart? That is what the Scriptures mean by the “inner man.” Sometimes this interior space where God speaks is expressed in terms of man’s having a conscience. So, no matter what others say, whether it be worldly others who have not read the Bible and do not have the slightest concern themselves for God (and so who think listening to your heart would be silly if that were taken to mean listening to God), or else serious religious types who claim to know the misguidedness of listening to your heart (because they think it means suggesting doing something other than God’s will), ignore them—ignore them all, and still listen to your heart. To listen to the heart—there is no other way to know what God demands of us.
5. Receiving blessings
Too much time is squandered pining for future blessings. Unless we are already grateful, would we even be present to enjoy them, were they to arrive? Recognize that life itself is a gift, and we feel immediately that life itself is sufficient unto itself. This is what Job learned, and each of us can learn it also.
6. All life is aquatic
Chrétien, Paul Claudel, and Marilynne Robinson all meditate intently on the nature of water. For Claudel, water is what quenches our thirst because we are liquid creatures. That is to say, not just beings recurringly in need of water for the continuation of this life, but also beings for whom our eternal destination will itself be aquatic. (“And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so” [Gen 1:7]). And for Chrétien, like Claudel also, water is sacramental, as the communicative medium of baptism. It is Robinson who considers these two reflections of water most thoroughly. Water, she says, is both elemental and spiritual, belonging to this world’s heavenly realms in the sky, and yet also indicating a kingdom of still even higher waters. Claudel, Chrétien, and Robinson perceive that water is a tangible symbol for the Holy Spirit—fluid, cleansing, purifying, refreshing. It is not that we associate water with the Spirit, but that the Spirit communicates to us through it.
7. The trees always say something
Thomas Merton once wrote of the “trees saying nothing” to describe periods of spiritual dryness. Yet it is not quite true that they ever go wholly silent. Notice how they grow skyward, stretching their arms to the Father of Lights. When we feel earth ridden, dry as forsaken soil, our eye can always follow the tree’s ascent, and see in it a reminder of our own vocation to do the same.
8. Prince Myshkin the cat
Hamann thought that the animals speak, but that we simply lack the ears to comprehend their language. Wittgenstein thought that if a lion could speak, we in any case would not understand it, for our respective forms of life are incommensurable. In the world to come, however, there will only be one form of life (“Christ is all and in all”), for everything will have become what it was always called to be. Not only will the lion lie with the lamb, but we shall all at last talk to one another as brotherly creatures.
9. The world is upside down
How strange that almost everyone will obey worldly authority with such unqualified zeal, particularly when it is evil men in charge who give the orders. Yet speak of the necessity of submission to God, and these same people who usually are willing to do slavishly as they are told act suddenly as if they have never heard of duty. When in the Acts it is said that the early Christians were described as “those who turn the world upside down,” that is why, in part. The idea that God must be obeyed, that God is the true authority rather than evil men with their wicked systems, was contrary to everything our inverted world takes for granted. What is up is treated as down, what is down as up. The world is upside down, and does not even see it.
10. What St. Paul said to young Timothy
No one comes to the Father except through Christ. Moreover, no one knows the Father but those to whom Christ reveals him. And because Christ can only be known through an acceptance of the suffering that comes by following him, we stand to attain the promise of eternal life only when we are not offended by Christ and choose to follow him nonetheless, no matter what hardships or deprivations come from doing so. Whoever comes to understand what is necessary to attain eternal life accordingly learns daily the ineluctability of drinking of the same cup of which Christ did. A salvation without suffering is superstition.
11. Two, and only two, paths
Every man at heart is a rebel. The question is simply whether he shall choose to rebel against God, or the world.
12. Time scents
We only become who we are to be when we embrace that the challenges in our life will never change; they remain the same, because they are ours, because they are God’s way of refining us into the individual he would have us be.
13. The existential problem of evil
Ivan Karamazov rejects the world for all its evil. He “returns God his ticket.” This rejection of the world is thus rebellion against God. It should be noted that Ivan fails to draw a distinction between evils God wills and those he permits. Camus’s rejection of God rests on the same mistake. But their rejection of God, their response to the existential problem of evil, rests on a deeper mistake than that. We have no right to reject God on the basis of the world’s suffering, for who has suffered more unjustifiably at the world’s hands than the Savior himself who loves us?
14. Heidegger on conscience
In Division Two of Being and Time, Heidegger states that the caller of the call of conscience is anonymous. Anyone who is honest with himself should at that point set the book down. If Heidegger denies that it is the Word alone who speaks to man in the depths, then what else could he possibly say of essential worth that is worth taking seriously? I think this is why many who like Heidegger like him. By deferring to him as a great philosopher, as though he is putting them on the pathway to something essential, they can feel that they are facing up to the fundamental reality of being human when in point of fact they are not. Reading Heidegger, for them, is an escape from being before God.
15. Our hands
Said otherwise, even man’s highest callings, and his greatest accomplishments, those brought about by the labor of his own hands, are testaments to his fundamental impoverishment. Every work of our own hands is a cry for our Creator to complete us in a way nothing else can.
16. House of mirrors
Dante equates being lost in the world to being forlorn in a dark wood. I sometimes think a more fitting metaphor for such a condition is to analogize the world as a house of mirrors, in which we are constantly being tempted to mistake ourselves with the distorted reflections we encounter all around us. For we are always emulating something, a measure, an ideal, an image. Human existence is inescapably mimetic. Satan knows this better than anyone, which is why he crafts innumerable false images, hoping that we will conform ourselves to anything besides Christ.
17. To die
Plato’s Socrates avers that philosophy is preparing for death. In the time shortly before taking the hemlock, he gives an account of how he has lived the examined life, which is to say, has thought existence in light of living before death. The modern philosophers worth reading—Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas, among others—understand philosophy in this Socratic fashion, inasmuch as they understand it as a practice for dying, as an attempt to give sense to death, even if, in doing so, we come to realize that we must acknowledge death remains mysterious, if not wholly unintelligible. Death, in one regard the ultimate phenomenon of life, for it is what makes life finite, and thus fragile, is a non-phenomenon. First, because I do not know what it holds for me, do not know what it is like to be dead, until it has arrived and I have died. Until it has given itself fully, which will mean I am no longer in any position to speak of it in this world, in this life, I am left only to anticipate what it will entail for me. That anticipation in the face of death is mortality—anticipating the meaning of the death that haunts the time we are given.
Second, because the death of others is not something we experience directly for ourselves. It is probably true that, in this life, we make most sense of death, so far as that is possible, through the experience of the death of others. In this respect, there are three dimensions to death. There is the sense of death in general—what results from the relative indifference we feel towards the death of those we either do not know at all, or at least do not know well enough to care deeply about. This is the kind of rapport with death that comes from the news story—a car accident, a shooting, in short, someone’s dying, in the sense in which Heidegger would call inauthentic, the “everyone dies” mode of encountering death by keeping it at arm’s length. Then there is the death of others that is more personal—the death of the friend, or the family member, or even an acquaintance. In this second form, the world changes through the other’s absence. The view they once took on the world is now absent. And we feel that lack. This only adds to death’s mystery—for in this case, the other, as Housset says in his fragility book, is characterized by an “enigmatic presence,” at once “still there” yet “definitively absent.” These two first forms of the other’s death only underscore that there is a human commonality, a bond, a shared solidarity, in death. The point can be underscored through an eidetic variation. Were, for instance, I to be mortal, but no one else, or were everyone else to be immortal, but not me, our experience would be entirely different from how it is, given the fact that each and every one of us, without exception, is mortal. This solidarity in our shared mortality does not begin to take the sting out of death, however, when it comes to the third way in which the death of the other reveals itself to me. For, finally, there is the death of the beloved, the dearest of all. In the grief brought on by the death of the beloved, it is not just that the world changes, as in the former case, but that it changes entirely, for everything is now a mere reminder of the other’s absence. Here, nothing short of the hope of being reunited in the next life can console our grief. This is why, although it is true that death does not mean we are isolated subjects, in the sense of being a Cartesian ego, or an egocentric narcissist, we are nonetheless alone. In the end, we die alone, and we bear our grief alone. I think this is so because God has seen fit that, in our pain, in the loss of the beloved, we should turn to him—the One who ensures that love indeed is stronger than death.
18. Cinema Paradiso
The postmodernist notion that art is somehow higher than life, or that life would not be worth living without art, or that art in a way redeems life, has merit. What I cannot accept is that morality must go out the window in order to produce great art. Alfredo should not have lied to Salvatore.
19. Jacobi
One remarkable illustration of today’s nihilism is the fact that the individual responsible for coining the term, Friedrich Jacobi, is totally unknown.
20. Jacobi (cont’d)
Or rather, I should say that his name is not known widely. Nevertheless, his thought lives on in those whose thought it has influenced and those in turn who read those it has influenced. To wit, somewhere in On the Divine Things and Their Revelation, he remarks that all beings, including us, above all, receive our existence, that we are brought to life from beyond ourselves, and that not for a single moment do we hold our own living existence within our own power. As he then goes on to explain, in this respect, we are breathing creatures, which is to say, our preservation is in need of a constant flow from outside. Now, anyone familiar with the phenomenological tradition will recognize in this first idea the central guiding thought of Michel Henry—we are living only insofar as we are always already the recipients of Life. And the second thought, namely the suggestion that such dependence can be likened to breath, is a principal one in Jean-Louis Chrétien. Henry read very little of the history of philosophy, preferring instead to reach his own philosophical conclusions based on whatever his own phenomenological investigations brought into view (in this way, he was like Husserl.) Chrétien, for his part, read more than normal mortals could in a thousand lifetimes (and, in this way, he was more like Heidegger.) While it is thus very probable that Chrétien at some point encountered this passage in Jacobi, whereas Henry never did, the question of influence is neither here nor there. For here it is more fundamentally a matter of inspiration—the same thought, expressed first by Jacobi, then later by Henry and Chrétien, is in each instance an expression of originality, for it is not a truth originating from having read a page in this or that text, but rather an encounter with what has itself called forth its articulation—the Breath of Life.
21. Two arguments for “methodological” atheism
What damage to truth can be done in the name of fealty to philosophical method! In one breath, one attempts to justify methodological atheism in the name of the phenomenological reduction. In the next breath, one attempts to justify it also by appeal to the Husserlian standard of Evidenz—God is not given clearly and distinctly, etc. etc. But what the reduction itself is, and in what performing it correctly precisely consists, is not at all a clear and distinct matter. To the contrary, the nature and purpose of the reduction has been a point of contention since phenomenology’s inception. We now face an obvious contradiction. The initial appeal to the reduction as a justification for methodological atheism has itself run afoul of the epistemic standard of Evidenz that was alleged to rule out the appearing of God. That these two main reasons cited to justify the bracketing of God from phenomenology cancel each other out—what else may we conclude but that there is nothing truly methodological about such atheism? “Reduction,” “Evidenz,” etc.—when those who oppose the “theological turn” of phenomenology deploy this arsenal of methodological terminology, it is just an ad hoc explanation meant to justify the original desire to ignore God.
22. Two arguments for “methodological” atheism (cont’d)
What I think, in short, is that those who most vehemently oppose the “theological turn [in phenomenology]” are not just atheists, strictly speaking. It is not so much that they disbelieve there is a God as it is that they hate God. Thomas Nagel, a famous antitheist, states quite openly that he wants atheism to be true, that he hopes there is no God, that it would be bad if God were to exist. The worst of all possible worlds is one in which there is a God—that is the main idea. This is why those who try to bracket God from phenomenology have so much to say about how phenomenology’s task is to attend to the world apart from God—in this way, they can imagine a world in which they get what they want, in short, one where there is no God. The practice of phenomenology as methodological atheism becomes an ascetic escape from their being before God.
23. Expectations
I came to the sea eager to write something sad, something bittersweet. At the shore, a ripping wind blew over the dunes, a whistling shrill cry of winter’s desolation. And yet, standing there beneath thick fog that veiled the frothing waves from clear sky high above and out of sight, I discovered within me, to my surprise, not the forecasted grey of melancholy, but rather only unanticipated joy. Oh, Lord, how frail we are, that even our own moods surprise and astonish us! All I know is that I love you, and that it is because of you that life is not a dark saying.
24. Nature’s half-spoken words
The gulls were far lovelier than I had imagined. They huddled together, braving the cold water, the bitter wind, everything about the desolate beach that explained why there was not another person in sight for miles. They did not speak, yet their silence was instructive, for it was a muteness that nevertheless taught me something. It will sound contradictory, but I do not think a man can begin to understand his infinite worth in the eyes of God until he has felt his utter insignificance in the eyes of the birds and nature’s other creatures.
25. Beardo
Many years ago at the college graduation party in California, my friend pointed to the world map hanging on his wall: “Each of you guys point to where you’re going, and what you’re going to do.” I pointed where I did, and have gone on to do what I said I would. Only those who first believe in Providence will come to see it at work in their own lives.
26. Lord, help my unbelief
“If you have faith, you would move a mountain.” This is not figurative or the least hyperbolic. No, the Lord meant it quite seriously, and I believe it. Or rather, I believe that he meant sincerely that if I had such faith, I could indeed command a mountain to move and that it would. Sometimes I have thought about turning to the wilderness, and spending the rest of my life attempting to command the mountain to move. I am defeated before I ever begin, which is why I will never attempt to begin measuring up to this particular test of faithfulness. For when I think about it, I realize that I would lose heart, that I will never truly attempt such a thing. For me, the idea remains only that—an idea. How humbling to recognize that our faith, however strong it may be, can always grow stronger, that is to say, is never yet as strong as it could be. Lord, help me with my unbelief.
27. The Scriptures read us
The wiser we become, the more difficult it is for us to express life’s truths. The trouble is not that they are too complicated to communicate, but rather that their simplicity is beyond words. That is why I always turn to the Proverbs and the Psalms in order to find the words I cannot find. I find there articulated what could not have been said without divine inspiration. The Scriptures express the thoughts I cannot. They read me.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is adapted from This Present World: Aphorisms for Knowing God (Wipf and Stock, 2025). All rights reserved.