Name that Deity

 Wéll before I became a Christian, or knew that C.S. Lewis was one of that ilk, I revered Lewis for his semantic acumen.  When I taught a graduate seminar in lexical semantics, the only texts I used (apart from my own notes) were Lewis’s Studies in Words,  and Word and Object, by that splendid atheist Quine. The idea being, that if I did nothing but babble, at least the students would have read two good books.

A repeated theme of C.S.L.  is that we speak incessantly in faded metaphors: not only about the ineffable, but about anything and everything that we can ascertain [OF, from ad- + certain] and comprehend [Latin con- + prehendere ‘to seize with our fat fingers’] in our everyday environment.

The metaphors fade; yet are not indifferent.  Witness Lewis on “he” vs. “she” for the Godhead, and its application to the ordination of women. Whether he was in this respect   right or ill-advised is not the point;  the point is:   metaphors matter.

And so: What of metaphors for the Deity?  who certainly needs them, like any infinite thing.

First of all, there’s “the Father”.  To this I have nothing to add beyond Lewis.  The metaphor  goes far, but only so far; the same epithet has been applied to UBL.

Next there’s “the King”.  Meaning what, with like a crown?  Well,  kind of like a king, or rather a King of kings, anyhow one whose writ runs well beyond Sherwood Forest.  All very regal.  The problem is, real kings generally suck, so they poison the metaphor at the source.

(Rare example of a good king:  Babar.  But that for later.)

And then: the “Lord of Hosts”.  – It was long, before I came to understand this phrase; yet let me leave it here, unparsed and uncommented, just as I found it.

“Creator” is much better; for we somehow intuit what it means, yet…based upon what?  It is hard to find an example, really, here on earth.  You have craftsmen, who would still be peasants or cavemen if they hadn’t learned the craft from their masters (they may have improved upon the techniques as received, but they didn’t invent them).  You have parents, but if they have any wits at all, they know they didn’t create the kid: they made certain fumbling motions, hopefully accompanied with a prayer, and before you know it, nine months on (why nine? who knows), out pops this – miracle, with an immortal soul.  It’s the d*mnedest thing. The closest we come to a feeling of actual creation is with the artist or the scientist – or even better, the mathematician, presenting Hilbert space to the world.  But the view I am arguing  is that the most “creative” mathematician is nothing like a playwright, he’s really just a stage hand, pulling back the curtain. If we’d *dreamt up* Hilbert space, rather than *discovered* it, -- who’d give a sh*t?  --Likewise the scientist.  And as for the artist, well yes, there is, there, more of the personal, which is to say the contingent, but if it gets too contingent, it’s sort of pointless; and certainly a great deal of dreck has been put forward as art, especially in the last century. -- The best possible subject for a painting, so I conceive, is the Annunciation.  Let us all praise your skill in visualizing and reproducing that pre-existing scene.  But that is the whole point:  you didn’t invent it.  Otherwise who cares.

So: It’s kind of interesting, that we have some sort of intuitive sense of what “creator” might mean, given that we’ve never met one.

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Other descriptions:

The “Necessary Being”.  Not really a metaphor, more like a woefully inadequate “Hi my name is…” tag, or like describing Napoleon as a “person”.

“Maker of Heaven and Earth”:  not a metaphor, just a bullet point in His resumé.  And probably not the main one.

The “First Cause”. – Yeh-h, well… true enough, I suppose, the way the President might be defined as the “husband of the First Lady”. It subordinates the Creator to the created world.  If you think of anything blander or more denuded, gimme a ring.

“The Author of our being”: This is a nice phrase.  For our purposes, however, it leads astray on two counts:  First, with the specifically literary image of “author” vice “creator”, thus tending to distract from mathematics as residing among the created things.  Second, with its quite excusable focus on ourselves.  But if we are contingent, and the truths of mathematics are not, it diverts the focus to what is not a Necessary part of His being.  (There is a theological view that we are actually not contingent, but are a necessary aspect of His being;  but such a matter is too profound to be investigated here.)