Reducing the Infinite: The Risks of Limiting Divine Mystery
Comparing God to unattainable, incredible, or supernatural concepts may lead to a number of serious risks and consequences for a person’s worldview. Firstly, the attempt to create an image of God that can be “seen” or touched reduces the infinite, Living essence to something limited, giving Him a human scale. This is expressed as follows: "Because as soon as we create a divine image and say, 'Look, here is God,' we immediately substitute our dynamic, Living, immeasurably profound God with something limited, giving Him a human scale, since every revealed knowledge must be measured by man; in revelation there is nothing beyond measure, otherwise, were it infinitely great or infinitely little, it would elude our understanding. Everything we knew about God yesterday does not correspond to today’s or tomorrow’s knowledge. I want to say that I cannot worship God within the confines of the knowledge I have about Him at the moment—it is a boundary. The God before whom I stand in prayer is the God, the knowledge of whom has brought me to the point where I can encounter Him beyond human images and mental representations. I stand before the Unknown God, whose mystery is eternally revealed to us and who, however, remains infinitely unexplored. To help people see God, it is useless to invent new images of Him." (source: link txt, page: 256-257)Such an approach limits our understanding of God, turning Him into something already known and therefore incapable of inspiring a true desire for a transformative encounter with the unknown. We risk losing the ability to perceive God as a source of endless discovery, which weakens the spiritual quest and conceals the depth of truth that cannot be comprehended through conditional, fixed concepts.Secondly, using comparisons with phenomena that are by nature already limited or even miraculous can give rise to internal contradictions in religious dogmas. This is expressed in the following excerpt: "By the content of spiritual illumination, religious revelations are decisively unamenable to logical frameworks; for thought, they are antinomic, internally contradictory. And in this fact of contradictions that permeate the entire realm of religious dogma, it is not the dogma’s own weakness but our own weakness, our sin, that is revealed. And only because the dogmas are contradictory can one—in fact, it is possible—to believe in them; if they were understandable, 'there would be nothing to believe in here, no need to cleanse oneself or perform an act of heroism'…" (source: link txt, page: 42)This idea underscores that if our understanding of God becomes too comprehensible and predictable, the possibility for faith, struggle, and inner spiritual heroism—which arises precisely where there is something “impossible to understand” and where our powers must overcome personal limitations—disappears.Finally, such a tendency may open the way for the distortion of the religious experience into a demonic aspect of existence, when true divine action is replaced by counterfeit, even devilish, manifestations. As noted in one of the excerpts: "Theo-kracy here turns into satanocracy. … But the sacramental grace of God is precisely absent in them. … Instead of Christ, the antichrist is asserted in the world. Instead of God, the devil is glorified." (source: link 6341.txt, page: 171)It is clearly stated that likening God to any supernatural images can lead to spiritual delusion, a distortion of the true nature of the divine, and ultimately to the emergence of idols that present a distorted reality and can be used for manipulation or deception.Thus, comparing God to something supernatural and unattainable carries the risk of reducing the infinite and ever-unfolding Divine to finite, human categories. This not only deprives the believer of the opportunity to encounter the Unknown, but also paves the way for dogmatic stagnation and even demonic interpretation of the religious experience.Supporting citation(s):"Because as soon as we create a divine image and say: 'Look, here is God,' we immediately substitute our dynamic, Living, immeasurably profound God with something limited, giving Him a human scale, since every revealed knowledge must be measured by man; ... To help people see God, it is useless to invent new images of Him." (source: link txt, page: 256-257)"By the content of spiritual illumination, religious revelations are decisively unamenable to logical frameworks; for thought, they are antinomic, internally contradictory. And in this fact of contradictions that permeate the entire realm of religious dogma, it is not the dogma’s own weakness, but our own weakness, our sin, that is revealed…" (source: link txt, page: 42)"Theo-kracy here turns into satanocracy. … Instead of Christ, the antichrist is asserted in the world. Instead of God, the devil is glorified." (source: link 6341.txt, page: 171)