Theological and Political Postscript to Presentations at the Haifa Conference: The Faith of Skepticism and the Skepticism of Faith in St. Augustine, Avicenna, Judah Halevi, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jacques Derrida

Just as in the case of monotheism, the very application of its doctrine construed negatively theologically (that we can only say what God is not, but not what God is) leading to a de-literalizing of God’s attributes constitutes a contradiction—applying the doctrine is already to violate it and to reduce it to incoherence because then God ceases to be unique and singular and becomes knowable to the extent that God is deprived of literal attributes—so, too, a consistent application of skepticism leads to an immobilizing of the whole doctrine. If one skeptically interrogates skepticism, this would conjure up the prospect that the external targets that skepticism had been invoked to question could be rehabilitated or sustained in their pristine form. This suggests that to apply skepticism consistently leads to rendering skepticism inert—just as to construe monotheism consistently means that one can say nothing about God (neither about what God is nor about what God is not). A mystical silence overwhelms both the monotheistic believer and the philosophical skeptic. When rationalism and skepticism collapse, they both yield (or eventuate in) mysticism. It would seem that the distance between the faith of skepticism and the skepticism of faith turns out to be much closer than the proponents of either side of the official Great Divide would have us believe.

I. St. Augustine (354–430)

St. Augustine brilliantly interpreted a classic name of God that God transmits to Moses on the occasion of God’s first revelation to him at the burning bush in the Midianite desert as the precursor and inspiration for Plato’s Theory of Ideas. The verse in Ex. 3:14, which introduces this name for God, is translated as follows: “I am HE WHO IS, and you will say to the sons of Israel, ‘HE WHO IS has sent me to you.’” Upon this verse, St. Augustine commented, “This implies that in comparison with him who really is, because he is unchangeable, the things created changeable have no real existence. This truth Plato vigorously maintained and diligently taught. And I do not know whether it can be found anywhere in the Works of Plato’s predecessors except in the book which has the statement, ‘I am HE WHO IS; and you will say to them HE WHO IS has sent me to you.’”¹

The way St. Augustine interpreted the verse in the Book of Exodus, the unchangeable, singular entity whose name God tells Moses to use when he reestablishes the relationship with the Jewish people, harbors a distinctly Platonic motif. The fact that God endures forever and does not change establishes the credentials as God. If this is the case, then God’s existence has not been in any way firmly established. According to Plato’s argument in the Meno, questions and answers are correlative notions.² The way we formulate any question determines a good part of the answer that we evolve to address the question. God is eternal because that is what establishes God as a counterweight to the transience of human existence. From St. Augustine’s perspective, when we postulate the idea of God, we are still moving within the charmed circle of human existence. “God” is a response to a primary question that puzzles human beings. There is still no external, objective corroboration for the idea of “God.”

What I have just summarized is St. Augustine’s questioning of the efficacy of the category of God to confer upon our deliberations and practices the aura of certainty and sanctity that we want them to exude. There is another dimension of certainty that human beings crave that the category of God fails to achieve. Whatever causal outcomes in our lives—physical or psychological—that we want to trace to God can, purely theoretically considered, be connected to other sources of certainty (for example, physical laws) or more transient and intermediate causal networks. What sanctions or satisfies our invocations of God? I...