religious revolution now 229what ever he is bears no relation to the experience of personality or of
distinctive selfh ood. If, however, God cannot be a being, in any sense
recognized by classical ontology, his non- being must nevertheless
mean something entirely diff erent from the sense of non- existence in a
world of par tic u lar beings. Non- being must in eff ect mean a horizon of
being beyond all par tic u lar beings. Th at is why the gnostic and mystic
tendencies in the Semitic mono the isms have moved in the direction of
a speculative monism whenever they have failed to take a vow of philo-
sophical silence.
To make such an idea of God compatible with these faiths, it would
be necessary radically to revise the understanding of their doctrines
and narratives, turning them into moral allegories. In such a view, his-
tory would cease to be what these religions have taught us that it is: a
setting in which the plot of redemption remains inseparable from deci-
sive events and personalities, acting in par tic u lar places and times.
Th ere is consequently no coherent idea of God or, more precisely, no
idea of God that can remain coherent and yet do the work that the reli-
gion of salvation needs it to do. Th is reasoning amounts to an informal,
inverse ontological argument. Th e ontological argument for the exis-
tence of God that Anselm fi rst proposed and that many great phi los o-
phers have since reinvented, in diff erent versions and to diff erent
ends, claims to infer the existence of God from the conception of God.
Th e inverse of the ontological argument is that God cannot exist if he
cannot even be coherently conceived.
For the consciousness of the educated classes, in the societies in
which these mono the isms continue to speak with the loudest voice,
there are two readily available but unsatisfactory ways of dealing with
the problem presented by the untenable character of all three ideas of
God.
One such way is to embrace a defl ated and humanized version of the
second idea: of God as person. Of the three ideas of God, this idea is,
aft er all, the one most easily reconciled with the historical discourse
of the religion. Th e idea of the personality of God can, however, be
translated into a view of the depth of the human person— its ground of
“ultimate concern” (as in the philosophy of Paul Tillich). Th e anthro-
pomorphic God then becomes a way of speaking about the theomor-
phic man. It is a manner of speaking about the unfathomable and