“Some say, ‘Everything!’ Others say, ‘Nothing!’ Nietzsche said, ‘He is dead!’ Atheists say, ‘He doesn’t exist at all!’ Perhaps the question should be posed in a different way: not, what does God do, but rather what does He do with us?
I tried to find Him on the cross of Christians, but He wasn’t there. I walked to Hindu temples and old pagodas, but nowhere could I find a trace of Him. I searched in mountains and valleys, but in the heights and depths, I couldn’t find Him. I went to the Kaaba in Mecca, but even there He wasn’t present. I asked scholars and philosophers, but even they didn’t understand Him. I looked inside my heart, and there He stayed. Nowhere else did I find Him.
With these words, the Persian Sufi mystic Rumi (1207-1273) hinted that neither science nor philosophy, nor even religions, can tell us who or what God is. To find an answer to that question, we must ask our hearts. Similar sentiment was expressed by the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart (1260-1328): You don’t have to search for God here or there; He is no further than right in front of your door.” and hearts. It stands there, persists, and waits.
Rumi and Meister Eckhart agree on two things. First: God exists. The existence of God or something divine has been spoken of by all peoples throughout time, although today’s atheistic currents fiercely strive to affirm atheism everywhere and at all times. In line with this, they have even declared pantheism to be hidden atheism. However, this Consensus gentium about the universal belief in God is the basis for Cicero’s proof of the existence of God:
There is no nation so wild and among them, none is so savage that they do not carry the idea of gods within their souls. Many people have wrong opinions about gods (which is prompted by their way of life), but they all believe that there is a divine power and nature… With this so-called argument of consensus, Cicero believes that he has proven the existence of something divine. However, I do not want to present evidence for the existence of God here. By the way, Abraham Lincoln once argued denial as well as the existence of God with a single sentence: “I could imagine a man looking” in my understanding, somebody looks up at the sky and denies the existence of God.” Apart from the fact that Rumi and Meister Eckhart agree that God exists, there is another consensus: we can only find God in our hearts. The emphasis is on the word “only.”
If we can only find God in our hearts, what does that mean? We assume that it implies that we must embark on a search for ourselves in order to find God. This reminds us of the often-quoted “Gnothi seauton” at the temple of Apollo: “Know thyself,” and many spiritual teachers have added, “Only then will you know God.”
For Eckhart, it is clear that self-knowledge is the knowledge of God because the “foundation” of the human soul is “God’s spark.” Separation from that foundation of the soul, in other words, distancing oneself from God, is a sin for Meister Eckhart. Sin is a detachment, a step backward from Unity towards multiplicity. Today, we would say that we lose our being, lose sight of the meaning of our existence as human beings, and scatter ourselves in countless pleasures and diversions. The so-called obligations. Our image of God affects us. It determines how we will behave in life, what we will strive for, and what we want to avoid. If we believe in a personal, transcendent God who determines everything in his omnipotence and can freely give us everything and take it all away, we will likely surrender to that God. In our prayers, we will negotiate with him. In the worst case, we will become spiritual beggars, relying on God’s grace through pious inactivity. Even pastor Martin Luther King spoke out against such an attitude: No problem is solved by lazily waiting for God to take care of it! The man who sat on his roof while the flood was rising was also waiting for God. Every time the firefighters passed by in a boat, he refused, saying, “God will save me!” When he eventually drowned, he complained to God’s throne that he hadn’t saved him. God replied, “I sent you firefighters three times, and you didn’t get into their boat.” Like many anecdotes, this one has its serious side.
The image of an all-powerful God who punishes and seeks revenge is even more dramatic, promising his faithful believers a more magnificent paradise the more non-believers they convert to the true faith or even destroy them.
Religious wars and religiously motivated terror are probably the worst outcomes of a distorted image of God. Reformer Martin Luther once said: “As you believe in God, so he will be. If you believe that he is benevolent and merciful, that’s how he will be to you.”
This idea can be equally applied to atheistic and generally non-religious ideologies. As we believe in the world, so it will be to us. Believing in the god of Mammon (material wealth), what does that do to us? Believing in eternal progress, what does that do to us?
And when we no longer believe in anything, when we deny any meaning of life as well as objectively valid values and truths, what does that do to us? Does it make us valueless egoists who only follow their own impulses and inclinations?
Does this senselessness lead us to a feeling of worthlessness, despair, and depression?
From that state which Friedrich Nietzsche calls nihilism, in which a person literally and desperately finds themselves in nothingness, according to Nietzsche there is only one salvation: a person must reflect on themself. Since they have lost themselves in God until then, now they can become a true human being. This “overman” is a person liberated from God who becomes the meaning of this earth themselves. They succeed in a “revaluation of values”; they affirm their inevitable destiny and thus become a conqueror of nothingness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein believes that believing in God means realizing that life has meaning. Viktor Frankl considers religion the will for ultimate meaning. Frankl calls this “ultimate meaning” or “meaning of the whole” the “supreme meaning”. In his work The Suffering of Meaningless Life, he writes: “Just as animals cannot understand humans and their world from their perspective, likewise it is impossible for humans to have insight into the otherworldly world”.
The only thing we can do is give meaning to individual situations in our daily lives. However, the whole has a supreme meaning in which we can only believe. you, but we cannot prove it. Because we cannot see everything in any way. The reductionism that prevails in science today, in which humans are seen as mere biological robots, pure products of their genetic material and environment, devalues the human being and deprives them of any freedom.
This is one of the reasons for our existential emptiness and all its consequences. This emptiness leads many people to aggression, addiction to entertainment, alcohol and drugs, to burnout syndrome at work and depression.
For Frankl, God is an absolute value that humans consciously or unconsciously assume. Everything else, material possessions, even our spouses or children, become relative in this higher light. However, if we desperately cling to something external, if we can no longer let it go, if for example we are unable to sacrifice a private weekend getaway for a higher goal such as supporting a friend in a difficult situation, then that is precisely the idolatry of materiality that is the reason for despair and resignation.
The one who can let go and sacrifice recognizes something more and so it can accept the relative value of earthly things. But the one who holds earthly things as the highest and only absolute, suffers from constant fear of losing them, and if he loses them, he falls into deep despair and resignation. Because of the transcendence that is deeply rooted in man, and which many call God, we can overcome fear and despair because the most valuable thing in our lives can never be lost.