Transcendence in Mormonism

This week some theology, but done against the background of an earlier column , "Just say . . . 'Whatever!'"

Like all religions, Mormonism often speaks of God's transcendence. But usually when Mormons use that term we are not making a metaphysical claim. Instead we are using transcendent to mean "superlative": God is supremely good or loving or just or something else.

Non-Mormon Christians have argued that it is not enough merely to say that God is the most loving person. To be worthy of worship, he must transcend us in more than magnitude. For them, that transcendence is located in creation: God is uncreated, infinitely being from all eternity, but as created beings humans are finite from the creation and for eternity afterward. That difference cannot be overcome. Even the Orthodox and Catholic doctrine of theosis , becoming like God, becoming fully in the image of God, does not erase the distinction between Creator and creature.

Mormons do not believe in an ontological difference between God and us. We believe that we share in the essence of God in that, as individuals, we too are eternally uncreated. Among Latter-day Saints, this is the common interpretation of what Joseph Smith is reported to have said [see Ehat and Cook, The Words of Joseph Smith 352, 359-360] and Abraham 3:18 . I am using that common interpretation, which assumes that human beings are eternally uncreated individuals, called " intelligences ." God is an uncreated intelligence; each human person is also an uncreated intelligence.

Of course the being that human beings share with God—the being of intelligence—is not fully developed in us and can be fully developed only through the grace of God. Nevertheless, there is some sense in which we are, embryonically, the same as God. To use the language of B. H. Roberts, we are "of the same species" ( The Mormon Doctrine of Deity [n.p.: 1903] 255).

That belief is dangerous, for it runs the risk of idolatry, the idolatry of bringing God down from his majesty and making him merely another person or thing in our world. He remains merely another person, even if he is a very powerful person or thing, perhaps an infinitely powerful one. If that is what we think God is, then we worship an idol, the most powerful person amongst us. Given the Mormon claim that in some sense God and humans are the same, how can we avoid idolatry? Can we speak of his transcendence as anything other than just magnitude?

I think the answer is yes.

First consider this definition of transcendence: "the transcendent is beyond representation in a conceptually comprehended totality." Given that definition, even mere things are transcendent. Though representation and conceptualization are necessary to our relationship to those things, no representation or conceptualization is fully adequate to the individual thing we encounter. Each entity transcends us.

Obviously my inability to represent an entity totally doesn't mean that I cannot represent it adequately. Most of the time we do well enough, or better than well enough. It doesn't even mean that I never encounter things themselves. I can encounter a thing itself rather than only my conceptualization of it, and when I do I encounter it as overpowering, amazing, bedazzling: my experience is of something exceeding my understanding. I find myself in awe and wonder at things in their transcendence.

But even though I encounter transcendent things in the world, God is not merely one of those things. How does his transcendence differ in principle from the transcendence of worldly things? If it does not, then it is difficult to see how we can avoid idolatry.

To respond to that question, let me ( once again ) borrow from Emmanuel Levinas and what he says about persons, who transcend us differently than do other things. By analogy, understanding how persons transcend us can help us understand how God transcends us in more than merely magnitude.

Levinas argues that when I experience the other person as a person, she breaks through the sphere of my otherwise solitary, ego-centered, conceptual world. Most of the time I live in a world of my conceptualizations and representations. There everything is encountered as if my will and I were the center of the world: the merely ordinary world . Exposure to another person in herself disengages me from that world. As a person, the other person overflows my understanding of her as an object, as something I conceive of—and by overflowing my understanding she interrupts my consciousness. She reveals its limits. My encounter of her is more overpowering, amazing, and bedazzling than is any encounter of things—though what the word more means in this case at first seems difficult to decide.

Like my encounter with entities, my encounter with another person who overflows my idea of her reveals that I am finite. I have limits; there are others outside beyond me, my will, and my understanding. My encounter with the other person as person is an encounter with infinity—with what is beyond my limits.

But that is not enough to make the encounter with the other person a figure of my encounter with God, for it equally well describes my encounter with ordinary things. In this experience of being interrupted by another person, the other person is indissolubly other than me. Yet things can also be that. Besides being irreducible to my wants, needs, goals, intentions, or conceptions—as are the entities I encounter—the other person is someone to whom I am obligated: I must respond to the interruption she causes; her interruption of my will demands my recognition.

That demand is most obvious in language: I communicate with her to explain myself and it is for her to decide whether my explanation is adequate. Her judgment of what I say may consist only in "I understand" or "I don't understand," but it is a judgment that I must submit to if I speak and use reason. That is the substance of language.

The necessity of explanation—a relationship of obligation and being-under-judgment—is emblematic of my relationship with the other person. That is the essence of the experience of a person transcending me. The marks of obligation-to and being-under-judgment-by differentiate it from the experience of mere entities transcending me. Those marks are the more of her overflow, and in them the experience of the other person can figure the encounter with God.

Borrowing the vocabulary of Jean Wahl (1887-1974) and Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973), Levinas differentiates the transcendence of the other person from the transcendence of ordinary entities by speaking of our experience of the former as transascendence . In the experience of transascendence we find ourselves drawn out of ourselves toward and by someone infinitely higher, someone to whom we are indebted and obligated, and someone by whom we are judged. The other person is the figure of the transcendent God toward whom we transascend.

How, then, does the transcendence of God differ from that of other persons if God is himself an intelligence like me? In the language of Mormonism, every other eternal intelligence transcends me. But my transascendence toward any other intelligence is made possible only by God. Though he is "of the same species" as we (intelligence), he differs from all other intelligences in that he brings the rest of us into spiritual and then mortal life. Though he does not create intelligences ex nihilo in the traditional sense of the phrase, as persons intelligences are nothing without his creative act. Without that act, they would remain the analogue of mere "matter" (cf. D&C 131:7 ), not yet a me or an I, except potentially. That we are human souls—body and spirit (cf. D&C 88:15 )—is a consequence of his divine grace.

Thus God creates us from outside ourselves and from a doubled infinite distance: he is infinitely distant from us in the same way that any other intelligence is, but the distance between us and him is also the infinite distance between the ones who are brought into life and the One who brings them. Neither of those distances can be undone, not even when a person attains the fullness of God's image. That person will always remain someone created by God. For Mormons, as for traditional Christianity, the Creator-creature distinction makes God divinely transcendent of us, even though we deny ex nihilo creation.

The infinite transascending relationship with the other person is an analogy to the infinite transascending relationship between God and myself. My relations with other persons who are infinitely other than me teach me about my relationship with God. Though God and human beings each have the being of intelligences, the infinite distance between the Divine and me is of a different order than that between myself and any other human being. He is the Creator and we are his creatures. Understanding our relationship to the other person and our relationship to God in terms of transascendence in different orders (the one infinite; the other doubly infinite) preserves both the "sameness" of God and human beings that Joseph Smith taught and the majesty of God that worship requires.