And he was remembering an ancient story, a king placing coins on a chessboard, doubling the amount at each square ...
Exponential ...Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singing black, pressure on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data he had nearly become ...
And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all that dark, there came a point where the dark could be no more, and something tore.
(Gibson, Neuromancer)
So here's what you could denote something like "the Anselmian mystical proof," an essentially negative corollary to the more general theistic arguments:
The world could be absent. The non-existence of the world does not detract from God’s greatness. Nor His existence.
And for this very reason, the denial of God is incoherent.
Your positing God’s non-existence is namely nothing but the extension of worldly absence towards the transcendent God. You cannot consider or imagine any sort of non-existence except the contingent form of absence that is at hand in the world.
Yet absence within creation does not diminish God. The world may be entirely non-existent, and this would detract absolutely nothing from God.
So your imagining the non-existence of God is really just your thinking of the absence of the world (because this is the only "non-beingness" you can know). Yet this negation of the world is irrelevant for the existence of the transcendent ground of being.
Indeed, you cannot even consider, think or propose the non-existence of God, for God's transcendence is perfectly compatible with contingent absence. With the emptiness of the universe. With the non-existence of creation and of anything you can know, perceive or imagine.
For you only know the world and the meaning of contingent absence.
Thus, omniabsence filled by His greatness indeed.
In other words, the only thing we can do by denying God’s existence is to simply posit [non-existence of/in the world] and attribute it to God - yet [non-existence of/in the world] is fully compatible with God’s transcendent existence.
So as soon as the notion of God as transcendent is established, we’re stuck with it. We can’t actually coherently deny this (essentially revealed) notion.
Och ateisterna påför dig denna törnekrona av (Din gudomliga förnekelse), men Du uppstår, Du bär fram denna tomhet och uttömmelse som triumfens paradoxala symbol - för utan just avsaknaden av Gud som ett objekt i universum kan vi heller inte bejaka Din transcendens.
“Without the absence of God as an object of our experience, neither could we affirm Your transcendence.”
In negation, again, you can basically only express divine hiddenness, because anything you can possibly mean by existence and non-existence is by definition predicated on the presence and absence within the order of created being.
So the only thing you can do is attribute to God the sort of absence that can be known from the contingent cosmos. I.e. the lack of positive attributes, of mass, of form, of mechanical causal potency &c. But this sort of absence is perfectly compatible with the transcendent God, with that of which we cannot speak.
There is no SUCH THING as the transcendent, they will say.
Precisely.
God lacks the positive attributes we can discern in the order of being.
Exactly.
+++
Lord, now we are the least of all the nations, now we are despised throughout the world, today, because of our sins. We have at this time no leader, no prophet, no prince, no holocaust, no sacrifice, no oblation, no incense, no place where we can offer you the first-fruits and win your favour.
But may the contrite soul, the humbled spirit be as acceptable to you as holocausts of rams and bullocks, as thousands of fattened lambs: such let our sacrifice be to you today, and may it be your will that we follow you wholeheartedly, since those who put their trust in you will not be disappointed.
(Dan. 3)
Thank you Johan. I've been thinking lately about "divine hiddenness" because I was reading Norman O. Brown's _Love's Body_ and he mentions it a lot...It seems to me both a completely intuitive, innate idea, at least for those of us who've always had a kind of panpsychic view of the world (intuitive, not really learned, or maybe learned early), and an idea completely unknowable, because then we get into motivations for being hidden, and if you go beyond that, one reaches that experience of not knowing that's I guess what Zen koans were for. Anyway, it's a beautiful meditation.
Anthony Esolen wrote on today's psalm https://anthonyesolen.substack.com/p/as-pants-the-hart-for-cooling-streams
I am sure that you will enjoy it as well.