It is hard to explain to a man blind from birth what the col­our white is like. Prov­ing the exist­ence of God is just such an impossible task – yet His non-exist­ence is equally impossible to prove. More pre­cisely, the argu­ments on either side work, and appear valid, when one accepts them on trust and enters the world­view with­in whose frame they hold their ground.

And yet theo­lo­gians have tried to prove the exist­ence of God by for­mu­lat­ing argu­ments for it. Accord­ing to the tele­olo­gic­al argu­ment, derived from the idea of pur­pose, the pur­pose­ful order of nature lets us infer a first and supreme being respons­ible for this sys­tem, as well as an ulti­mate, all-embra­cing pur­pose (telos – pur­pose, logos – study). The cos­mo­lo­gic­al argu­ment infers the exist­ence of God from the exist­ence of the uni­verse: all that is determ­ined or acci­dent­al can be traced back to some cause, which in turn has a determ­in­ing cause, and so on, but for the chain of caus­a­tion to work at all, at its end there must stand a cause uncon­di­tioned, abso­lute and neces­sary in itself – so held Aris­totle and St Thomas Aqui­nas.

Finally, accord­ing to the onto­lo­gic­al argu­ment, God can be con­ceived only as a per­fect and neces­sary being, and exist­ence belongs to per­fec­tion and neces­sity, and so God exists. It was the monk Anselm of Can­ter­bury (1032?–1109), a Doc­tor of the Church, who for­mu­lated this onto­lo­gic­al argu­ment, poet­ic in its sweep.

Anselm: Pros­logion – the para­dox of the argu­ment for God

  • 1. God: that than which noth­ing great­er can be con­ceived; 2. That than which noth­ing great­er can be ima­gined exists in the intel­lect; 3. All that exists in the intel­lect exists either in the intel­lect alone or in real­ity as well; 4. That than which noth­ing great­er can be con­ceived exists either in the intel­lect alone or in real­ity as well. Let us sup­pose that 5. That than which noth­ing great­er can be con­ceived exists in the intel­lect alone. But it is cer­tain that 6. Some­thing can be con­ceived that exists in real­ity as well; 7. All that exists in real­ity as well is great­er than all that exists in the intel­lect alone. Con­clu­sion: pro­pos­i­tions 6 and 7 are true, there­fore sup­pos­i­tion 5 is false.

In other words: we have with­in us the concept of the most per­fect being; then this being also exists, for oth­er­wise it would not be the most per­fect, since even the frailest exist­ent is more per­fect than the non-exist­ent. Hence the concept of the most per­fect being entails that a real­ity should cor­res­pond to it. Since the concept of the most per­fect being is with­in us, the most per­fect being must also exist. Deus cogit­atur ergo sum – God is con­ceived, there­fore He is…

Although Anselm's reas­on­ing was dis­puted even by his con­tem­por­ar­ies, and is still seen today rather as an aid to deep­en­ing a pro­pos­i­tion accep­ted on faith, the poetry of the thought can hardly be dis­puted. Besides, St Bonaven­ture, Duns Scotus, Descartes and Leib­n­iz all accep­ted the force of Anselm's reas­on­ing as proof. Oth­ers regard the whole line of thought as the aes­thet­ic­ally dis­taste­ful word-twist­ing of an infant­ile argu­ment. It is worth pon­der­ing wheth­er we need to attempt explan­a­tions when faith is an inner path, an awaken­ing to a high­er real­ity. Let us take this exper­i­ence as our ori­gin, our start­ing point, and try to build our world­view upon it. As for the rest, we shall see…

If we say that reli­gion is noth­ing other than the meet­ing of divine Beauty and divine Love in the heart of man, then we have found a crys­tal­line defin­i­tion that reaches bey­ond the lim­its of ages, nations, ideo­lo­gies and denom­in­a­tions, that holds true in any quarter of the world, in any spir­itu­al tra­di­tion or cul­tur­al milieu. What is more, it may hold true at any point in the uni­verse.