It has been said that God is Truth, Beauty and Love.
How can God be Truth, Beauty and Love? For are not truth, beauty and love all different concepts? Certainly they are all different words, different terms in language. Certainly each has a different lexical definition and different uses than as referents to God.
That God is Truth, Beauty and Love, all three at once, can be understood only in terms of Language Systems and their Ultimate Concerns. You see, in order to understand and in order to communicate, we persons must first choose a language, a symbolic language, with its attendant concepts, by means of which Logos or intellect operates. And Logos uses symbolic languages, just like a digital computer, in the performance of its functions of understanding and communicating. This means to communicate its understanding to another person (another Logos or Intellectual entity). Before beginning communication, one must first decide WHICH LANGUAGE SYSTEM ONE IS GOING TO USE. Normally, in everyday life and without much thinking, we would use "common language," as J.D. Moore referred to it.
But, if one chooses the language of Aesthetics, which is concerned ultimately with the nature of beauty, one will find that Beauty is the Ultimate Concern in that language system. Beauty becomes a sort of god, in other words, the ultimate concept in the language system of Aesthetics. Beauty becomes the overarching concept which ties the language system and the conceptual paradigm into a world, the World of Aesthetics. If one could speak and think only in the language of Aesthetics, one would essentially "exist" in the world of aesthetics and one would always be striving to know God in the form of Beauty.
If one chooses the language system of Epistemology, which is concerned with the nature of knowledge, "true knowledge" becomes the major theme. For in the language system of Epistemology, true knowlege is our dominate concern. True knowledge or "Truth" becomes a sort of god in the language system of Epistemology because in that language system, it is The Ultimate Concern. It is the central core, the gravitational nucleus and even the boundary or defining limit of that world. For once you wander away from "Truth," you wander outside of the world of Epistemology.
In the language system of Ontology, which is concerned about the nature of being and existence, the ultimate concern, of course, becomes the nature of the greatest being. And, as we will recall, St. Anselm had offered centuries ago that "God is That Being of which no greater being can be conceived." In short, God is the Ultimate Being and The Ultimate Being is the Ultimate Concern in the language of Ontology.
What about the language system of Cosmology? Cosmology is the study of creation. It is the story of the beginning of and creation of the universe and all that is in it. This includes ourselves, of course. The language system of Cosmology is ultimately concerned with "the power" behind all creation, the initial source of all being, the prime mover, the creative power, the creator of all things! The ultimate concern in the language of Cosmology becomes the nature of The Creator. And The Creator becomes "God" in the language system of Cosmology. Christianity teaches that "God is the creator of all things." Western religions are both cosmological langauges as well as moral languages. They address how the universe came to be and concern themselves with how we are to behave during our lives, in relationship to The Creator, to the world and to one another.
And what about love? In which language system is "love" the ultimate concern. Why, in the language system of Sociology, of course. For love is the ultimate binding force in the social relations between human beings. Love is synthesis. Love draws, pulls, binds and bonds. Love holds individuals together into mating pairs, into families, into tribes, clans, ethnic neighborhoods. Love makes us dutiful, sacrificial, tolerant, forgiving and is the ultimate motive behind all the social graces and behind humanity itself. It is what makes "us" or "we" The Organism. Love creates groups and makes us part of some group. And if not the actual sensation of love, then the yearning and need for love, the hope and dream of love, will still keep us in the group, hopeful. Love is the Ultimate Concern in the language system of Sociology. And therefore, in the language system of Sociology, God is Love. A "church" is a group of people forming a body held together by common religious beliefs and "love." Jesus is known as "the God of Love" and appealed to us to build a church based upon love for one another.
We have offered an explanation of how the ancient concept that God is Truth, Beauty and Love has come down to us. This is understandable only by utilizing the concept of "language systems" ("language games" according to Wittgenstein) and the concept of Ultimate Concerns, proposed by Paul Tillich.
As stated above, we in America (and England, Australia, New Zealand, Canada etc.) routinely choose the language system called English in which to carry out our daily discourse. We have not, at least up to this point, much thought about it, for it seemed to have simply evolved as the dominant common language of daily discourse. When we begin to communicate we often assume we will do so in the language system of English. But the general language system of English has many, many sublanguages. Among them are the sublanguage systems of Philosophy, the sciences of Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, Biology, Geology etc., Religion(s), Politics, Medicine, Sociology, Computer Science, Engineering etc., etc. And each of these has its own sublanguages and subsublanguages. The sublanguage of Chemistry has the subsublanguages of Inorganic Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Biochemistry, Physical Chemistry, Steroid Chemistry etc. Each has its own Ultimate Concern, its own 'god.' The ultimate concern of Chemistry is Energy; in Physics the ultimate concern is Matter/Motion, in Economics it is Wealth, in Sociology it is Love, in Biology it is Life, in Medicine it is Health etc., etc.
Those we referred to, the language systems of Aesthetics, Epistemology, Ontology and Cosmology, are often thought of as sublanguages in the larger system of Philosophy. Understanding that every language system is a conceptual paradigm and will be contained by an ultimate concept, an overarching concept that ties the language system and the conceptual paradigm together into a "world," and pulled together by the gravitational core of that concept, helps us to understand the existence of many gods, many ultimate concerns, each the god of its own world, and the god of those who speak that language. And some speak more than one language. And again, human beings become the creatures of internal conflict.
How do we resolve these conflicts? We do not! We do not think along the foolish lines of females for whom peace and slavery are great concerns and desires. We accept the inherent dynamic nature of the universe, the ever-changing nature of all things including language. For language is a living thing. Languages are metaphysical entities and exist in a metaphysical state or world. Languages are born, languages grow, they develop, they give birth to new languages and sublanguages and sub sub sub languages ad infinitum in the metaphysical world, just like actual living creatures do in the physical world. And Being and Existence will continue to give birth to new Beings in the form of our offspring and to new Existences in the form of our personhoods and our conceptual entities. And these languages will strive to grow and will contest with one another for dominance. Each will be used by some group as the ultimate language in which to talk about the world, with which to understand the world and to communicate with one another about the world. And a common language always serves to bind people together into groups, individuals with whom one can speak, reach out to in the lonliness of Analogos, and perhaps to touch another soul in the darkness.
Albert M. Iosue
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