The Nearness of God

Abstract

‘God is closer to me than I am to myself’Meister EckhartCan God be closer to you than you yourself are? I believe that the answer to this question is ‘yes’. Indeed, God is such that it is impossible for you to be closer to yourself than God. Surely this is a paradoxical claim. It would be paradoxical to maintain that something could be closer to, say, a stone than a stone. Not even God could get closer to the stone than the stone itself. How then could God be closer to you than yourself? In part, I believe that the answer lies in appreciating the nature of what it is to be psychologically present to someone, including oneself. There is more to ourselves than meets our eyes, but not the eyes of God. A rich appreciation of personal identity and psychological presence can illumine the sense in which God is supremely present in our lives, indeed closer to us than we are. I spell out the nature of this Divine human proximity and conclude with reflection on what it is for someone to be indwelt by God.I shall be assuming the intelligibility of certain classic tenets about the God of Christianity. God is the all-knowing, all-powerful, loving Creator of the cosmos. I shall also help myself to some garden-variety claims about persons. Persons have beliefs, emotions, desires, and sensations. They have a conscious and unconscious life. They act (or are capable of acting) in the world. They often have a past and future. These are not to be taken to be necessary conditions for personhood.