Skip to main content

Does God Exist?


Book Overview

Title: Does God Exist?
Author: Hans Kung
Translated from German by Edward Quinn
Publisher: Collins Fount Paperbacks, 1978
Pages: 839

This is the most scholarly book I have ever read. It was a birthday gift I received in 1986 from a Catholic priest who taught me philosophy for two years. I had abandoned religion as well as God though it might be truer to say that God had given me up. I was a student of religion. I had ample faith in God. I used to pray half a dozen times a day. I wrote love poems to Jesus. “You took the brush and colours danced in my heart.” The ‘you’ in lines that smacked explicitly of romance in my poems was Jesus. I wrote those love poems when I was a student of philosophy. The only teacher to whom I dared to show those poems was the one who gifted me Hans Kung’s magnum opus on my 26th birthday when I had already proclaimed my atheism loudly enough. [The details are in my memoir, Autumn Shadows.]

Hans Kung is one of the most profound theologians of the Catholic Church. The Church was not quite pleased with many of his views and so he was even barred from teaching theology. He has written many books though I have read only two of them, the other being his History of the Catholic Church. This book is so profound that it will engage even a voracious reader for months.

The book looks at God from various angles: philosophy, psychology, mysticism, and religion with a focus on Christianity. Even science and mathematics make their presence felt in many parts of the books. The very opening sentence of the book is: “It is not surprising that mathematicians in particular have always had a special interest in an unconditional, absolute certainty in the realm of life and knowledge.” There is no mathematics without certain absolute truths. Hans Kung begins his exploration of God’s ontology with none other than Rene Descartes, the mathematician who gave us coordinate geometry without which much of classical mathematics would not exist. Descartes was a philosopher too. I think, therefore I exist. That remains his most famous saying. Like all mathematicians Descartes had to establish his philosophical edifice on a self-evident, absolutely true proposition.

Kung begins with a questioning of those absolute propositions of philosophy. “Does not consciousness include in addition to and together with rational thinking also willing and feeling, imagination and temperament, emotions and passions, which just cannot be attributed rationalistically to pure reason, but have their own reality, often opposed to reason?” He asks. Man is not just a cerebral robot. He needs more, much more, than reason to guide him, to give him meaning in life.

The eminent theologian then moves on to a lot of other philosophers like Blaise Pascal, Hegel, Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Kant, and Wittgenstein and discusses them in great detail. Anyone who is interested in philosophy will find this book thoroughly exhaustive and stunningly thought-provoking. Kung not only summarises the views of these philosophers elegantly but also critiques them subtly and sharply.

He also takes necessary insights from psychology. Adler, Jung and Freud all come under Kung’s piercing scanner. By its very nature, Kung informs us, “psychological interpretation alone cannot penetrate to the absolutely final or first reality.”

God remains beyond the rationality of philosophy and the analytics of psychology. Isn’t God an experience? The last part of Kung’s voluminous book focuses precisely on that question. No one can arrive at God without faith. In fact, no one can make life meaningful without the fundamental trust which enables us to say Yes to reality.
 
The title page of my copy
Being a Catholic priest, Kung obviously offers us the God of Christianity in detail though he would never suggest that Jesus’ God is the only true God. On the contrary, he states clearly that the Christian experience of God is only one of the many possible experiences. He dismisses any claim to universalism on the part of Christianity as “a sign of provincialism”.

People can and do experience God in their own ways. Kung quotes William James’s definition of religion as “the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” Whatever. Even a wedge of rock that is made to look like a phallus can lead the believer to a divine experience.

For Kung, Jesus is the foundation of his divine experience. The God of Jesus is different from the tyrannical and capricious Yahweh of the Old Testament. Here is a God who loves, who cares, who is compassionate. Jesus is the “embodiment of a new attitude to life,” says Kung, “and a new life-style.” Jesus enables him to accept the evils of life. “I cannot myself attach a meaning to my living and suffering,” Kung says, “but I can accept it in the light of the completed life and suffering of this one man.” The sufferings of Jesus act as the buffer for Kung.

Well, that is where I parted ways with Hans Kung. If Jesus were indeed God, omnipotent and loving as Christianity envisages him, why couldn’t he show us a better way than that of the cross? As I put the mammoth book down some time in 1987 [I think I took about a year to read it], I realised that I had not travelled much farther from the mathematical logic of Descartes. My approach to reality remains intellectual even today in spite of the strong element of romanticism in me. I can stand in awe before a tulip. I can pet a kitten with the tenderness of a new mother. My love can turn passionate where passion is required. But when it comes to grappling with life’s realities, my intellect jumps to the fore.

God is an emotional experience. Even when profoundly religious people like Hans Kung give me intellectual reasons for their faith in God, I know ultimately even for them God is an emotional experience. Otherwise God is nothing. God is the awe that the tulip springs in me. God is the tenderness that the kitten extracts from my heart. God is the passion in my romance.

Hans Kung may find it difficult to experience that awe, tenderness and passion without the person of a God to uphold them. He concludes his book thus: “Does God exist? Despite all upheavals and doubts, even for man today, the only appropriate answer must be that with which believers of all generations from ancient times have again and again professed their faith.” What is it? It begins with faith and ends in trust, Kung answers in the last lines of the book. It is the instinctual faith of the infant in its mother; it is the conscious trust of the adult in the love that lies beyond.


Comments

  1. Indeed, god is an emotional experience. I believe that we all have the same experience, the believers see them through the name of god while the non-believers don't. Thank you for yet another suggestion. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, Dashy, it's a question of the way rather than the destination. Ways differ. Hinduism, Christianity, or whatever. Or literature in my case.

      This book may not be easily available.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...