In The Natural History of
Religion, David Hume claims that the human mind has difficulty holding on
to the pure (i.e., unencumbered) idea of divine simplicity, and thus tends to
apply familiar (i.e., human) attributes or qualities onto that idea (i.e.,
anthropomorphism), as if hanging ornaments on a naked Christmas tree. Eclipsed
or compromised, or even lost entirely, is the quality of God being wholly
other, and thus being qualitatively different than us and anything in our
world. The Christian theologian Dionysius grasped this idea in his claim that
God goes beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and sensibility
(i.e., human emotions). The Biblical claim in the Book of Job that God is angry
with Job’s “friends” for making statements about God’s ways without knowing
them can be analyzed with an eye towards both viewing anger as only going so
far with respect to God and being critical of the “friends’” presumption in assuming
that God’s ways are within the limits of human cognition (i.e., theories).
Rather than go to a negative theology wherein God is thought to be ineffable, I
want to stress the value of recognizing both distance and mystery as being indispensable
with respect to our relation to God lest we reduce God to our various masks of
eternity.
The full essay is at "Holiness and Mystery of God in Judaism."
