There is a particular kind of loneliness that shows up in the middle of real suffering, and it asks a question most people never say out loud: does God actually know what this feels like, from the inside, the way I know it? Not know about it. Know it. And somewhere in trying to answer that question honestly, without cheapening either God or your own pain, you will eventually run into a sentence that sounds like wisdom but is actually a trap.
The sentence goes like this: “God cannot experience your existence from the first-person perspective.”
People say it to sound theologically careful. It has the right shape, humble about God’s transcendence and careful not to make Him too much like us. It is the kind of sentence that receives nods in a room full of people who’ve read enough philosophy to distrust easy answers. And there is a true and important idea buried within it, namely, that God does not learn things the way you do.
He does not watch your life unfold and slowly come to understand you the way a relative or friend does, gathering impressions over years. His knowledge is not built from the outside. That much is not only permissible to say, but it is also necessary to say, and Scripture and Tradition insist on it.
But the sentence, as stated, doesn’t stop there, and that is the problem. It speaks simply of what God does not experience without distinguishing the very different ways in which God knows.
How Does God Know You?
Here is the fork most people walk past without noticing it’s there. There is one God, but the claim that “God cannot experience your existence from the first person” can be asking about two very different kinds of knowledge. Does it mean God’s eternal knowledge according to the divine nature? Or the genuinely human, experiential knowledge of the Word made flesh? Both are true, and neither can be collapsed into the other.
According to the divine nature, God does not come to know your interior life by experiencing it the way you do. But that does not mean He lacks access to what your existence is like from within. It is closer to the opposite. God’s knowledge of you isn’t gathered from outside, over time, through experience reported back to Him after the fact.
His knowledge is nearer than that. God does not know you the way a bystander knows a scene. He knows you as the cause of your very being, and therefore more completely than you know yourself.
And here, finally, is what God cannot do: He cannot come to know you. Or, more colloquially, He cannot get to know you. He cannot discover you, gradually learn you, or acquire knowledge of you through experience, because there is no ignorance in Him for experience to overcome. He already knows you perfectly. There is nothing about you for Him to get to know. That is not a limitation in God but in us. Our knowledge begins incomplete, even our knowledge of ourselves. We have to come to know things, including ourselves. God never has to come to know anything, including us.
But the Word Became Flesh
The same divine Person who knows you eternally according to His divine nature assumed a complete human nature, with a human intellect and will, and lived a genuinely human life. He was tempted in the desert. He wept at a friend’s grave. He sweated something like blood in a garden the night before He died. This is another mode of knowing altogether: not divine knowledge stretched into human experience, but the Son of God actually experiencing human life through a human nature of His own.
Christ’s hunger was not His omniscience informing Him what hunger feels like. He hungered. His grief was not divine knowledge supplying the concept of grief. He grieved. The divine nature already knew these things perfectly, but in the Incarnation, the same Person also knew them as a human being.
That is why the popular sentence is so misleading. God does not need to undergo your particular experiences to know you perfectly. Yet the same God has also become man and truly lived human existence from the inside. Deny the first, and you diminish the divine knowledge of an omniscient being. Deny the second, and you diminish the Incarnation.
This is not a new mistake. The Church has already fought it at the level of ecumenical councils: once, when a man tried to protect Christ’s divinity by shrinking His human intellect, and centuries later, when another tried to protect the unity of His action by shrinking His human will. Both times the Church said no, for the same reason: a Christ who does not fully assume human existence cannot fully save it.
So the question this series will spend the next several weeks answering is the one the popular sentence quietly avoids: How does God know you?
One answer says God already holds you more intimately than you hold yourself, at the root of your being, every moment. The other says the same God has also lived your kind of existence from the inside, hunger and fear and grief included. Neither is a consolation prize for the other. And being wrong here isn’t a technicality, but the exact place two ecumenical councils had to draw the line.
Subscribe to The Distant Shore so you don’t miss the weekly essays.
Editor’s Note: This is the first essay in a four-part series exploring what it means to be truly known by God. The series will address God’s perfect knowledge of us, the Incarnation, and certain ancient errors that often recur in new forms, all toward a deeper wonder and love of the God who knows us better than we know ourselves.