Can We Know God?

We can know God, but “since our knowledge of God is limited, our language about him is equally so.”

How Can We Speak about God?

39. In defending the ability of human reason to know God, the Church is expressing her confidence in the possibility of speaking about him to all men and with all men, and therefore of dialogue with other religions, with philosophy and science, as well as with unbelievers and atheists.

40. Since our knowledge of God is limited, our language about him is equally so. We can name God only by taking creatures as our starting point, and in accordance with our limited human ways of knowing and thinking.

41. All creatures bear a certain resemblance to God, most especially man, created in the image and likeness of God. The manifold perfections of creatures—their truth, their goodness, their beauty—all reflect the infinite perfection of God. Consequently we can name God by taking his creatures’ perfections as our starting point, “for from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator” (Wis 13:5).

42. God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, imagebound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God—“the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable”—with our human representations. Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God.

43. Admittedly, in speaking about God like this, our language is using human modes of expression; nevertheless it really does attain to God himself, though unable to express him in his infinite simplicity. Likewise, we must recall that “between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude”; and that “concerning God, we cannot grasp what he is, but only what he is not, and how other beings stand in relation to him.”

— Catechism of the Catholic Church, 39–43

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Can We Know God?

There is a beauty in this passage from the Catechism, and I encountered the question it addresses in a different form when writing my book on open theism.

In that debate, there was a tendency among the opponents of open theism to classify certain biblical descriptions of God—his changing his mind, experiencing regret, expressing uncertainty—as mere anthropomorphisms that describe God as he appears to us rather than as he truly is. Meanwhile, the two verses that say God is not a man that he should change his mind were treated as ontological statements about the divine reality. The operative assumption was that we can sort biblical language about God into a literal pile and a figurative pile, and that the literal pile gives us unmediated access to the divine essence.

The Catechism cuts through this kind of sorting entirely. It teaches that all human language about God is limited and analogical—not because God is less than what Scripture says, but because he is infinitely more. We cannot speak of God, who is infinite, without comparing him to something finite. The open theists stumbled upon a genuine insight here—that we should take the full range of biblical language seriously rather than explaining away the passages that make us uncomfortable—but their conclusions depart from Catholic teaching at a critical point. Where the Church teaches that our language about God is limited while God himself is unlimited, open theism claims that God’s knowledge itself is limited, denying the divine omniscience the Church has always affirmed (cf. CCC 269–271). The insight about the inadequacy of human language is sound; the theological conclusion drawn from it is not.

Imago Dei and the Analogy of Being

Because we are created in the image of God, we are the most fruitful source of comparison with the divine. The analogy of being—the analogia entis—holds that created things can tell us something true about God precisely because they participate in his being, while simultaneously falling infinitely short of it. That comparison is real but imperfect, and it must be so.

When Scripture says that God changes his mind, it is not telling us that God undergoes the same psychological process a man does when he reconsiders a decision. But neither is it telling us nothing. It is communicating something real about God’s relationship with his creatures in the only language available to us: human language. God condescends to communicate with us through images and experiences we can grasp. Any attempt to peer behind those images and seize the divine essence directly is not just futile but presumptuous. If God chose to reveal himself in a certain way, that is the best way we have to understand him.

We Can Know God in His Condescension

The Catholic tradition has long recognized a distinction between what God is in himself and what we can know of him through his works. God in his innermost essence remains beyond the reach of any created intellect. Yet he is not therefore hidden from us. He makes himself genuinely known through creation, through Sacred Scripture, through the sacraments, and supremely through the Incarnation of his Son. What we know is real knowledge of the real God—but it is knowledge received on our terms, accommodated to our finitude.

The Essence–Energies Distinction

The distinction between God’s essence and his outward activity is most often associated with Eastern Orthodox thought, particularly as developed by Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century. Catholic theology uses different categories but arrives at an analogous conviction. Thomas Aquinas teaches that God’s essence is identical with his existence (ipsum esse subsistens) and that while we cannot grasp the divine essence directly in this life, we truly know God through his effects and self-revelation. The Catechism echoes this balance: our knowledge is genuine but always partial, always pointing beyond itself.

Apophatic Theology

As Aquinas wrote—and as the Catechism echoes in paragraph 43—a primary source of our understanding of God comes from knowing not what he is but what he is not. This tradition, known as apophatic or negative theology, does not mean that positive statements about God are false. It means they are incomplete. When we say “God is good,” we speak truly—but God’s goodness so exceeds any goodness we have experienced that our words, as the Catechism puts it, must be “continually purified.”

The quotation in paragraph 43 about the dissimilitude between Creator and creature comes from the Fourth Lateran Council (1215): “between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude.” This principle has governed the Catholic theological tradition ever since. Every true statement about God simultaneously points beyond itself to a reality that exceeds what the statement can capture.

How Can We Know God?

There is a productive tension here. We must constantly seek to know God better while simultaneously recognizing that we can never comprehend him fully. The two impulses do not cancel each other out; they sustain each other. It is precisely because God is inexhaustible that the pursuit never grows stale.

The means are not hidden from us. Theology, Sacred Tradition, Scripture, the Magisterium, and philosophy all serve as instruments through which the Holy Spirit continues to reveal the depths of God to his people. The Catechism itself is an exercise of this kind—an attempt by the Church, guided by the Spirit, to set down in human words what God has made known of himself.

And there will always be more. Even in the beatific vision, where the blessed see God as he truly is, no creature can exhaust the infinite mystery of the divine essence. We will never arrive, so to speak. That is not a deficiency but a gift—an eternity of deeper communion with the God who made us for himself.

Christ and His Bride

Why should we keep trying to know God if we cannot know him fully? Because the inexhaustibility of God is not a wall but a horizon—always receding, always inviting us further in.

Scripture reaches for the image of marriage to describe this dynamic. A husband can never fully know his wife; no matter how long they are married, there is room for deeper intimacy. That is what makes the relationship so alive, in both the best and worst of times. So it is with God, on a scale beyond all comparison.

We worship an infinite God who is far beyond our ability to grasp, yet who chooses to reveal himself to us—little by little, in ways we can receive. He condescends to demonstrate his love again and again. He humbled himself by taking on human flesh, suffering the pains of death, and rising so that we might share in his life. The more we recognize the greatness of the God we worship, the more astonishing the Incarnation becomes. And there is an eternal beauty in that.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What does the Catholic Church teach about knowing God?

The Catholic Church teaches that God can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason (CCC 36), but that our knowledge of God is always limited and analogical. We can name God only by taking creatures as our starting point, and our human words always fall short of the mystery of God (CCC 40, 42). Full knowledge of God’s essence is beyond human capacity in this life.

What is apophatic theology?

Apophatic theology—also called negative theology—is the tradition of approaching God by affirming what he is not rather than what he is. It recognizes that God so far exceeds our categories that the most honest way to speak of him is to deny that any creaturely concept applies to him univocally. Thomas Aquinas and the Fourth Lateran Council both affirm this principle.

What is the difference between God’s essence and his energies?

In Eastern Orthodox theology, especially as developed by Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century, God’s essence is his inner being—utterly unknowable and incommunicable—while his energies are his real, outward activities through which creatures genuinely encounter him. Catholic theology uses different terminology but recognizes an analogous principle: God’s ipsum esse subsistens (subsistent being itself) cannot be grasped directly, yet we truly know God through his effects and self-revelation.

What does CCC 43 mean by “an even greater dissimilitude”?

Paragraph 43 of the Catechism quotes the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which taught that any likeness we draw between God and creatures must be understood alongside an even greater unlikeness. This means that while we can truthfully say “God is good” or “God is wise,” his goodness and wisdom infinitely surpass anything we mean by those words when applied to creatures.

If we cannot fully know God, why should we try?

Because the pursuit itself is the relationship. The Church teaches that human beings are made for God and restless until they rest in him (CCC 27–30). The inexhaustibility of God means that knowing him is not a problem to be solved but a communion to be deepened—one that extends through this life and into eternity.

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