God’s incomprehensibility is a matter of order, not of knowledge’s limits

Evidence

When the different writers we have been looking at invoke the idea of the ‘incomprehensibility’ of God, they resist any implication of obscurity, obscurantism, or unintelligibility. They do not contrast what Hegel calls the ‘homely pictures of faith’ to speculative insight. They concentrate on what, in God, cannot be comprehended, what cannot be seized, possessed, or assimilated. Not because spirit – by some flaw, by some fallibility – is impotent to constitute the divine as object of knowledge, but because he is not simply a matter for knowledge. God is not a concept. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 744

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Distinguishes two senses of ‘incomprehensible’: something reason fails to grasp vs. something not of the order of reason at all.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s enmity question: whether the enemy likewise resists being an object of knowledge vs. exceeding knowledge’s order is a definitional split parallel to the passivity/agency ambiguity of plasticity.

Related

• God’s incomprehensibility means he exceeds knowledge, not that reason fails him. (similarity 0.93)
• Malabou’s limit of knowledge may coincide with theological unintelligibility (similarity 0.82)
• Theologians reject Hegel because concept-bound God loses transcendence and power to promise. (similarity 0.82)
• Sublating sensuous immediacy leaves God presented to knowledge as representation (similarity 0.81)
• God’s self-identity is differentiated and not empty even in pure thought (similarity 0.80)
• For Hegel spirit is not merely self-contained thought but essentially self-revelation and objectivity (similarity 0.80)
• Theological mystery is God’s mode of self-appearing, not a cognitive failure. (similarity 0.80)
• Hegel’s ontology of consciousness remains framed entirely in terms of knowledge. (similarity 0.79)
• God’s self-knowledge occurs through human self-consciousness and knowledge of God (similarity 0.79)
• A fully self-transparent God can neither occur nor arrive, and so cannot promise (similarity 0.79)
• God’s fall is the highest form of his eminence, not his diminishment (similarity 0.79)
• Divine mystery is God’s mode of appearing, not hiddenness from reason (similarity 0.79)
• Hegel uniquely read the Death of God as divine self-negation (similarity 0.79)
• For Hegel God’s essence includes self-representation and being-for-itself (similarity 0.79)