A Reflection on the Intrinsic and Extrinsic Value of Human- and God-Ethics in the Story of Moses and Khidr in the Surah The Cave
This reflection is indeed a response to my previous interpretation of this story a while ago, where I criticized Khidr for killing a young boy, without committing any crime, just for the fact that based on Khidr's God given foreknowledge, he knew the boy would become wickedly rebellious and disturb his righteous believer parents. In this reflection, I will reject my first interpretation and discuss the qualitatively different intrinsic and extrinsic values of the ethical for humans and for God. I repeat my conclusion here:
To
recapitulate: two major elements separate us from divine sources who have
foresight and foreknowledge of future.
First, it is the fact that we are bound to pain and pleasure and these
two are bound to becoming, our finitude and death, on the one hand, and grandiosity,
greed, and will-to-power, on the other.
We can intensify our pleasures momentarily through sex and drugs. We can take pleasure in luxury and ownership
of palaces, towers, and cities. As well,
we can take an ascetic path and starve ourselves to death or to survive on the
minimum, on the other extreme. Khidr and
divine forces, because of non-acquired knowledge of unseen, establish a
completely different relation with their existence. Their ethics is not grounded in how to deal
with their limitation and lack of foresight, and because of their infallibility
their ethics is purely consequentialist, i.e., what they do won’t affect their
essence, and they do what serves the divine telos. So, Khidr was ethically justified to kill a
young boy who hasn’t committed any crime, but we are not, because we have neither
the essential nature of Khidr, nor his divine foreknowledge.
The
second factor is that we as mortals have a spiritual dimension, which is unique
to us; it is internal and intrinsic to our existence. The story of secularism, materialism, and
reductive Darwinian evolution questions this spiritual and intrinsic value and
instead sets survival as the only measure of evolution. No wonder that three major 19th
c. philosophers who affected the whole course of Western civilization: Mill,
Nietzsche, and Marx set hedonism and will-to-power as two major motifs for
human existence. For Mill and Marx, at
best our spiritual dimension, if we can use this term, is confined to a sense
of human solidarity or species-being or variations of
humanistic-naturalism. But thousands
years of scriptures have heralded and cultivated the message that we are more
than beasts, desire for survival, or nature.
We have a spiritual destiny. And
this spiritual destiny can be fulfilled the best if we set our moral conduct on
intrinsic value of our action rather than focusing on consequences. Not strange that all major religions such as
Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Vedas and Upanishads, and Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam, and even indigenous religions, and philosophers
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Neo-Platonists, even Stoics and Kant reject consequentialism
based on hedonism and urge us to attune our internal disposition to “doing
good” for its own sake, for its intrinsic value. This non-consequentialist and intrinsic moral
conduct says something essential about our finitude both in terms of our existence
(survival and death, pain and pleasure) and lack of foresight and limited
knowledge. As well, the imperative of
pursuing the intrinsic value of our moral actions hints to our spiritual
destiny and growth.
So, human ethics is essentially intrinsic, which means I ought to do good for what it does to my inner sense of self, because I have freedom of the will to violate this inner sense or to aid it. In another word, I am not an angel or a miraculous extraordinary creature such as Khidr. As well, due to our existential limitedness we don’t have knowledge of far future. So, we ought to do good, in a non-consequentialist sense, because we become what we do. If I do good, I purify my inner disposition and create a character. As Aristotle puts it, virtue is a matter of habit (Ethos=habit): while what we do serves our survival, and in religious terms, it serves our salvation, our body-soul absorbs whatever we do into its dispositional structure. The strange insight is that there is no becoming or being, as we know it, in God. In this sense, God is ineffable to us as the ground of Being does not belong to the world of becoming and contingency. As, ancients said, God’s essence or inner disposition is God’s existence. Or more accurately, there is no duality between God's action or bringing about things into existence and God's essence. God’s actions are consequentialist: to bring about the good outcome out of divine will. God’s actions have no intrinsic value for God, because they can’t affect God’s essence: the divine value is God’s doings; there is no becoming in God. God and good is the word-deed of God and the word-deed of God is God and good.
The Story of Moses and Khidr
“Moses said to his servant, ‘I will
not rest until I reach the place where the two seas meet, even if it takes me
years!’ but when they reached the place where the two seas meet, they had
forgotten all about their fish, which made its way into the sea and swam away. They journeyed on,
and then Moses said to his servant, ‘Give us our lunch! This journey of ours is
very tiring,’ and [the servant] said, ‘Remember when we were resting by the
rock? I forgot the fish–
Satan made me forget to pay attention to it– and it [must have] made its way
into the sea.’ ‘How strange!’ Moses said, ‘Then that was the place we were
looking for.’ So, the two turned back, retraced their footsteps, and found one
of Our servants– a man to whom We had granted Our mercy and whom We had given knowledge
of Our own. Moses said to him, ‘May I
follow you so that you can teach me some of the right guidance you have been taught?’
The man said, ‘You will
not be able to bear with me patiently. How could you be patient in matters beyond
your knowledge?’” Moses said, ‘God
willing, you will find
me patient. I will not disobey you in any way.’ 70 The man said, ‘If you follow me
then, do not query anything I do before I mention it to you myself.’”
(18:60-70)
This is the strange story of Moses and Khidr in the Quran. The first part reminds me of Tarkovsky’s
movie The Stalker (Guide), where the
scientist forgets his knapsack and leaves Stalker and the writer going back to
find it. The writer says we should wait
for the scientist. Stalker (the guide)
asks the writer to proceed as the Zone constantly changes and they can’t wait
or go back to find the scientist. After
going through a cave-like water shed, they find the scientist on the other side with
his knapsack. The scientist wonders how they
got there, because he had to crawl on his four to get back to find his knapsack
and Stalker is scared of this strange story and can’t find confidence for the
time being to go forward. He asks the scientist
and writer to stay there to rest for a while and indeed it is the moment of
reflection for all.
Similarly, the junction of two seas, where Moses will meet a special
creature with divine foreknowledge, is not a static point. It is a point where the fish, which they had
prepared for food comes back to life and swims away. It was revealed to Moses where the fish
comes back to life is where the two seas meet.
Satan distracted them not to notice the fish coming back to life. Moses and his servant had to go back to the
rock where they forgot their fish, and there they found Khidr, a mystical
miraculous man, who had certain non-acquired knowledge, laduni knowledge in contradistinction to Moses’ acquired knowledge
through evidence and reason and God’s commands . Here also we have two kinds of ethics. The ethics of immediate results or what in
Islamic literature is called knowledge of external standards of justice (zahir) and the ethics of foresight or
foreknowledge, or knowledge of inward knowledge (batin) of unseen, what one might along with Kierkegaard call:
teleological suspension of the [external=zahir]
ethics for the divine [internal=batin]
ethics. This is a difficult spiritual
food to digest, because of the following:
“They travelled on. Later, when
they got into a boat, and the man made a hole in it, Moses said, ‘How could you
make a hole in it? Do you want to drown its passengers? What a strange thing to
do!’ He replied, ‘Did I not tell you that you would never be able to bear with
me patiently?’ Moses said, ‘Forgive me for forgetting. Do not make it too hard
for me to follow you.’ And so they travelled on. Then, when they met a young
boy and the man killed him, Moses said, ‘How could you kill an innocent person?
He has not killed anyone! What a terrible thing to do!’ He replied, ‘Did I not
tell you that you would never be able to bear with me patiently?’ Moses said,
‘From now on, if I query anything you do, banish me from your company– you have
put up with enough from me.’ And so they travelled on. Then, when they came to
a town and asked the inhabitants for food but were refused hospitality, they
saw a wall there that was on the point of falling down and the man repaired it.
Moses said, ‘But if you had wished you could have taken payment for doing
that.’” (18:71-78)
Moses’
objections to Khidr represent the external [zahir] acquired knowledge of
justice and ethics. The ethical as that
which has intrinsic value—i.e., we do it for its own sake not for any worldly
result alone— is based on divine given ethics and human reason needs to fathom its
inner logic. The inner logic of divine
and human ethics is the same, otherwise Moses and Khidr couldn’t later converse the
issue of Khidr’s violations of ethical verdicts and come to agreement. If the inner logic of divine and human ethics
were not the same, Moses couldn’t even be sure that Khidr is a representative
of God and not devil. Moses and Khidr
belong to the same divine goodness.
However, we are dealing with two different ethical apparatuses: human
ethics and God-ethics. These two share
the same essential core but God-ethics is not smeared with evil in any sense,
while human ethics is based on good and evil: we are engrained with good and
evil, and the good repels evil or vice versa.
So,
human ethics is essentially intrinsic, which means I ought to do good for what
it does to my inner sense of self, because I have freedom of the will to
violate this inner sense or to aid it.
In another word, I am not an angel or a miraculous extraordinary
creature such as Khidr. As well, due to
our existential limitedness we don’t have knowledge of far future. So, we ought to
do good, in a non-consequentialist sense, because we become what we do. If I do good, I purify my inner disposition
and create a character. As Aristotle
puts it, virtue is a matter of habit (Ethos=habit): while
what we do serves our survival, and in religious terms, it serves our salvation, our body-soul absorbs whatever we do into its dispositional structure. The strange insight is that there is no becoming or being, as we know it, in God. In this sense, God is ineffable as the ground of Being does not belong to the world of becoming and contingency of matter. As, ancients said, God’s essence or
inner disposition is God’s existence. Or more accurately, there is no duality between God's action or bringing about things into existence and God's essence. God’s actions are consequentialist: to bring
about the good outcome out of divine will.
God’s actions have no intrinsic value for God, because they can’t affect
God’s essence: the divine value is God’s doings; there is no becoming in God. God and good is the word-deed of God and the
word-deed of God is God and good. Thus,
Khidr explains the wisdom of his actions to Moses in this way:
“He
said, ‘This is where you and I part company. I will tell you the meaning of the
things you could not bear with patiently: the boat belonged to some needy people who made their living from the
sea and I damaged it because I knew that coming after them was a king who was
seizing every [serviceable] boat by force. The young boy had parents who were
people of faith, and so, fearing he would trouble them through wickedness and
disbelief, we wished that their Lord should give them another child– purer and
more compassionate–in his place. The wall belonged to two young orphans in the
town and there was buried treasure beneath it belonging to them. Their father
had been a righteous man, so your Lord intended them to reach maturity and then
dig up their treasure as a mercy from your Lord. I did not do [these things] of
my own accord: these are the explanations for those things you could not bear
with patience.’” (18:78-82)
In
explaining his actions, Khidr shows the goodness of the consequences of his
actions. He is purely consequentialist,
because his inner divine disposition is immutable and his foreknowledge of the
future is his only rationale of action.
Khidr did violate certain immediate human ethical verdicts for the
goodness of saving righteous people. We
ought to do good, and the inner sense of “good” is the same for us and
God. Indeed, God endowed us with this
inner meaning of “good”. We ought not to
hurt or to kill people, without justification or out of malice. We ought not break our promises. We ought to serve people, the destitute,
children and elders. Aristotle calls
“good” as “the end” for the natural functional tendency of beings. We are all here to fulfill our function as human-spiritual,
and not merely natural, beings. Although
the telos=good=end is set for us by God, in our free will we ought to move
towards that goal with God’s help. We
are equipped by reason and inner compass to realize the law of karma: whatever
we do, it has external and internal effects.
We do something to other beings and through our very actions something
being done to us.
In
the structure of the story of Moses and Khidr, we have a series of ethical
violations of acquired knowledge of justice, i.e., we know that sabotaging a
boat which belongs to another person, or more importantly killing a young boy
without him committing any crime, are intrinsically wrong for us. God’s commands also urge us not to commit
such immoral actions. However, Khidr
commits those immoral actions, because of his knowledge of future. There is a qualitative difference between
us, mortals, and divine forces. We are inherently
limited to pain and pleasure, to vulnerability and death. We need to take care of ourselves and
survival can become as the sole purpose of one’s life, as a variation of
falling in spiritual nihilism. Historically
we have evolved to see and experience ourselves as spiritual beings in addition
to the demands of natural survival. Divine scriptures and messages have guided
us to the steep direction of rising above our whims and our short term unbridled
desires and pleasures and aim at spiritual growth and justice—with the
declaration that we ought to liberate ourselves from the limited
consequentialism of pleasures of this world, to achieve salvation in the world
to come.
As
I argued before, humans are unable to see the future and their perception of
consequences is limited and short sighted.
An ethics based on consequences, such as utilitarianism can be useful
only for local policies not to be taken as a general ethical-spiritual
principle on how to act in general. For
example, the logic of consumerism in capitalism couldn’t see far enough and in
practice we polluted our oceans and air—and our soul. W caused deforestations and destruction of
natural resources, and fell into vanity of hedonism and will-to-power—or
humanism at best. Our excess and greed
are responsible for the extinction of 20% of species on this plant and the
pending global warming and environmental disaster. So, we need to focus on God’s commands of
goodness and act in terms of improvement of our internal disposition. My argument is that Khidr and divine forces
are essentially consequentialist, because their essence is infallible and
immutable and because of their foreknowledge of unseen. So, it is justifiable for Khidr to kill a
young boy who will become wickedly rebellious for some good consequences, but
it is not legitimate for us to do so.
Divine Mercy Intervenes
in the Destiny of Individuals at the Disposal of the Telos of History
Based
on my own personal experience and according to scriptures, Khidr and divine
forces are at work here on the earth and in the whole universe. The story of Khidr and Moses clearly shows
that God actively intervenes in the world.
Khidr makes a hole in a boat to help the owner of the boat from an
aggressive King. He kills a young boy
whose nature and future is known to him as wicked. He would become a rebellious son who would
put his pious parents in trouble and God wanted a better son, purer and more
compassionate for them. Khidr repairs a
wall to hide the treasure beneath it for the orphans of a righteous father as a
mercy from God. What is strange is this individuation of care and mercy toward
humans by God. God intervenes to help
the orphan children of a righteous man.
God kills a young boy, who would become wicked, to help his pious
parents. God helps the poor man to save
his boat from a tyrant. There is an intrinsic
value in God’s intervention: it is justice, care, and mercy for the righteous
and believer. There is an extrinsic
value in God’s intervention: it is spiritual growth of believers individually
and as a whole, based on God’s predestination, plan, and intervention.
However,
the intrinsic and extrinsic value of God’s intervention and guidance is
qualitatively and existentially different from our consequentialist and
non-consequentialist moral behavior. We
can’t imitate God in these relations.
And this is an important lesson that we forget. We experience and desire mercy as God’s
intrinsic value is mercy, the giver of mercy, to give us the gift of life and
to help us to spiritually grow, to deserve God’s company. And the intrinsic value of divine mercy of
guidance includes suffering and “punishment”.
God’s infliction of suffering is mercy too. It is not difficult to understand that we
suffer from poverty of existence compared to God. We can’t help and sustain ourselves. Based on God’s foreknowledge, God may decide
to erase a generation of wrongdoers.
There would be so many children and young boys and girls among this
destroyed generation. We are unable to
measure God’s behavior based on our human scale. It is not difficult to understand that our
scales are so different. We are focused
on our pain and pleasure and at best our species being or an affection for all
living beings. God is the eternal force
who has created all beings and based on God’s knowledge of unseen, God might
decide to destroy part or all a species.
Who are we to judge? We ought to
abandon the arrogance of protest and pretense of knowledge. We should remember constantly the poverty of
our existence and the fact that we can’t imitate God’s actions.
God’s
intervention and action, beside sustaining the order of the worlds in universe,
is for our growth, not for God’s growth.
God’s extrinsic actions is consequentialist or teleological but the
telos is the divine foresight and foreknowledge of the outcome of all events
and God actively participates in history to take us to that direction,
individually and collectively. Our
existence and wisdom, mercy, and love in our heart are gifts of God to us. In that sense, we carry the spirit of God or
we are the image of God. But we
shouldn’t get confused about the meaning of this inherent mercifulness and call
ourselves “God” or try to imitate God based on our limited understanding. So, we ought not to try to act like Khidr to
kill a young boy as he did, because we don’t have knowledge of his future. God’s order to us is not to kill any human or
living being without justification and reason, as life is sacred. But Khidr is not bound by this order. Because Khidr has a different kind of
knowledge, the knowledge (laduni) of
future, and thus he implements God’s order, which is based on the intrinsic
value of mercy for the righteous. The
life of a wicked person, even if he is a young boy, even if he has not
committed any crime now, might be taken by God, and the act of killing doesn’t
have an intrinsic effect on Khidr, while the act of killing an innocent or even
not innocent person has an intrinsic effect on us. We are not Khidr, we are humans with limited
existence and knowledge. God’s command
to us is different from God’s command to Khidr.
We ought to digest this completely and clearly while reading this story
in the surah The Cave, otherwise we may fall into atrocity.
But
one may object that “if God kills a young boy who hasn’t committed any crime in
the story of Khidr, what is divine justice?”
Once, I wrote the following.
Where do you think I fell astray?
“If I were the
sojourner of Khidhr I would not be perplexed by his making a hole in a boat,
because I could imagine there was somehow longer term goodness in this
action. Remember Khidhr is the representative of a benevolent God whose
actions may seem violating some ethics (like making a hole in a boat) but still
it is for a further ethical goodness. I would be patient when Khidhr
asked me to make a wall in the middle of nowhere, again because I believe in
his goodness and farsightedness and extraordinary vision and wisdom of
future. But when he killed the child or before committing the crime I
would hold his hand and would adamantly tell him this could not be the command
of God, as Moses did, and this is Devil’s teeth, as Moses didn’t. Khidhr
would argue with me that, no it is all godly because this little child will
become an in-obedient indolent and insolent adult and his parents will suffer
from his denial of religion and criminal character [80. “As for the youth, his parents
were people of faith, and we feared that he would grieve them by obstinate
rebellion and ingratitude.”] I still would say to Khidhr: this
argument is so loose and groundless that I doubt it has come from God.
You say because this child will become, say, Hitler, Antichrist, or Dajjal, so
I have to kill him now. I say this is not godly and God doesn’t ask for
it. God doesn’t ask you to kill a child, who has not yet committed any
crime, for his possible future crimes. If everything about our lives is
so determined then there is no point of making a choice and act for betterment
or even repent. Secondly, we don’t punish people for what they have not
yet done but is likely to do in the long run. Even preeminent wars have
rules. The ethical act has INTRINSIC and KARMIC value, not committing
murder has INTRINSIC and KARMIC value. To repent from killing and harming
has an intrinsic and karmic value. They are not INSTRUMENTAL only for some
further good. Therefore, if you, Khidhr, kill this child now, it is Unjust and
God cannot be unjust.”
In the light of
what I said up to here, it should be clear now where I went astray. My major argument is this: “You say because
this child will become, say, Hitler, Antichrist, or Dajjal, so I have to kill
him now. I say this is not godly and God doesn’t ask for it. God doesn’t
ask you to kill a child, who has not yet committed any crime, for his possible
future crimes. If everything about our lives is so determined then there
is no point of making a choice and act for betterment or even repent.”
In the story of
Khidr and Moses, Khidr argues “The young boy had
parents who were people of faith, and so, fearing he would trouble them through
wickedness and disbelief, we wished that their Lord should give them another
child– purer and more compassionate–in his place.” This is a concrete reason for a concrete
action. And who knows if this is not also God's mercy to this boy, whose wicked actions in future would bring hell upon him. The story insists that God has
foreknowledge of all events, but it doesn’t say that God would kill ALL
would-become-wicked boys. So, the
argument about Hitler and Antichrist is irrelevant, because there are all sort
of wicked people in the world and God let them be, because they perform a part
in God’s plan.
Moreover,
I was unable to understand the point of divine justice. I measured this justice according to human
intrinsic value. As I discussed above,
the divine intrinsic and extrinsic values are different from ours. We, humans, ought not to kill any human
being, without justification and before they commit any crime. This is a divine decree in the Quran, Bible,
and Torah. But this is not applicable to
God, because God’s justice might be to kill a would-become-wicked-boy, even if
he hasn’t committed any crime, if for example he might cause so much pain for their
righteous believer parents. In the story
of Khidr, the saving of boy’s parents from the ills of their son, as well as
letting Hitler or possibly Antichrist emerge, fit within God’s destination for
us—to cultivate us. One should remember
that our being here on the earth, according to scriptures, is the field of test
and for our cultivation, otherwise God already knows the result of the
test. Roughly speaking, it is like we
want to save an endangered species and create a proper habitat for them. We might already know how many of them will
flourish and procreate, but our knowing doesn’t change the fact that the saved
individuals of this endangered species must flourish and procreate in practice
and for their own survival.
The
second part of my argument also falls apart.
I wrote: “Secondly, we don’t punish people for what they have
not yet done but is likely to do in the long run. Even preeminent wars
have rules. The ethical act has INTRINSIC and KARMIC value, not
committing murder has INTRINSIC and KARMIC value. To repent from killing
and harming has an intrinsic and karmic value. They are not INSTRUMENTAL only
for some further good.”
I forgot that,
yes, “we—humans” ought not to punish people for what they have not yet done,
but God’s measure of justice is different from human justice. We know that generations of children and
families might die in wars and famine or natural disasters. This is indeed one of the major arguments
about the problem of evil in the world and God’s justice. The fact is that if a crop of wheat is
infected, so many young bushes also might die or we might burn them. But as we speak about ourselves, it seems so grave if God deems to destroy a generation
or a city of humans altogether, according to God’s wisdom. The point of story of Moses and Khidr in the
surah The Cave is that “we are not able
to understand God’s action, because we don’t have knowledge of future.” And while God is just, we are not able to
fathom the depth of God’s behavior due to our lack of knowledge.
The end of my
argument, where I talk about intrinsic value of the ethical, is completely
irrelevant. I wrote: “The ethical act
has INTRINSIC and KARMIC value, not committing murder has INTRINSIC and KARMIC
value. To repent from killing and harming has an intrinsic and karmic
value. They are not INSTRUMENTAL only for some further good.” As I argued before, the intrinsic and
extrinsic value of God’s ethics is different from the intrinsic and extrinsic
value of ethical behavior for us.
To
recapitulate: two major elements separate us from divine sources who have
foresight and foreknowledge of future.
First, it is the fact that we are bound to pain and pleasure and these
two are bound to our finitude and death, on the one hand, and grandiosity,
greed, and will-to-power, on the other.
We can intensify our pleasures momentarily through sex and drugs. We can take pleasure in luxury and ownership
of palaces, towers, and cities. As well,
we can take an ascetic path and starve ourselves to death or to survive on the
minimum, on the other extreme. Khidr and
divine forces, because of non-acquired knowledge of unseen, establish a
completely different relation with their existence. Their ethics is not grounded in how to deal
with their limitation and lack of foresight, and because of their infallibility
their ethics is purely consequentialist, i.e., what they do won’t affect their
essence, and they do what serves the divine telos. So, Khidr was ethically justified to kill a
young boy who hasn’t committed any crime, but we can’t, because we have neither
the essential nature of Khidr, nor his divine foreknowledge.
The
second factor is that we as mortals have a spiritual dimension, which is unique
to us; it is internal and intrinsic to our existence. The story of secularism, materialism, and
reductive Darwinian evolution questions this spiritual and intrinsic value and
instead sets survival as the only measure of evolution. No wonder that three major 19th
c. philosophers who affected the whole course of Western civilization: Mill,
Nietzsche, and Marx set hedonism and will-to-power as two major motifs for
human existence. For Mill and Marx, at
best our spiritual dimension, if we can use this term, is confined to a sense
of human solidarity or species-being or variations of
humanistic-naturalism. But thousands
years of scriptures have heralded and cultivated the message that we are more
than beasts, desire for survival, or nature.
We have a spiritual destiny. And
this spiritual destiny can be fulfilled the best if we set our moral conduct on
intrinsic value of our action rather than focusing on consequences. Not strange that all major religions such as
Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Vedas and Upanishads, and Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam, and even indigenous religions, and philosophers
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Neo-Platonists, even Stoics and Kant reject consequentialism
based on hedonism and urge us to attune our internal disposition to “doing
good” for its own sake, for its intrinsic value. This non-consequentialist and intrinsic moral
conduct says something essential about our finitude both in terms of our existence
(survival and death, pain and pleasure) and lack of foresight and limited
knowledge. As well, the imperative of
pursuing the intrinsic value of our moral actions hints to our spiritual
destiny and growth.
So, human ethics is essentially intrinsic, which means I ought to do good for what it does to my inner sense of self, because I have freedom of the will to violate this inner sense or to aid it. In another word, I am not an angel or a miraculous extraordinary creature such as Khidr. As well, due to our existential limitedness we don’t have knowledge of far future. So, we ought to do good, in a non-consequentialist sense, because we become what we do. If I do good, I purify my inner disposition and create a character. As Aristotle puts it, virtue is a matter of habit (Ethos=habit): while what we do serves our survival, and in religious terms, it serves our salvation, our body-soul absorbs whatever we do into its dispositional structure. The strange insight is that there is no becoming or being, as we know it, in God. In this sense, God is ineffable to us as the ground of Being does not belong to the world of becoming and contingency. As, ancients said, God’s essence or inner disposition is God’s existence. Or more accurately, there is no duality between God's action or bringing about things into existence and God's essence. God’s actions are consequentialist: to bring about the good outcome out of divine will. God’s actions have no intrinsic value for God, because they can’t affect God’s essence: the divine value is God’s doings; there is no becoming in God. God and good is the word-deed of God and the word-deed of God is God and good.
