This word, noumenon, is brought to our attention by the 18th century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant.
The word is originally classical Greek, and expresses the concept of a thing in itself, something of reality unsullied by anyone’s take on it or views about it projected onto it. It’s a reality that lies behind or beyond the world of the senses. As soon as we think about it or try to get our heads round it or say what it is, we lose part of it, we muddy the water by getting mixed up in it ourselves.
In Kant’s philosophy, he makes a distinction between noumena and phenomena — both are realities, but phenomena are real in the sense that a red umbrella is real; yes, it’s there, you can touch it and use it, but it’s boundaried by the limitations of time and space and definition, and anyway everyone sees a different shade of red.
A noumenon is not like that. The noumenon has not been, and cannot be, limited by definition and perception. It can be encountered, we can be aware of it, but it is what it is, we cannot appropriate it. The noumenon can lie behind phenomena that we can see and touch, but it cannot be reduced to a phenomenon.
In Taoist thought, it seems to me that this is exactly what the Chinese philosopher Lao Tsu meant when he wrote:
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth.
In Judaeo-Christian thought, I think we encounter something similar when God says to Moses, “I Am that I Am”. So, God can be met, one can be in the presence of God — in fact you can’t get out of the presence of God, try as you might — but you cannot annex or define or encapsulate God. Your best bet is to start with reality, because that’s what God is. God, like a noumenon, is unbounded by our projected opinions. As C.S. Lewis put it, Aslan is not a tame lion.
In its classical Greek origin, the etymology of the word noumenon shows a root connection with the word my Yorkshire family always pronounced as nous.
“Oh, use your nous!” somebody would say in a circumstance where some practical common sense was what was required. It’s the innate, intuitive, appropriate feeling your way to what is needed in the moment. I love it that this earthy common sense, this instinctive informal knowing, is linguistically related to the being of a thing-in-itself that cannot be grasped or defined or pinned down. Common sense can touch what eludes definition.
Now, today, as every week, we had three readings — Old Testament, Epistle and Gospel.
Let’s see if we can discern the presence of the noumenon. So, use your nous, and let’s look at them.
The Old Testament lesson most likely makes you feel a bit uneasy. Poor old Job, eh?
He’s just lost everything. His property, his children, his health — everything. He is distraught. He’s driven mad by his friends trying to make sense of it with the religious and moral wisdom that under normal circumstances make absolute sense but in this instance totally fail to meet the case. And his wife, living with the same loss and grief, seeing her husband sitting in the dust, scraping his sores silently, says bitterly, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die”
Then, in the passage we heard today, the Bible says God spoke to Job out of the storm.
And the reading we heard makes it sound as if God absolutely gave Job what for. Told him off in no uncertain terms. It reads like the most excoriating and unreasonable mother of all divine rants.
But we must be wary of turning the noumenon into a phenomenon, of projecting onto the great I Am That I Am the tone of voice and attitude of mind that this looks like to us at first sight. I’ll come back to that.
Then we come to our epistle. The most glorious translation for this, in my opinion, is that of the New English Bible:
“As God’s servants, we try to recommend ourselves in all circumstances by our steadfast endurance: in hardships and dire straits; flogged, imprisoned, mobbed; over-worked, sleepless, starving. … we are the imposters who seek the truth, the unknown men whom all men know; dying we still live on; disciplined by suffering, we are not done to death; in our sorrows we always have cause for joy; poor ourselves, we bring wealth to many; penniless we own the world.”
This is the way the prophet Zechariah recommended when he said, “Not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord.”
It’s about reaching beyond the world of phenomena to touch the noumenon, the steadfast, unchanging, causal reality from which life proceeds. It’s about having the insight and the audacity to see that behind and beneath anything and everything life can throw at us is a tremendous and creative mystery, more real than anything found in this world.
Talking this through with Grace the other day, I remarked that it reminds me of Kirsty Allsop in Love it or List It, if you’ve ever seen that on the telly, where she comes into a family’s house with grand plans for renovation. There’s that moment when their kitchen has been ripped out and their sitting room wall is in rubble and the ceiling is held up by acrow props, and she stands in the middle of complete demolition in a cloud of cement dust, seized by excitement at what is coming into being.
And Grace said, “Yes! It’s about holding the vision! About seeing beyond the present devastation to the new reality that will emerge from it!”
I don’t suppose the apostles enjoyed being flogged and derided any more than the rest of us would, but they had enough of Kirsty Allsop in their inner make-up to hold the vision of the way life could be, conditioned by the undefined but unconquerable absolute reality of the I Am That I Am, the power of God that raised Jesus from the dead.
And then we come to the Gospel. Jesus, as the storm raged about them: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” And he spoke into the phenomenon of the storm the intrinsic reality, the I Am That I Am, that he brought into their circumstances — “Peace, be still.”
There’s a teacher called Helen Hamilton, who said, “We can notice that we are not using our mind or our senses to tune into the Noumenon. We must check and check again until it is obvious. When we come to know we are already looking FROM the Noumenon it will begin to dissolve the idea that we were ever a separate being.”
Jesus is looking, acting, responding from the Noumenon. He is aligned with, held by, within the Father. Think of it like a joey surveying the world from the context of the mother kangaroo’s pouch. He is held by God. That is his outlook.
And the Gospel reading — only Mark’s gospel puts it like this — says “They took Jesus into the boat just as he was.”
That’s the key. It is the grace to involve ourselves with the whole, unadulterated, unrefined power and presence of God. It is when, instead of projecting onto Jesus all the churchy things he’s supposed to be, “gentle Jesus meek and mild” — and macho Jesus setting up an exclusive club — when we leave all that behind and take him into the boat just as he is, then all heaven is let loose.
Now look back at the Old Testament reading and God’s words to Job. What if God, the ground of our being, the I Am That I Am, is not scolding or lecturing Job, but bringing him absolute affirmation and reassurance, a kangaroo pouch to climb into, a Kirsty Allsop view on the world?
What if God’s saying, “I am bigger than your circumstances. I was here at the foundation of the world, before any of this. I can bring hope and magnificence out of Ground Zero. From this present devastation you can absolutely trust me to bring life and hope and a new beginning. Everything is going to be okay. We’ve got this.”
What the apostles in our epistle were doing, what Jesus in the storm on Galilee was doing, what God is showing Job how to do, is looking from the Noumenon, the determinant reality, at the changing circumstances of life with all its sorrow and disintegration and loss. When the phenomena of life are beyond discouraging, like those in our readings — massive bereavement, punishing sickness, cruel persecution, wild weather — of course we’re going to feel rough, that was true of even Jesus; but if we learn how to look from the Noumenon, the I Am That I Am, the steady determining reality that stands while the world revolves, then we attain mastery.
It’s when we locate ourselves in the I Am That I Am, when we hold the vision and act not by might, not by power, but by the Spirit of God, that we find:
“You raise me up, so I can stand on mountains
You raise me up to walk on stormy seas
And I am strong when I am on your shoulders
You raise me up to more than I can be.”
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