Ideas - What if God is the possibility of the impossible?

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

Former IDEAS writer-broadcaster David Cayley passed away at his home on Wednesday June 10, surrounded by family. To honour his legacy, we wanted to share part of a 2006 conversation David had with Irish philosopher Richard Kearney on the space for theism within atheism, and/or atheism within theism.Richard Kearney is a philosophy professor at Boston College and University College, Dublin. He has written many books on modern philosophy and culture, including The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion and Anatheism: Returning to God After God.

If you sold somebody a loaded gun who you knew was in a vulnerable state and they shot themselves. I think it is murder. Just because you're using the internet doesn't mean you get away with murder. I'm Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead. This season, I take you inside the business of suicide, and the places desperate people go when they can't find what they need in the real world. Hunting the Suicide Salesman. Available now, wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. The question usually asked about God is whether God exists. Children ask each other, do you believe in God? This is the voice of David Cayley, one of ideas' most prolific producers. But what does the question mean? Is God a fact whose existence we can prove or disprove? David Cayley worked on this program from 1981 until 2012.

And after he retired from the CBC, he continued lecturing, writing, engaging in debate, and most recently, in sharing his concerns about the future of the CBC in a changing world. David Cayley died June 10, 2026, peacefully in the company of his family. Bernie looked, the former executive producer of ideas, worked closely with David for many years. He described him as having a capacious mind and a sensitivity to the tenor of the times. For example, in the early 1980s, when people began talking about something called the Information Superhighway, David's response was to produce a series about the politics of information.

One of David's chief concerns was the depth of discourse on the issues of the day. He always wanted to deepen the conversation. Tonight on Ideas, we are sharing a program of Davids from 2006 called The God Who May Be. It was identified by one of our listeners as a favorite of hers as we celebrated our 60th anniversary this year. This program features the Irish philosopher and poet Richard Carney. author of many books, including in 2001, The God Who May Be. In the beginning is the word, not a stone, not a certitude, not a god you can put in a bottle,

and bring out every so often on festive occasions to prove you've got the absolute truth that nobody else has. In the beginning is the word. And as we know, words are dialogical, and you've got to listen and then you respond. A central aim of Richard Carney's project, is to reintroduce imagination to matters of religion. He draws on sacred scripture and reminds us that these are not rigid, static texts. They are a reflection of the dynamic and unfolding experience of the divine.

When we forget the imaginative aspect of faith, he argues, religion loses its power to help us find peace. Most wars are caused in great part, I'll be it very often unconsciously for religious reasons. But for me, that is a perversion of religion largely. And I think the antidote and the response to that, if we want to bring about world peace, is religion. It's the hair of the dog that bit you.

We will find a solution to the wrong interpretation of religion in the right interpretation of religion. This is just the kind of insight that appealed to David Cayley. and he found these insights in work that was incredibly wide-ranging. He explored everything from the development of scientific thought to the growth of the prison system, from the roots of Canadian conservatism to the unfolding ecological crisis. And he wrote out his scripts longhand, often in school notebooks.

Here's David Cayley in conversation with Richard Carney and The God Who May Be. The question usually asked about God is whether God exists. Children ask each other, do you believe in God? But what does the question mean? Is God a fact whose existence we can prove or disprove? Richard Carney thinks it's the wrong question. In 2001, he published a book called The God Who May Be, in which he says that God is revealed to us,

not as a positive fact, but as a possibility, something remembered and reached for, but never entirely present. The positive God is the God of the philosophers, the God whom Nietzsche says has died. The possible God is the God of the Bible, the God who calls Samuel in the night, and speaks to Moses from a burning bush, the pillar of cloud and fire that leads the Israelites out of Egypt. Imagination, Richard Carney says, is our only way to the divine. And this means that we can have no guaranteed knowledge, but only what we can sift from our experience by patient interpretation. I was very taken by Richard Carney's argument when a friend introduced me to the God who may be, and so I asked him if I could visit him at his home in Boston. There, we recorded

several long conversations. The first about his interpretation of religion and the Bible. He began by telling me a little about his religious formation. My relationship to God and the God question began pretty early in Ireland as a certain kind of ambivalence. On the one hand, I had a very positive experience of religion growing up, perhaps uncharacteristic and unusual, growing up in southern Catholic majority, Ireland. and I never felt religion there for never experienced it as something punitive

or judgmental or self-righteous or dogmatic. And we were sent to boarding school in Limerick, County Limerick, which was north of where we lived in Cork. And there we were fortunate enough, the brothers at any rate in the family, to be taught by the Benedictines, many of whom had just come back from Paris and were full of the ideas of the 60s and the Second Vatican Council

and the new movements basically. When I then went to college, it was somewhat different, extremely conservative. You know, there I learned St. Thomas Aquinas, but not even reading the text of St. Thomas, we read Thomism, and Thomism was a system. It was called realism. And I had an instinctive reaction against that.

So I sort of had two attitudes towards religion growing up. One was at a spiritual, even mystical level, level, liturgical level, a relationship of great affection and great admiration indeed for what the church represented. And yet, when I went to university and obviously witnessed the more clerical institutional side of things, and then also saw many abuses, clerical abuses in society where the church was much too dominant in all of that was something to which I found. myself very opposed. So it was always, you know, this ambidextrous sort of approach to religion. This ambidextrous approach, open yet critical, would characterize all of Karnie's later work. It grew out of the contrast between the spiritual atmosphere of his home and the dogmatic and authoritarian spirit he encountered at university.

But it was also fostered, he says, by the teachers at his boarding school. school at Glendstall Abbey in County Limerick. We had a class called religious doctrine, I think it was called. It was first of all, catechism, and that became religious doctrine. And the normal approach would have been, you know, you get your book and you have your answers, you have your questions, and you have your answers that you learn by rote. But fortunately, my Benedictine mentors didn't believe in that. They threw that out the window, and they said, no, you should begin by learning

the good arguments against the existence of God and the good arguments for them. But we'll start with the arguments against. And of course they started with a number of philosophers, Nietzsche, Freud, Bertrand Russell, Sartz, Marx. And we had a great time, you know, saying, sure, they must be right. You know, this old God who's terrorized us and oppressed us and punished us and judged us and taken away our responsibility and our autonomy and our freedom and our choice. Yeah, let's get rid of that. then this particular teacher, Father Andrew Nugent, he said, okay, now we've gone through

the arguments against God. Here are some reasons why maybe God might exist or could exist or should exist. And so we got the arguments of Dostoevsky and we got the arguments of Augustine and we got the arguments of Gabriel Marcel and the Christian existentialists. And it made religion a very intellectually robust and challenging practice and enterprise. For Richard Carney's teachers, atheism was a necessary preparation for faith. And a similar preparation has been taking place, he thinks, in modern Western culture more generally. Widespread atheism, he says, has cleared the ground for a more tentative and less aggressive

form of belief. The atheistic turn, which started really with the Enlightenment, was, I think, not a bad thing. I think one needed to get rid of the idols, what Marion calls the conceptual idolatry of Western thinking, that, you know, God was the first cause,

the final cause, the supreme unmoved mover, the answer to all our questions. And so, God became sort of a being, a thing, the omnigod, you know, omnipresent, omnipotent, who was the solution to everybody's problem. There was a place for everything and everything was in its right place.

And of course, that led once it's translated into politics and society from the Holy Roman Empire right up to the Enlightenment to huge abuses in terms of church and state. I think that probably did need to come crumbling down and then after that sort of 100, 200-year sort of hiatus, where religion was kept strictly out of philosophy, there then came a question which is, well, if we're doing phenomenology and we're studying all phenomena,

can we actually exclude as one phenomenon amongst others, many others, the religious phenomenon? So the question of God, the question of the sacred, the question of religion, came back again. But in a much more humble, modest guise, and instead of sort of invoking the great church fathers or the scholastic supremos like Aquinas and Bonaventure and so on, not that they're not wonderful thinkers, of course they are,

but instead of starting there and working down, there was a tendency to look to certain neglected texts in the tradition, to texts like the Song of Songs, the mystics, very important, the retrieval of the mystics, Angela Silesius, Hildegarde de Bing and Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, Dres de Vavilla, this huge interest, even shown by a lot of the atheistic thinkers like Batai and Laco and France,

but the god that was now appearing was not a god of pure, fact, thingness, power, status, institutional hegemony, but rather a god of possibility, a god of the least of these, you know, as the gospel says. whether it's the openness to the Samaritan woman, the openness to Mary Magdalene, the sinner, the openness towards sinners and tax collectors and prodigal sons, and of course the least of these,

the meek and the humble and the thirsty and the hungry. And this new approach to the divine coming after the, I would say probably necessary acesis and purgation from the Enlightenment through to existentialism, that necessary atheism led to. to sort of a retrieval of this aspect of the divine as a God who may be, not as a God who is in terms of some kind of certain logical proof or certain institutional power. The expression, the least of these, which Richard Carney used a moment ago, is drawn from the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus is describing the day of judgment when he will receive the righteous into his kingdom and will say to them,

I was hungry and you gave me food, a stranger, and you welcomed me, in prison, and you visited me. But the righteous, Jesus predicts, will ask, Lord, when did we do any of these things for you? And the Lord will reply, whatever you did for the least of these, my brothers, you did for me. It's a passage that recurs in Richard Carney's work, and in our interview. He likes it because it says so clearly that God does not confront us as power and glory, but as whatever is least in our estimation. And because it is the God of power and glory that atheism has denied, Richard Carney argues, a way has been opened to a new account of God after atheism.

For this new account, he writes in the God who may be, God neither is nor is not, but maybe. What I'm trying to get at there is that, you know, the alternative of sort of dogmatic theism, God is, we know what God is, God is this thing, God is this being that can be defined A to Z in this way. Therefore we can possess God, appropriate God, conceptually compute and classify God,

and that's our property. What we have, we have. hold and it's our duty to convince everybody else. Now, that to me leads to war and in a lesser mode in tolerance. And I want to get away from that dogmatic sense of theism. And I wanted to get away from the dogmatic atheism of many of the philosophers and thinkers and students that I've frequented in Canada and Ireland and Paris in the 70s and 80s who said, what? I mean, you're interested in the question of God, but you know, you've gone soft in the brain or something? Did you not hear of the Enlightenment? I mean, I've not heard of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, you know, where have you been?

So I was looking for a middle way, which would be a form of theism that learns from atheism and keeps in dialogue with atheism. So the God that I was suggesting modestly and metaphorically in the book The God Who May be is a God who is a God who, is not in a dogmatic sense and yet is in another sense that I'm trying to retrieve from certain passages in scripture. We'll come to these specific passages in a moment, but a few words first on Richard Carney's general approach to the Bible. He reads it as a work of imagination, but not therefore as untrue. For him, the imaginary does not, not oppose the real. It unfolds it. Imagination is our most crucial and fundamental faculty,

the way we make the world we end up living in. And the Bible itself agrees with him, he says, from its very first pages. From the word go, there's a good and evil imagination. It's called the Yetzar Harah and the Yasser Hatov in Hebrew. And interestingly, from the word go, we're dealing with this this Yasser because God created the human being

Adam and Eve with the Ytsir and he called it good and when Kane went and killed his brother because he imagined

what it would be like to be better to be the better one the chosen one you know he wanted to be

his brother he had covetousness he had envy he had memetic rivalry he wanted to be able

so he killed him to become him in a way and to replace him and God said why do you do that and Kane replies, well, it's not my fault. It's the evil yetzer, the evil imagination,

the evil drive that you created in me. So your fault, not mine. And of course, the rabbinical interpretation of that is that God created Kane with the good yetzer, but Kane had the ability to turn it to evil. So we can turn imagination to evil. But in its initial instantiation in the human, according to the book of Genesis, it is good. It is good. And of course, the Hebrew word for the creator is Yotsar. It's the same root. Yzadr. So imagination is the creative power in us to complete the seventh day of creation which God left empty so that we would be free to co-create the kingdom with God. Now, as we know, we can use our Yetzer, our creative imaginative power. which opens up all kinds of possibilities

and enables us to choose between possibilities because that's what imagination does. We can use that either as an evil fantasy through propaganda, hatred, pornography, caricaturing of the enemy as the monster and so on and so forth, hatred. We can use it in that way and it's used every day in that way

and we can kill as Kane killed his brother Abel because of his evil yetzer, his evil imagination, or we can turn it to the good. And that's freedom, that's human freedom. because otherwise Adam and Eve would have just been ventriloquist dummies, marionettes doing the will of God, but never having the possibility of doing otherwise. And it's because we can do good or evil and choose good or evil that we are free beings. And therefore, if we do good, we are so pleasing to God, according to another midrashic account,

God Yave preferred the songs of humans over the songs of the angels because humans had a choice in terms of directing their Jetser towards God whereas angels didn't they just had to sing from the same hymshite whether they liked it or not and that sense of the freedom

of humanity is integral to imagination which is always the realm of the possible opening the actual to the possible opening reality to horizons of hope and of fulfillment that are contained as promissory notes within the reel but that opening up of the reel towards the future and towards the past because the past is absent too

that ability to make the absent present, be it a futile absence or a past absence, that's the power of imagination. It's also the source of our self-division, of course, as human beings because as Sareth put it, it's an old existentialist maxim, the human being is one who is what he is not and is not what he is. Because we're always haunted by that notness of the no longer and the not yet by time.

An imagination brings the not yet of the future, which is a pure absence now, and the no longer of the past, which is now absent, it brings it, it represents it and brings it into this kind of plot, this narrative plot that connects it with me now. and makes me responsible for the past and the future. For Richard Carney, imagination and possibility are linked, because imagination alone can reveal what is possible. But imagination must always be subject to interpretation. Because the God of the Bible doesn't just call for justice.

He also calls on occasion for genocide. The Bible is what René Girard once called a text in travail. As a human transcription of the divine, it presents contradictory and competing visions. There is the God who addresses Job from the whirlwind and the thin, small voice that whispers to Elijah from a cave, the God who tells Abraham to kill his son Isaac, and the God who tells him not to and supplies a ram in the boy's place. Only interpretation can sort the voices out. And it's the same for the characters within the story, Richard Carney says, as it is for the reader. When Abraham listened to the strangers who came to his door, and he invited them in,

and they sat under his tree, and he gave them food to eat, the three angels, who then announced to him that Sarah, his baron 80-year-old wife, is going to have a baby, he was listening to the voice of the stranger. but when later in Exodus he banishes Hagar and her son Ishmael out into the desert he's not listening to the voice of the strangers anymore he's saying now I have a true son and I'm going to get rid of the bastard untrue son and you know when the rabbis say

every line of the Bible has at least ten meanings and this is an invitation to endless harmonetics to endless rabbinical discussion interpretation exegesis That's what's so wonderful about it. There is no one way of reading it. We're invited to interpret these difficult passages and see where even Abraham, even Isaac, even Jacob and Joseph, they all got some things wrong.

And they all presumably got a hell of a lot right. But that's harmonetic. It happens within the text itself, and it's an invitation to us. And in a way, Joseph is a kind of a master harmonious interpreter because that's what he does. he interprets dreams. He interprets images and signs. The Pharaoh doesn't know how to,

if Pharaoh gets the dream about the seven plagues, but he doesn't know what it means. Jacob is the rabbinical interpreter within the biblical text that teaches us how to interpret the dreams and to say this is what it means. And that's an invitation within the text itself to engage in hermeneutic listening and vigilance

and so on. And the prophets, what do they do? They listen to sounds and words and invitations and summonses and they get it when very often the people who are getting the same summons don't get it. That's a way of saying that, you know, the meanings are there, the call is there, the summons to love and justice is there and to the kingdom is there. But some people listen, the prophets, some people don't. And that's really a way of saying it's always about discriminatory. and discerning between spirits and voices and sounds and signs and signals. In the beginning is harmonetics. In the beginning is the word. And that's true for imagination because without imagination, we couldn't do the interpreting. We couldn't see the different possibilities. We couldn't imagine the senses, the hidden senses, the ulterior senses that are behind the words. We couldn't imagine God.

and if we can't imagine God that there could be another other out there that there could be other possibilities apart from what we have in the world today we couldn't hope for a kingdom we couldn't have that utopian sense of always seeking the city on the hill

or indeed of remembering the past the good promises made in the past the promissory notes that still haven't been fulfilled or signed off which is what I'm staying with the story of the Bible now the Bible is all about promissory prophetic notes

about the messianic kingdom. We couldn't remember all that. I mean, Zakhar is one of the great commands of the Bible. Remember. But we can't remember Zion if we don't have imagination that can recall the past and make it present

through parables, images, stories. It doesn't make sense otherwise. Nobody's a hotline to God and thanks me to God. We don't because if we did, we'd be in trouble saying, I've heard a voice from God. It says, go out and kill the evil ones and so on.

Because everything's media, through stories and parables and signs and metaphors and myths, that's the graciousness of the Bible. If it was a hotline to be read literally, we'd be in trouble. And we know certain sects or certain religions who sometimes claim that there's no need for harmonetics or interpretation. Sorry, there's just one meaning here and this is it. We know the damage that can be caused by that belief

that the interpreter is God and, in fact, is not an interpretation. interpret it at all because there's nothing to interpret. The message is absolute and is absolutely possessed by that claimant. That's terribly dangerous. From 2006, Irish philosopher, poet and author Richard Carney. This program was originally produced by David Cayley, who worked with us from 1981 to 2012 and who passed away this month. This is Ideas on CBC Radio and online at cbc.ca. slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Since the dawn of time, humanity has been at war. It has shaped the world around us. And if it somehow

feels like we've been here before, it's because we have. I'm David Boris. I'm a military historian, and on my new podcast, Hostile History, I take us inside history's most defining wars and rebellions. From Genghis Khan to the war in Iran, find out how the past can explain the present. Search for and follow hostile history on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. David Cayley began his time at the CBC and at ideas as a freelance contributor in the 1980s. Then executive producer Bernie Lucht remembered being so impressed with David's intellectual gifts that he, quote, wanted that mind in the core of the show. Bernie made it happen. and indeed that mind would help to shape ideas.

One multi-part series at a time for 30 years. Here's the second half of Part 1 of David Cayley's program about Richard Carney and The God Who May Be. In his book The God Who May Be, Richard Carney found his account of God as possibility, as he said earlier, on a close reading of selected biblical texts. The first is the story in the book of Exodus of Moses and the burning bush. Moses has fled from Egypt after killing an Egyptian and is tending his father-in-law's sheep in the land of Midian. In the wilderness, he comes across a bush that is burning without being consumed. A voice addresses Moses from the flames and identifies itself as the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

It tells Moses that he is to lead the captive Israelites out of Egypt. By what authority, Moses asks, who shall I say sent me? But he does not get the answer he hopes for. Moses asked the burning bush for a name. Now, the burning bush refuses to give a name. And this is a very tawdry thing. It's just a thorn bush, you know, in the middle of nowhere that's burning. And yet it's the divine.

and is revealing itself as the divine but is refusing to give itself a name. One of the reasons being, as it's been argued, because if Moses was given a name, then he'd go back to the Egyptian, and he'd say, look, my God is more powerful than your God, because I got the name, and I can invoke this name,

and I'll have more power and more authority than you do. But no, he was going to get no name. What he gets is a refusal of a name, but a conundrum. In other words, I am not a name that you can possess, not an idol that you can revere, not a thing that you can have.

I am a promise, basically. I am who may be. I am who will be, shall be, can be, maybe, in history, incarnate in history, if you respond to my command to be free, to be just, and to be loving. And that's the message that Moses goes back to his people with, and then the people go from bondage into freedom.

The most familiar translation of the voice's response to Moses' request for a name is, I am who I am. Say to the people of Israel, I am has sent me to you. But Jewish scholars Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, in making their modern German translation of the Bible, suggested that the Hebrew phrase could be done. just as correctly rendered as, I shall be who I shall be. Other modern scholars have concurred,

and it's on this translation that Richard Carney bases his interpretation. But most modern translations still retain, I am who I am, and that is the expression that has resounded through the history of theology and metaphysics. Unfortunately, what happened there all too often was it became sort of the centerpiece for a pretty doctrinal and sometimes even dogmatic scholasticism that it became equivalent to the first cause

the being that is identical with itself that has no possibility within itself because it is pure actuality and this was coming of course from Aristotle the god that is self-subsistent and self-identical the unmoved mover so God as interpreted

by some of the main Christian scholastic thinkers was the ego sum quesum, the I am, that am, right? And so that idea of an enclosed God who is self-loving, self-causing, self-thinking, self-being removes any idea of vulnerability from God, fragility, risk, or promise. God ceases to be that wonderful promissory note and becomes a fact

and a datum, a datum of revelation rather than a provocation to move towards love and justice. And I think in that mistranslation there was a great loss of this possibleizing God who was basically saying to you,

I cannot be God unless you help me to be God. And this is something that Etty Hillesum, you know, in Westerbrook at concentration camp in 1940, three on the borders of Germany and Holland. She wrote about this in her last days before she was exterminated, young Jewish thinker, wonderful woman, Etty Hillesam,

in her book, An Interrupted Life. But she writes in it, she said, you know, here I am, and I see horror all around me, I see evil. So where are you God? You know, it's the old question asked by so many Jewish survivors or non-survivors, Eti Hillisum and others.

How can God be, given this evil? And her response was, you, God, cannot be God. unless I enable you to be God by bringing love into even this inferno of hatred, violence, and suffering. So that's a very different concept of God, right? The God who can be, maybe, is constantly calling to us to be made incarnate, but cannot actually be in the world unless we respond to the call. Just as Mary of Nazareth could not ever have enabled Jesus to become incarnate,

if she hadn't said yes to the call. Now, did she or did she not have the freedom to say yes? This is the big issue. If God is I am who am, you know, I'm going to be anyway, regardless of what you human beings think or do or decide, then the fact of the matter is that she had no freedom. She was violated and God was going to be God, no matter what Mary or anybody else thought.

But that's very different from the idea of Mary as existentially free. to say yes or no. For Richard Carney, God is only possibility until Mary says her answering, let it be. Moses too must answer. That he not,

the fire which burned the bush without consuming it would have left no trace. I shall be what I shall be says, in effect, what I can be depends entirely on you. Divinity acts in and through us,

and it is only by recognizing its embodiments that we can know anything about it. What divinity is cannot be possessed in itself. It remains ineffable, unnameable, unsayable, unthinkable. All we can know an experience of the divine is through the widow, the orphan and the stranger. It's through the crucified one and resurrected one. It's through the Shulamite bride wandering the streets

of her city looking for her divine bride, groom in the Song of Songs is through the shepherd wandering aimlessly on Mount Harab. All of these revelations come to people who are the least powerful in the world, the least situated, the least authoritative, if you like. You know, Joseph down at the bottom of the well rises up. But the, you know, the revelation always comes at the moment, at the dark. darkest moments, at the moments of greatest humility and loss. The great mystics have all experienced the moment of radical atheism,

the moment in the desert where they feel abandoned and they let go. Among Richard Carney's examples of revelation occurring in situations of loss and displacement are Moses, who's the shepherd wandering aimlessly on Mount Horeb, and the Shulamite Bride, who is the central figure of the Song of Songs. The song is one of the shortest and most unusual books of the Bible, and it provides the second of Richard Carney's proof texts in The God Who May Be. A sensual love poem profuse in its images of nature and desire. It calls itself in its opening line, the Song of Solomon.

But the one who then speaks is not the king, but a bride longing for her lover. She's dark, she's black, and she's beautiful, and she's having this liaison dangerous with the bridegroom, who's coming from we know not where, we don't even know who he is, is he the shepherd, is he Solomon, is he the king? And there's this kind of radical subversiveness about this song, because she is breaking free from her brothers and her family

and the guardians and the society that wants to reign her in. She's even mocked by her fellow women, competitors who say you're a nothing, you know, you don't even belong here. You're a Shulamite. The Shulamite woman, nonetheless, the cry of divine desire is reciprocated. And during the song, the bride and the bridegroom, there's a kind of a reversibility and a transversibility where they exchange roles. And the divine becomes the human and the human becomes the divine. And it's not sure who's actually speaking and to whom they are speaking or where they are speaking. and there's this radical explosion of the divine

into sort of multiple identities and the divine is in the landscapes and the fauns and the gazelles and the doves and in the pomegranates and the vineyards and in the bees and honey and everything it's throughout the landscape

in all kinds of vegetal, animal, mineral and of course human incarnation. So to me it's a song of radical incarnation. And of course also of radical interpretation, because it invites a proliferation and a multiplication of readings. The commentaries inspired by the Song of Songs, in both Jewish and Christian tradition, have been multiplying for centuries. One of the reasons is that the song is such an anomaly, a poem of sweet sexual longing planted right in the middle of the moral urgencies of the Hebrew Bible.

Many Christian commentators have tried to explain the sex away. The song, they say, is an allegory for the love between Christ and his church. In the King James Bible, each chapter has a prefatory note to this effect, so that in the passage in which the king compares his beloved's breasts to two fauns feeding among lilies, the note tells us that this is Christ setting forth the graces of his church. Richard Carney admires the poem's erotic charge

just as he admires its unusual form It brings together a Jewish canticle in the form and in the genre of an Egyptian Babylonian wedding song So I like to think of the song of songs as the opening up of the Jewish revelation to the non-Jew if you like to the Egyptian, to the enemy

that it's a song of love with the enemy already even in terms of its linguistic mixing of genres and it's one of the great how shall I put it one of the great duties I think of and tasks of contemporary re-reading of the God question is to retrieve

the body in Christianity Judaism has been much better about retaining the body and indeed the Jewish readings right through the Kabbalah the madrashic and Talmudic readings were much more respectful of the body and sexuality and carnal union and carnational contact as a way to the divine than curiously Christianity, which believes in the incarnation but kind of thinks it stops with Jesus and doesn't, in fact, issue in a solicitation to a celebration of erotic desire.

rather than this splintering of love as Agape, the father for the son and the divine creator for creatures, and then Eros as this kind of marginalised suspect mode of love or desire, which really should be just kept for reproduction, you know, at worst or at best, but never allowed into the divine human relationship proper. The next of Richard. Carney's key texts in The God Who May Be is the New Testament scene of the Transfiguration, which appears with small variations in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Jesus takes three of his disciples up a mountain, where he is suddenly clothed in a dazzling white light. The disciples observed Jesus talking with Moses and Elijah, and then a white cloud envelops him. the whiteness of Jesus is like the whiteness of Moby Dick you can't get it you can't capture it in Melville in Moby Dick has a most beautiful passage

called the whiteness of the whale where he compares it to the whiteness and the radiance and the transcendence of divinity and he calls it at one point I think the colourless all colour which is the non-color of atheism

and in a way there is a moment of atheism here because you don't know who or what God is anymore. It's a wonderful moment of atheistic modesty where God becomes white and we can't grasp them. And then after that and there's a come down of course. Jesus comes back to ours

and they descend to the bottom of the mountain and interestingly Jesus says to his disciples, don't tell anybody about this and don't build a temple, a tent a memorial place because their first innings to say, look we've seen you transfigured here into a divine entity

we must immediately have some kind of testimonial memorial building. And Jesus refuses that and says don't tell anybody, which of course they did because we wouldn't know about it otherwise. But it's interesting that the instinct was again, no only made angry. Do not try to touch me, hang on to me, and so on. But Christ doesn't disappear in transfiguration. Christ comes back again, just as Moses doesn't disappear into the burning bush.

Moses comes back again to his people. You've got to come down from the mountain and go back to the people. And, you know, the message of love and justice is unending in that regard. Curiously enough, when I visited with my wife and children, Jerusalem, maybe about eight years ago now,

we were on our way to the Sea of Galilee and we saw Montabras we were passing. Sure enough, on top of the mountains, there's this massive basilica. And you just say, what a shame. You know, I mean, it's human. nature. And we all need our mementos and our rituals and our, you know, we can't just do this on our own, but there's something ironic about that. Jesus' effacement by the cloud during his transfiguration

is just one of several gospel scenes in which he is temporarily unknowable. The others occur after the resurrection. Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb mistakes him for the gardener. And two of his disciples talk with him on the road from Jerusalem to the neighboring village of Amas without ever recognizing their traveling companion. It's only when the seeming stranger joins them for dinner that they see who it is. I was very struck by the fact that it's only when he sits down and breaks bread with them that they recognize him. It's in the sharing of the bread, it's in the action of love and giving, that then they remember everything he told them. as he instructed them on the readings of the scriptures and the Torah and so on.

Then they remember it. The word comes retrospectively to light through the flesh, through the eating of the bread. And that Eucharistic message, I think, is an extraordinary one because, of course, then Jesus disappears. As soon as they see that, Jesus is gone. And, of course, Jesus is gone, temporarily as well, in terms of ascending to heaven as a man.

metaphor goes so that the paraclete can come. And the paraclyte to me is the constant return of Jesus through the Eucharistic moments. The word paraclet, just to interject here, is the New Testament Greek word for what is also called the Holy Spirit. Literally, comforter or advocate. It's the spirit that Jesus says he will send when he goes to the Father, and that can only come when he goes. The Eucharist is the communion meal of bread and wine by which Jesus asked his disciples to remember him at the Last Supper. Remember me. We do this in remembrance of Jesus until he comes. So there's always this postponement. God has already passed and God is still to come. Just as in the Song of Songs, God has already traversed the bride in love and desire and God is still

to come. And that's always, that's what I call eschatological. time because it's not a time that can be reduced to our beginning, middle and end which we tend to try to do and reduce God to our own temporal notions. This turns the past into the future and the future into the past and keeps God

open, of course, to a futurity, which is the futurity of possibility, the God who may be, the God who is still to come. And the return of God in each act of the Eucharist, I don't see that just as the Eucharist of the sacraments and the ritual Eucharist or for Jews

the Passover, you know, the reminder of the Messiah that is still to come. I see it actually in every moment of breaking bread and giving the cup of cold water to the person who is thirsty. The Eucharist isn't that. The Eucharist is also in the eating of the Madeline in Proust. It's in the

passing of the seed cake from Leopold Bloom to Molly Bloom and the famous kiss on the Hoth Head at the end of Ulysses. That's Eucharistic too, and Joyce knew it. Joyce and Proust knew this. That the Eucharist can be secularized, but in the good sense of bringing the divine into the secular, and bringing the secular, or opening up the secular to the divine.

I think the great crimes of Christianity has been this division between the sacred and the profane, the transcendent and the imminent. And in the God who may be in my own small philosophical way, I'm trying to bring this notion of a transcendent divinity back into epiphanies of the everyday, everyday Eucharistic moments of giving to the least of these, sharing with the least of these. The least of these, as I mentioned earlier, refers to Jesus saying that whatever is given to those in need, to the least of these my brothers is given to him. It's a passage which Richard Carney thinks should have prevented the followers of Christ

from ever enclosing themselves as an exclusive religion. If you give it to the least of these, you give it to me. Now that's really saying, you know, you can only come to the Father through me, but who am I? I am the one who is now telling you not to possess me, either on Mount Tarbour when I'm transfigured, or after the resurrection when you see me, don't try and possess me, noly my tangray, don't touch me, don't hang on to me. Even you, Mary Magdalene, who know me probably better than anybody, along with St. John, don't touch me, let me go. so that the paraclete can come. And the paraclete is incarnate potentially in everybody,

the least of these. If you give it to the least of these, you give it to me. So the argument that's often used by fundamentalists, but, you know, Christianity really is the only religion because Christ says only through the father, only through me can you get to the father? There's no salvation except through me.

I'm the way, the truth of the life. But in fact, what Christ says, if you analyze it closely, is you can only come to the father through me. me. You can only get to the divine through me. Okay, now who am I? Am I one kind of idle amongst others? Am I one God to be invoked against and amongst others? Or am I a way that leads to always? Am I the way exclusive? Yes, only through me, because it's only through the way that leads to all ways that you can find the divine. So the excluder of the only, in fact, is the

exclusion of exclusiveness. The only thing that's excluded is exclusiveness. In the way, widow, the orphan, the stranger, the person who's thirsty, the person who's hungry, the person is seeking God, the divine is present. So when Stephen Dedalus says at the beginning of Ulysses, what's God, a cry in the street, he's right. God is present in the crying in the street. That, it seems to me, is the radical nature of Christ's message. I think it's already there, by the way, in the burning bush, in Exodus 315 and in the Song of Songs and in certain other texts, but Christianity to me is a very important narrative and story and testament. And test, by Jesus Christ to this fundamental message,

that the divine cannot be locked up as a thing. And if it is, it leads to war, and then atheism is not only desirable, it's necessary to rid the world of that religious triumphalism and fundamentalism and self-righteousness, which to this day is still the cause, I believe, of most of our wars. Richard Carney's account of religion as the unending interpretation of imaginative vision obviously puts him at odds with more dogmatic and more authoritarian versions of Christianity.

But he has remained a Roman Catholic, he says finally, despite his differences with the church hierarchy. What I love about the church and what I'll always kind of hopefully retain access to is the sense of of the impossible becoming possible is the sense of epiphany, the sense of wonder, the sense of sacredness about certain places and times of the year. You know, the liturgical calendar is wonderful. Advent and Easter and, you know, Christmas and little Christmas

and the feast days of saints. And this way of having sacred days and sacred places, I grew up in Ireland where there are many sacred places, this is important. But, you know, one must always fail apart de shows, as you say up in Montreal, you know, make a distinction between that which is enabling and liberating

and that which is disabling and incarcerating. And the church has both visages. It's a Janus face. It looks in both directions. And we got to try and work that one out. When the sun comes up in the morning and I reach from me. my last day

in the morning life I hear the calling of loved ones far away their voices sing sweet reunion and guide me on that road that we all must walk when the time comes

to shed life's heavy low You just heard The God Who May Be, featuring Irish philosopher Richard Carney. This episode of Ideas was produced by David Cayley. David passed away June 10, 2026, after singing a song during his weekly bluegrass night, according to a message from his family. Special thanks to Bernie Lowe. and to Patrick Mooney from CBC Library and Information Services. This program was assembled by Sean Foley.

Lisa Ayuso is our web producer. Technical production by Emily Kjaveo. Senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayad. I say goodbye. But for a moment until we meet again. And we all will smile

Upon each other One family in that land Do we reach sweet Won't you carry me in your heart That I might share And your life's treasure in that way to never part For more CBC podcasts, Go to cbc.com.

Thank you.