Names and Naming
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
The Name of God has special significance in the first commandment — “Do not take the Name of the Lord Thy God in Vain,” and in the Lord’s Prayer — “Hallowed be Thy Name.” Why this focus on the “Name of God” as opposed to God Himself or Herself?
As Kant pointed out, there is the thing itself, the unknowable essence that you presume exists outside of your mind; and there is the concept of the thing, its representation in your mind.
The human mind evolved to make practical sense of the world around us, to allow us to cope in a world that is fundamentally unknowable. We use names to organize and associate thoughts, and we relate those thoughts to our personal experience. In the beginning was the Word.
In some traditions, everyone has a true name which expresses that person’s nature. Knowing someone’s true name gives you power over that person.
Your name, whether traditionally or randomly chosen by your parents, is an empty vessel that takes on meaning over the course of your life. That name comes to stand for the unique person that you become. It also connects with others who came before who were given that same name.
The word name also refers to the categories which we apply to all of creation, like dog and cat, in recognition of characteristics that a set of things or creatures have in common. In Genesis Adam and Eve named all creatures.
And the word name can also stand for an unknowable essence — God — enabling us to talk about and contemplate what we cannot know.
The mind uses names to mirror the world. When we give names to what we encounter in the world, we set up mental equivalents that we can manipulate and compare and remember. In striving to understand these concepts, we assign meaning to them and associate them with one another, and meaning grows from what we think about them as well as from our experience in the world. With this cumulative remembered mental activity we enrich our lives and come to better cope with the experiences we encounter in the world.
By the ways we associate these concepts with one another, we create maps in our minds that represent how we imagine the real world — not just a one-to-one association of ideas to things, but ideas of ideas of ideas — a rich tapestry of layer upon layer of associations. The names of things are far richer than the things themselves, because we can associate them with one another in our minds and we can communicate these complex ideas to others.
To name is to begin the effort of trying to understand.
By this line of reasoning, the Name of God is the first step in trying to understand what God might be.
