Can We Know What God Is Like?
Short Answer
Yes. We can know truly what God is like, although we cannot comprehend Him completely.
The Catholic Church teaches that human reason, beginning with the created world, can know with certainty that God exists and can arrive at real knowledge of certain divine attributes. St Paul says that God's invisible things are known through the things He has made, including His “eternal power” and divinity (Romans 1:20).
The First Vatican Council solemnly defined that the one true God can be known with certainty from created things by the natural light of human reason.
Reason can therefore know that God is not merely an impersonal force. He is the transcendent Creator and Lord of all things: one, spiritual, eternal, immutable, intelligent, free, omnipotent, perfectly good and distinct from the universe He created. Revelation then tells us truths about God which unaided human reason could never discover—above all that the one God is Father, Son and Holy Ghost: three divine Persons in one divine nature.
But knowing God truly is not the same as comprehending Him exhaustively. God is infinite; we are finite. We can say true things about Him, but no created mind can contain or measure the divine reality.
As St Thomas Aquinas explains, in this life we know God through His effects and according to causality, excellence and negation—not by seeing His essence directly.
Why This Question Matters
Once someone accepts that God exists, the next question is unavoidable: what kind of God exists?
A vague belief in “something higher” is not yet Christianity. Nor is it sufficient merely to say that there must be some first cause behind the universe. Different religions and philosophies describe ultimate reality in radically different ways. Some describe God as personal; others as an impersonal absolute. Pantheism identifies God with the universe. Deism imagines a Creator who does not govern creation. Materialism denies spiritual reality altogether. Some forms of agnosticism maintain that even if God exists, nothing meaningful can be known about Him.
Catholicism rejects each of these positions where it conflicts with what reason and revelation establish.
The question also matters because religion depends upon the nature of its object. Before asking whether Christianity is true, whether Christ is God, or whether He founded a Church, we need some understanding of what the word God means.
If God is the infinitely perfect Creator upon whom everything depends, then our relationship to Him cannot be merely optional or cultural. He is not one interesting subject among others. He is the source of our existence, the supreme Good, the final explanation of reality and the ultimate end for which man was created.
At the same time, Catholic teaching protects us from imagining God as merely a larger version of ourselves. God is not a very powerful creature living somewhere inside the universe. He does not possess a body, occupy space, develop, learn, grow old or acquire new perfections. He is infinitely above every creature.
Understanding this distinction between Creator and creature is essential for understanding almost everything that follows in Christian theology.
What the Catholic Church Teaches
Sacred Scripture
Sacred Scripture teaches both that God can be known through creation and that He infinitely transcends creation.St Paul writes:
“The invisible things of him… are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.”
— Romans 1:20
The Book of Wisdom likewise reasons from the beauty and greatness of created things to their Creator:
“By the greatness of the beauty… the creator of them may be seen.”
— Wisdom 13:5
This means that creation genuinely tells us something about its Creator. Effects reveal something about their cause. Order points toward intelligence; contingent beings toward a necessary source of being; limited goodness toward a supreme source of goodness.
Yet Scripture also warns us not to reduce God to anything created. Christ declares:
“God is a spirit.”
— John 4:24
When God reveals His name to Moses, He says:
“I AM WHO AM.”
— Exodus 3:14
The passage points toward God's unique mode of being. Creatures receive existence; God does not receive existence from another. Everything else exists dependently. God is the uncreated source upon whom all created existence depends.
The First Vatican Council
The First Vatican Council gives one of the clearest authoritative summaries of Catholic doctrine concerning God.
In the Dogmatic Constitution Dei Filius, promulgated by Pope Pius IX on 24 April 1870, the Council professes one true and living God who is Creator and Lord, almighty, eternal and infinite in every perfection. It teaches that He is an absolutely simple and immutable spiritual substance, really distinct from the world and infinitely exalted above everything created or conceivable.
This is not merely one theologian's preferred description of God. It is solemn conciliar teaching.
The Council then teaches in Chapter II that God:
“may be certainly known by the natural light of human reason, by means of created things.”
The corresponding canon makes the doctrinal status even clearer:
“If anyone says” that God cannot thus be known with certainty, “let him be anathema.”
Thus the Catholic position is neither rationalism nor fideism.
Rationalism claims that human reason can discover or demonstrate everything, including the supernatural mysteries of God.
Fideism, in its stronger form, distrusts reason so greatly that it denies man's natural capacity to reach certain knowledge of God.
Catholic doctrine rejects both. Reason genuinely reaches God; revelation then raises us to truths inaccessible to unaided reason.
The Fourth Lateran Council
The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 likewise confessed one true God who is eternal, almighty, immutable, incomprehensible and ineffable, with “three persons but one absolutely simple essence.”
The Council also states an enormously important principle concerning our language about God:
No similarity between “creator and creature” exists without an even greater dissimilarity.
This prevents two opposite errors.
We must not say that words such as good, wise, living or just are meaningless when applied to God. They tell us something true.
But neither may we imagine that goodness, wisdom or life exist in God merely in the same limited manner in which they exist in creatures.God is good—but not merely good in the way a good man is good.
God knows—but He does not learn facts one after another.
God lives—but His life is not biological.
God loves—but divine love is not an emotional fluctuation.
The same words may truthfully be used, but the perfection exists in God infinitely and without the limitations found in creatures.
The Roman Catechism
The Catechism of the Council of Trent, promulgated by command of Pope St Pius V, teaches that human reason is capable of acquiring knowledge of God from His works. It describes God as the supreme and most perfect Good and explains that philosophical reason rightly attributes to Him supreme wisdom, justice, goodness and absolute perfection.
When explaining the word Almighty in the Creed, the Roman Catechism warns that omnipotence does not mean the ability to perform contradictions or imperfections. God cannot lie, sin, cease to exist or be ignorant. Such things would indicate deficiency, not power.
That is an important point. God's omnipotence means that no genuine possibility exceeds His power. It does not mean that contradictions such as a “square circle” are objects that God somehow fails to create. A contradiction describes nothing capable of existence.
Historical and Theological Evidence
We Know God Through His Effects
St Thomas Aquinas explains that during this earthly life we do not naturally begin by looking directly into the divine essence.
We begin with created reality.
Things exist.
Things change.Things depend upon causes.
Things possess limited degrees of goodness, truth and perfection.
The universe displays intelligibility and ordered activity.
From effects such as these, reason rises toward their ultimate cause.
Aquinas states in Summa Theologiae I, q.12, a.12 that natural knowledge of God comes through the images or intelligible content supplied by His effects. From creatures we can know God as their cause and can understand that He infinitely transcends them.
This means natural theology is not an exercise in imagining what we would like God to be. It argues from what exists to what must ultimately account for it.
The Three Ways of Speaking About God
The classical Catholic theological method can be expressed through three related approaches: causality, negation and excellence.
By causality, we recognise that created perfections must ultimately have their source in the first cause. If intelligence exists in creatures, the ultimate source of creatures cannot be deficient in the perfection represented by intelligence.
By negation, we remove from our concept of God the limitations belonging to creatures. God is intelligent, but not through a material brain. He exists, but not by receiving existence from another. He acts, but not because something outside Himself moves Him from potency into actuality.
By excellence, whatever genuine perfection exists in creatures is attributed to God in an infinitely higher manner. Created goodness is limited; divine goodness is unlimited. Created knowledge is acquired and partial; God's knowledge is perfect.
St Thomas summarises this approach when he explains that God is known from creatures “as their principle” and according to excellence and removal.
Our Language About God Is Analogical
This leads to one of the most important principles in Catholic theology: analogy.
Suppose we say:
God is good.
A man is good.
The word good is not being used in two completely unrelated senses. If it were, saying “God is good” would tell us nothing. But neither does goodness belong to God and man in precisely the same manner.
The creature possesses goodness by participation and in a limited way.
God is the uncreated source of goodness and possesses no limitation.
St Thomas therefore teaches that terms applied both to God and creatures are neither simply univocal nor purely equivocal; they are applied analogically.
This is why Catholic theology can speak meaningfully about an infinite God without pretending to reduce Him to the level of created things.
What Can Reason Know About God's Nature?
Once the existence of God is established, philosophical reasoning can arrive at a considerable body of genuine knowledge concerning Him.
The Church's own formulations provide a useful summary.
God is one. There cannot be several absolutely ultimate, unlimited first principles competing with one another as gods.
God is spiritual. He is not composed of matter or bodily parts.
God is simple. In theological language, divine simplicity means that God is not assembled out of more fundamental components. He does not possess parts upon which His existence depends.
God is eternal. He does not come into existence or pass out of existence.
God is immutable. He does not improve, deteriorate or acquire some perfection that He previously lacked.
God is infinite. No created limitation circumscribes His being or perfection.
God is intelligent and possesses perfect knowledge.
God is free. Creation was not forced from Him by necessity. Vatican I teaches that God created by a completely free counsel in order to manifest His perfection through the goods bestowed upon creatures.
God is omnipotent: all things genuinely possible are subject to His power.
God is perfectly good: goodness in creatures has its ultimate source in Him.
God is provident: He not only creates but preserves and governs the reality He has made.
The Baltimore Catechism, summarising traditional doctrine for instruction, describes God as “the Supreme Being, infinitely perfect,” and lists eternity, goodness, omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence among His perfections.
These are not unrelated qualities stuck onto God like decorations. Because God is absolutely simple, the distinctions arise principally from our limited manner of understanding the one infinite divine reality.
God Is Not the Universe
Another conclusion follows immediately.
God is really distinct from creation.
Catholic doctrine therefore excludes pantheism—the idea that God and the universe are ultimately the same reality.
The world depends upon God; God does not depend upon the world.
God existed without creation. He did not create because He was lonely, incomplete or deficient. Vatican I explicitly teaches that God is supremely blessed in and from Himself and created not to increase His own perfection or happiness but freely to manifest His goodness.
This also explains why creation is neither part of God nor an emanation that diminishes Him.
God creates from nothing—ex nihilo.
The creature is real, but it is not divine.
Is God a Person?
Catholicism does not teach an impersonal cosmic force.
Pope Pius XII stated in Humani Generis on 12 August 1950 that human reason can attain true and certain knowledge of the one personal God who governs the world by His providence.
Calling God “personal” does not mean He is a human person magnified to infinite size. It means, among other things, that ultimate reality possesses intellect and will.
God knows and wills.
He acts intelligently and freely.
He is not a blind physical mechanism.
Christian revelation goes far beyond this natural knowledge by revealing that within the one divine essence there are three Persons: Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
What Reason Cannot Discover by Itself
Here Catholic theology draws a firm boundary. Natural reason can know many truths about the unity and attributes of the divine essence.
But reason cannot discover the supernatural mysteries hidden within God's own life merely by studying creation.
The most obvious example is the Blessed Trinity.
St Thomas states plainly in Summa Theologiae I, q.32, a.1:
“It is impossible to attain to the knowledge of the Trinity by natural reason.”
Why? Because creatures reveal God insofar as He is their first cause. Creation can therefore lead reason toward truths concerning the divine essence and the Creator-creature relationship. But creation does not of itself disclose the eternal processions by which the Son is begotten of the Father and the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son. Those truths must be revealed.
Vatican I accordingly teaches that, beyond truths accessible to natural reason, there exist mysteries “hidden in God” which could not be known unless God revealed them. Even after revelation, these mysteries are not reduced to ordinary objects fully penetrable by reason.
Faith therefore does not destroy reason. It gives reason truths that reason could not have discovered for itself and then permits theology to investigate their meaning and relationships.
Revelation Gives Us More Certain and More Profound Knowledge
There is another reason revelation is necessary.
Even some truths that reason can know are difficult for fallen human beings consistently to attain without error.
Pius XII explains in Humani Generis that although human reason is naturally capable of reaching true knowledge of the personal God, its operation is impeded by imagination, sense experience, disordered passions and the effects of original sin. Divine revelation therefore makes religious and moral truths available more readily, firmly and free from admixture of error.
This is why revelation does not merely provide information inaccessible to philosophers.It also confirms, purifies and elevates truths that reason itself can attain.
In This Life We Know God Truly but Not Comprehensively
When Catholic theology calls God incomprehensible, it does not mean completely unknowable. These are very different claims.
To know something means to possess genuine truth concerning it.
To comprehend something, in the strict theological sense, means to grasp it exhaustively—to contain intellectually the full extent of what it is.
A finite intellect cannot exhaust infinite being. Consequently, a child who knows that God created him may know something absolutely true about God even though neither that child nor the greatest theologian comprehends the divine essence.
Aquinas therefore says that in this life we do not know the divine essence as it is in itself; rather, we know God through the perfections reflected in creatures and through revelation.
This is intellectual humility, not agnosticism.
Will We Ever See God Directly?
Christian revelation promises something far greater than our present knowledge. The final destiny of the blessed is the Beatific Vision: the direct vision of the divine essence.
Pope Benedict XII solemnly defined in the constitution Benedictus Deus of 29 January 1336 that purified souls in heaven see the divine essence:
“by intuitive vision, and even face to face.”
Even then, the creature does not become God and does not exhaust God's infinite intelligibility. But the blessed no longer know God merely through created effects or through the obscurity of faith. God Himself becomes the immediate object of their vision.
Thus Christianity's answer to the human desire to know ultimate reality is extraordinary: man is not destined merely to reason that God exists but, through supernatural grace and final glory, to see God.
The Main Objection
A serious objection can be stated as follows:
If God is infinite and incomprehensible, and all our ordinary concepts come from created things, how can we possibly say anything meaningful about Him? Aren't words like “good,” “wise,” “Father” and “loving” merely human ideas projected onto an unknowable reality?
The objection has real force. Our concepts normally arise through experience of created reality.
We know created goodness before attempting to speak about divine goodness.
We know human intelligence before discussing divine intelligence.
We know human fatherhood before calling God Father.
If God transcends every creature, it might seem that these concepts must become either false or meaningless when applied to Him.
Response
The objection would succeed only if there were no real relationship between creatures and their Creator. But creatures are genuine effects of God. Whatever reality and perfection they possess ultimately derives from Him.
An effect need not reproduce its cause perfectly in order to reveal something about it.
A work of engineering reveals intelligence without being an engineer.
A written argument reveals the existence and intellectual activity of its author without containing the author's entire mind.
Creation similarly reveals God, though incomparably less adequately.
Catholic theology therefore avoids two extremes.
The first is anthropomorphism: treating God as though He possessed created perfections in exactly the manner we do.
The second is agnosticism: claiming that because our knowledge is imperfect, it is therefore not genuine knowledge.
Analogy supplies the proper middle course. When we say God is wise, the affirmation is true. Wisdom is not absent from God. Yet divine wisdom exceeds created wisdom beyond measurement.
When Scripture speaks figuratively of God's “arm,” “eyes” or other bodily images, those expressions do not imply divine anatomy. They communicate divine action or knowledge in language accommodated to human understanding. Christ's statement that “God is a spirit” and the Church's doctrine of divine simplicity prevent a crude bodily interpretation.
So we neither reduce God to our categories nor surrender to silence. We can know Him truly because creation genuinely comes from Him and because He has genuinely revealed Himself.
We cannot know Him exhaustively because no finite mind can contain the infinite.
What We Can and Cannot Conclude
Established Catholic doctrine:
There is one true and living God, Creator and Lord of all things. God is spiritual, absolutely simple, immutable, eternal, infinite in intellect, will and every perfection, and really distinct from the created universe. This is solemnly taught by the First Vatican Council and is consistent with the earlier profession of the Fourth Lateran Council.
Established Catholic doctrine:
The existence of the one true God can be known with certainty from created things by the natural light of human reason. Vatican I expressly defined this proposition and condemned its denial.
Authoritative pre–Vatican II teaching:
Human reason can attain genuine knowledge of a personal God who governs creation by providence, although fallen man's intellectual and moral condition creates serious practical obstacles. Pius XII explicitly teaches this in Humani Generis.
Certain and classical theological teaching:
Our natural knowledge of God proceeds from created effects and uses causality, negation and excellence. Terms signifying pure perfections—such as goodness, wisdom and life—can be predicated of God truly but analogically. St Thomas Aquinas gives the classic systematic account of this doctrine.
Established Catholic doctrine concerning revelation:
There are genuine supernatural mysteries which human reason could not discover without divine revelation. The inner mystery of the Trinity belongs to this supernatural order. Vatican I teaches the existence of such mysteries, while the dogma of the Trinity itself is solemnly professed by the Church.
What we cannot conclude:
Knowing true propositions about God does not mean that the human intellect comprehends the divine essence. God's incomprehensibility is not equivalent to unknowability.
What we must not conclude:
We must not imagine God as merely the most powerful being inside the universe, as though He belonged to the same order as creatures. God is the uncreated source of the entire created order.
What revelation adds:
Natural theology can bring us to genuine knowledge of the Creator. It cannot by itself produce the specifically Christian mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation, grace, Redemption or man's supernatural destiny.
Conclusion
Yes, we can know what God is like.
Creation is not silent about its Creator. Human reason can rise from the world of effects to genuine knowledge of the first Cause and can recognise that God must possess, in an infinitely higher manner, the perfections reflected in His creatures. The Catholic Church solemnly teaches that God's existence can be known with certainty by natural reason and confesses Him as the one, spiritual, eternal, immutable, infinitely perfect Creator and Lord.
Yet God infinitely exceeds our concepts. We do not know Him by reducing Him to the dimensions of created things. We know Him analogically: truly, but imperfectly. Every genuine likeness between God and creatures is accompanied by an even greater difference.
Divine revelation then opens an entirely higher order of knowledge. God has revealed truths about Himself which philosophy could never discover—above all the mystery that the one divine nature subsists in three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
Christianity therefore proposes neither blind faith nor an unknowable deity. It holds together reason, revelation and mystery.
Reason tells us that God can be known.
Revelation tells us far more about who He is.
And the Christian promise reaches beyond both present reasoning and present faith: the ultimate happiness of the saved is to see God Himself, face to face.
For the sincere inquirer, the next question is therefore not merely whether some God exists. It is whether this God has actually spoken to mankind—and, if He has, where His revelation is to be found.
Primary Sources
Sacred Scripture, Douay-Rheims: Romans 1:18–22, especially v.20, on knowledge of God from creation. Romans 1:20 — Douay-Rheims
Sacred Scripture, Douay-Rheims: Wisdom 13:1–5, especially v.5, reasoning from created beauty to the Creator. Wisdom 13:5 — Douay-Rheims
Sacred Scripture, Douay-Rheims: Exodus 3:14, God's revelation to Moses: “I AM WHO AM.” Exodus 3:14 — Douay-Rheims
Sacred Scripture, Douay-Rheims: John 4:24, “God is a spirit.” John 4:24–26 — Douay-Rheims
First Vatican Council, Dei Filius, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, 24 April 1870, Session III, Chapters I–II and Canons on Revelation. Dei Filius — First Vatican Council
Fourth Lateran Council, 1215, Constitution 1, Firmiter credimus, and Constitution 2 concerning the Creator-creature analogy. Fourth Lateran Council — texts
Catechism of the Council of Trent, Part I, Article I, “I Believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth,” trans. Rev. Jeremiah Donovan. The 1829 edition is available as a scan. 1829 Roman Catechism scan
St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.12, especially aa.11–13, on how God is known by us. Summa Theologiae I, q.12
St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.13, especially aa.1–6 and 12, on the names applied to God and analogical predication. Summa Theologiae I, q.13
St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.32, a.1, on the inability of natural reason to discover the Trinity. Summa Theologiae I, q.32
Pope Pius XII, Encyclical Humani Generis, 12 August 1950, especially §§2–4, 25 and 29, on natural knowledge of God and the limitations encountered by fallen human reason. Humani Generis — Vatican archive
Pope Benedict XII, Apostolic Constitution Benedictus Deus, 29 January 1336, defining the Beatific Vision. Benedictus Deus — text in Denzinger collection
Further Reading
Joseph Pohle, God: His Knowability, Essence, and Attributes: A Dogmatic Treatise, authorised English version by Arthur Preuss, St Louis: B. Herder, 1911. A substantial pre–Vatican II manual covering natural knowledge of God, the divine essence and attributes. Internet Archive edition
Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., God: His Existence and His Nature — A Thomistic Solution of Certain Agnostic Antinomies, originally published in English in the twentieth century from the earlier French work. Particularly useful for readers wanting a more philosophical treatment of divine knowability and analogy. Open Library / Internet Archive record
Joseph Wilhelm and Thomas B. Scannell, A Manual of Catholic Theology, Vol. I, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1899, especially the treatment of revelation, mystery and the knowability of God. Online text of A Manual of Catholic Theology
Baltimore Catechism No. 3, Lesson 2, “God and His Perfections,” for a concise catechetical summary of self-existence, eternity, goodness, omniscience, omnipresence, wisdom, justice and mercy. Baltimore Catechism — God and His Perfections
Related Questions
Does God Exist?