By MICHAEL FERBER
I want to look at an ambiguity about God, capitalized, but before that: Where does the word come from? Words that mean “god” are quite different even among the languages of our Indo-European family. All of our fellow Germanic languages, at least, have very similar words: Dutch god, German Gott (German capitalizes all nouns), Danish gud, and Icelandic goth and guth. The two words in Icelandic are not from different regions of Iceland; rather guth refers to the Christian god, while goth refers to one of the pagan gods, say Othinn or Thorr. In English we use the same word for the Judaeo-Christian (and Islamic) god and for the pagan gods, but in writing, out of faith or courtesy, we capitalize the latter, a gesture with consequences, as we shall see.
But the root of these words is very uncertain. One theory is that it is from the same root we see in Old English geat (or yeat), as in this translation from Leviticus: He geat thæt blod uppan thæt weofod (“he poured the blood upon the altar”). From the root meaning “pour,” if you add the –ed ending for the passive voice, you can come up with something like gead (pronounced like yad), and if you assume the vowel was a rear vowel (old roots often varied their vowels), you can get god. A god, then, was someone or something poured to. The same root, apparently, underlies Sanskrit huta (“poured out in sacrifice”) and Greek khutos (“poured out”).
Intriguing but tenuous. Another theory traces the word to a root meaning “call” or “invoke,” visible in Sanskrit hu– (“invoke a god”) and Old Irish guth (“voice”). A god was someone invoked. Also intriguing, and also tenuous.
The Latin word for “god” is deus, which is akin to Sanskrit deva-, Old Irish dia, and Lithuanian dievas, all meaning “god,” all going back to Proto-Indo-European *dei-u-o- (“god of the bright sky”), from which we get the Greek skygod Zeus, the Roman equivalent Jove and the first part of Jupiter, and Tiw, the Old English wargod, after whom we named Tuesday.
The Russian word for “god” is bog, and an almost identical sound means “god” in all the Slavic languages, differing a little in the final consonant. Its etymology is also uncertain: perhaps from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “share, portion, lot,” as in Sanskrit bhaga (“happiness”), and perhaps via Old Persian baga (“god”).
The Greek word for “god” is theos, whence our words theology and atheist, seems to go back to Proto-Indo-European but not to any of the roots we have looked at. There is a cognate in Armenian, and several words in Latin that begin with f– seem related, such festus (“feastly”) and fanum (“temple”).
These puzzling origins (except for deus) of quite distinct words may tell us that early societies had very different notions of what a god is, or that there were taboos about saying the name of a god, or that certain features were more prominent in some cultures than in others: invoking, pouring blood or wine, distributing lots, and so on. I am over my depth here, so let’s go back to English.
Unless we are referring to the pagan gods, or extending the word metaphorically, as in the new god of the White House, the convention is to capitalize God. But that makes it a proper name: the god of the Christians and Jews has a name, and it is God. (Jews often remember the Hebrew names Elohim, Adonai, or the not-to-bespoken YHVH, while Muslims, who assert “there is no God but God,” often prefer the Arabic Allah.) God is what you call him when you speak to him, and it’s “him,” too, because English has the word goddess, and he is not that. As far back as the fifteenth century we find the phrase a God, referring to the one god of Christianity, but that is odd, if it is a name. Do you believe in a God? has been normal usage for centuries, and it is not equivalent to Do you believe in one God? Suppose the name were Fritz. Do you believe in a Fritz?
Normally today the article is dropped, and you may be asked Do you believe in God? Since God is still a name, the question is ambiguous. It could mean: Do you believe in an omnipotent, omniscient, and utterly transcendant personal power (or something like that), or it could mean: Do you believe there is something or someone named God, or Fritz? There may be other ways to look at it. But in the end it seems distinctly misleading to make this power or spirit or whatever it is into a personal name by capitalizing its first letter.
If you don’t capitalize it, and ask: Do you believe in god?, you have made god into a mass-noun, like mud or music, and that’s very odd, since we then cannot speak of one god any more than we can say one mud.
In a debate with the geneticist and Christian Francis Collins in 2006, the geneticist and atheist Richard Dawkins agreed that “There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.” To that Collins replied, “That’s God.” So, if Collins is right, this vague and vast “something” that we cannot understand has a personal name! That’s rather charming, almost heart-warming, as it brings this thing down to us: we can call it by name, tell it our troubles, and pray to it.
But what Collins has really done is transfer the name God to something not at all like what most people think of as God. People believe lots of different things, of course, but most Christians would have to agree that he is our father; he resembles us, because he made us in his image; he has a son who was incarnated as a man, died on the cross, and rose to heaven; and he is also the “holy spirit” who dwells in us and particularly in the church of believers. There could be much more: he created the world in six days, he made Adam out of clay and Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs, he allowed Satan to entice them into eating a fruit and then punished them for doing so, he sent a flood to destroy everyone on earth except for a family of eight, and so on. Absolutely none of this is implicit in the phrase Dawkins used, as Collins well knows. He has tried to show that the leading atheist of our time confesses there could be a god after all, or God.
This equivocation or sleight of hand rests in large part on the capitalization of proper names in English. Maybe things are clearer in German. But in future debates about “God,” let’s be sure a linguist or two sits on the panel.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu. Website: michaelkferber.com.
Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.