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Hortatory Address to the Greeks
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Chapter 21: The Unnamed God
GOD CANNOT BE CALLED BY ANY PROPER NAME: as names are given to identify and distinguish different subjects, which are many and varied. No one existed before God to give Him a name, nor did He think it right to name Himself, recognizing that He is one and unique, as He testifies through His own prophets, when He says, “I, God, am the first,” and afterward, “And beside me there is no other God.” Therefore, as I mentioned earlier, when God sent Moses to the Hebrews, He did not mention any name but mystically used a participle to teach them that He is the one and only God. “For,” He says, “I am the Being,” clearly contrasting Himself, “the Being,” with those who are not, so that those who had been deceived could see they were attaching themselves, not to real beings, but to those who had no being.
Since God knew that the first humans remembered the old delusion of their forefathers—by which the deceptive demon tricked them, saying, “If you obey me by transgressing God's command, you shall be as gods,” calling those beings gods which had no existence—this deception led them to believe there were other gods, and thus they might become gods themselves. On this account, He told Moses, “I am the Being,” using the participle “being” to show the difference between God, who is, and those who are not.
People, deceived by the demon, dared to disobey God and were expelled from Paradise, remembering the name of gods but no longer being taught by God that there are no other gods. It was not just for those who failed to keep the first, simple commandment to continue being taught; rather, they were rightly driven to punishment. Banished from Paradise and thinking their expulsion was solely due to disobedience—unaware that it was also because they believed in non-existent gods—they even gave the name of gods to men born afterward.
This first false idea regarding gods originated with the father of lies. Knowing that the mistaken belief in many gods oppressed the human soul like a disease, and wishing to remove it, God appeared first to Moses, saying, “I am He who is.” It was necessary, I believe, for the one who would lead the Hebrew people to first know the living God. Therefore, God appeared to Moses in the way He could appear to a man and said, “I am He who is.” Then, about to send him to the Hebrews, He further instructed him to say, “He who is has sent me to you.”