Is "The Infinite" a metaphor that can refer to God?

Question

First, I am not entirely sure this can be viewed as a metaphor, but I feel this is an edge case, because like the "Absolute" it refers to a quality of God, but "Infinite" even if it's a quality of God, sounds sketchy at best. What do you think?

Answer 1

I'll play devil's advocate and Answer: Yes. In terms of making the metaphor (or any metaphor) 'work' your success depends on your novel as a whole.

Imagine a novel written in the style of Hemingway--very sparse, concrete language. Few metaphors. In such a case, dropping 'The Infinite" into the narrative, in the absence of any clues or what have you, will not conjure a picture of God.

But. Imagine a novel about an alien culture--alien in many, many ways. Perhaps they communicate through dance, and have tails, and never sleep. Who knows, but they are clearly not at all like humans. They refer to love as 'The Communion." They refer to food as "The Power." To their jobs as "The Definition" or "The Hours of the Day." And to God as "The Infinite."

Two extreme cases here--hopefully illustrating the point that 'The Infinite' can refer to God in a fairly obvious manner depending on your execution. Imagine one being says to another, "Pray to the Infinite." We get the meaning easily, especially if we already know that something like "The Red" means an injury.

Your novel may be in between these two extremes, but as with so many of these issues, it depends on your execution.

Answer 2

Speaking as a scientist, "Infinite" wouldn't mean "God" to me, it would refer to an opinion about time and/or space; which some people consider infinite.

Answer 3

"Absolute" is not a common reference to god, at least not to most people. I have heard of "absolute being" as a reference to god...

"infinite" never heard of that word used that way either...

https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/god

There are a lot of words for god...

BUT this being a metaphor.. you can do whatever you want, if you can make it work, it works.

but if you want to say "I saw infinite last night in my dreams" out of the blue, you should have no real expectation to be understood.

Answer 4

I'll give a second vote to yes as in many Judeo-Christian beliefs, God is described as Omnipotent (All Powerful), Omniscient (All Knowing), and Omnipresent (Present in all possible spaces). The idea of god as a being of such magnitude has inspired tropes of having any working knowledge of God is just a little too much knowledge for humans to handle, with works like Kevin Smith's "Dogma" God is so powerful that he tasks a specific Angel to speak God's divine message to humans, least their heads explode ("We went through several "Adams" before we worked that out). In the tv series "Joan of Arcadia" Joan passes out after learning a small part of God's Plan and comes to several hours later, having forgotten any element of it. Even in the Bible, Mose asks if he can see God and God responds that Moses cannot see God's face, but lets him gaze upon God's back, which causes Moses' face to glow brightly from the energy for several days, forcing Moses to wear a cloth over his face until it stops glowing, and the Angels' catchphrase greeting "Fear Not, For I am an Angel of the Lord" was due to the fact that the Angels weren't humans with wings (this occured after Christianty made its way to Rome) but rather bizarre and almost Lovecraftian images that shocked most people they appeared before.

Referring to God as all things is common in rituals and God's capacity for forgiveness in Christianity is often described as infinite. It's certainly appropriate and can even be a bit subtle to refer to God as the Infinite by an alien race that is perhaps more math oriented in their language as opposed to humans which are more metaphoric.