The alien God · homesickness as evidence

Hans Jonas's name for the Gnostic deity: not merely transcendent but foreign — unrelated to this world, uninvolved in its making, unknown to its ruler, and reachable only because something of him is stranded here. Jonas's point was psychological as much as theological: in this scheme your not belonging is not a symptom, it is the evidence. The fact that a person can feel homesick in a world that produced them is treated as data — you could not miss a place you were native to. The Kabbalah has a God beyond all knowing too — Ein Sof, without end, of whom nothing can be said — but never an alien one: the same source that cannot be spoken is the source that contracts itself to make room for the world, and the world is its garment rather than its prison. Same infinite unreachable Beyond; total disagreement about whether it is a stranger.