Victor Frankl - The Notion of God

Chapter 4
The Notion of God

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The notion of God, of “supra-meaning” as Frankl sometimes refers to God, is

one of the major thematic concepts underpinning his logotherapy. Frankl expli-
citly relates ultimate meaning to God and religion. Man’s Search for Ultimate
Meaning as well as other writings examine the notions of God and existence
in relation to each other. Frankl’s conception of existence drops out the determi-
nistic Freudian triad of ego, id, and super ego with their attendant conflicts.
Frankl goes beyond the deterministic Freudian doctrine of the equilibrium
(the homeostasis) of these conflicting elements—at best a fractious psychological
armistice—to assert the existence of the unique antecedent which he calls the
“unconscious God.”
Frankl borrows the term “unconscious” from the Freudian vocabulary. For
Frankl, however, the term indicates a built-in, prior orientation which is not some-
thing acquired through the actions or choices of existence. However, he is speaking
of neither the Freudian conception of the unconscious nor obviously of the
common-sense notion according to which someone is knocked unconscious or
is rendered unconscious for surgery. When Frankl speaks of the “unconscious
God,” then, he means that God is the prior, built-in goal of existence, or—in the
language of Husserl and Scheler—the intentional horizon of existence, the goal
that existence intends, or aims at. To put it roughly, the unconscious God is
“inside” the person and part of the person’s structure as a human being. “God”
is called “unconscious” because existence has no ability to Invent, control or
eliminate this innate, built-in, a priori orientation to God. Existence does not in
any manner construct this orientation, this intending which Frankl calls “the
unconscious God.” In his thinking, the unconscious God is the pre-given goal of
the will to meaning which thus orients and directs existence in its choices and rejec-
tions of actions on the basis of whether they have value, and thus are possible
meanings.
Frankl’s phenomenological method reveals how the unconscious God comes
to be known. This method identifies the structure of the individual intentional
acts of choosing values; the good choices which existence makes, that is, the
meanings which existence pursues. Frankl’s phenomenology reveals the relation-
ship of the unconscious God and the will to meaning as the necessary condition
for all these acts of meaning, ordering them to their overall goal: knowledge of,
and union with, God. Briefly, for Frankl the unconscious God is the intentional
orientation of existence to discern God as a person. Acts of meaning do not
© URAM Volume 36, nos. 1–2, 2013, Published 2019 65

accidently or haphazardly reveal the “unconscious” God to the person who is the
author of the acts, such that the person automatically knows God better. The
unconscious God is not revealed by a pre-established set of ritualistic choices
and practices, nor even after a set period of time. For Frankl the consciously
known God was an important part of his life from the time of his childhood
with his family for whom their Jewish religion was of the highest importance.
The “unconscious God” is Frankl’s terminology for the fundamental orientation
of existence of every person, to God (the Lord, the Lord God), or whatever name
one wishes to use for the Supreme Divinity.
The unconscious God can become the “God consciously known” at any time or
place. One of the seemingly paradoxical ideas of Man’s Search for Meaning is that
God can be found even in a concentration camp. This paradox clarifies Frankl’s
belief that God is present at any time and any place whether sought by individuals
or worshiping communities. He holds that the unconscious God is neither remote
nor frequently inoperative, but rather is always present. It is through their acts
of meaning that persons can always consciously look for God and find God.
Thus Frankl asserts that the unconscious God directs existence towards a con-
scious and personal relation with the known God through prayers. Such a con-
scious and personal relation is what essentially constitutes not only a personal
religious life, such as that of Frankl, but also the religious lives of communities,
such as those of Jewish communities.
“Religion” can be defined as a manner of worshiping a deity, or God, with a set
of basic beliefs and practices, such as special feast days and forms of worship. Reli-
gion includes traditions, rituals, and usually sacred texts, like the Hebrew Bible.
Theology, however, is a systematic reflection upon the teachings of religion. It
raises questions about such issues as creation, the providence of God, a virtuous
life, and the nature of evil. Theology makes use of philosophical methods, such
as phenomenology, to offer some understanding, for example, of such human re-
sponses to God as awe, love, and worship. Some examples of religious persons
would include the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah, St. Francis of Assisi, Gandhi,
and Mother Teresa. Their principal responses to the Divinity are “minimally”
intellectual. Questions like “What was God doing before making the world?”
and “Is evil a thing or a person?” have little interest for them. Not that they are
lacking intelligence, rather they are essentially preoccupied with loving and serving
God, and following the commandment to love others as themselves. Theologians
would be persons like St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and Bernard Lonergan. To be
a theologian obviously does not preclude piety and religious living. The study of
theology depends upon the questions which arise in the minds of religious persons,
and of irreligious as well, such as the abiding question about a good God and the
omnipresence of evil. Frankl, however, often uses the term “religion” to signify
studies and procedures that would better be called “theological” or “philosophi-
cal” (see The Unconscious God, ch. 6–7).
Frankl’s philosophical method, as discussed in Chapter 2, is essentially phe-
nomenological, influenced by Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler. Following
66 © URAM Volume 36, nos. 1–2, 2013, Published 2019

these two philosophers, Frankl is interested in the intentional acts of a person, of
existence, particularly the acts of discerning values and meaning. In brief, in find-
ing values. These acts are intentional because through them the person, by eval-
uating and making a specific choice, is correlated to some “object,” some goal,
like marrying some particular man or woman, rather than merely thinking
about marriage in general. The intentional acts which primarily interest Frankl
are acts of meaning: the morally good acts of free choosing and love. The source
of these intentional acts is the will to meaning. When he is examining the relation
between his ethics and his conception of God, Frankl always invokes the will to
meaning as the essential link, the essential condition.
Further, when Frankl discusses this relation, he normally shifts his study from
the world of description to the world of explanation. His description of conscience
as “sniffing out values” or the well-known description of conscience as an “inner
voice” belong to descriptive accounts. In such accounts, conscience is described
through the use of common-sense images and metaphors. Such metaphors and
images are a valid and rich way of describing conscience, including moral con-
sciousness, and its attempts to find values and meaning. They offer imaginative
accounts of conscience by describing conscience as “sniffing out” values, or as
being an inner voice. These descriptions appeal to the affective responses of the
person who is praying to God or meditating upon the “personality” of God man-
ifested in the person’s own interior life of affection, tranquility, and worship. These
descriptions are in no way inferior to the explanatory account which drops out the
personal relation as well as any imaginative and metaphorical account that would
tie down the notion of God to particular places and times. The habitual attitude of
the pious person is that it is better to love God than to speculate about God and
God’s plans (see Recollections 4).
Thus, when Frankl turns to an explanatory account of the “unconscious God”
and of “God as consciously known,” he moves from description to explanation.
He explains the meaning of “the unconscious” by ignoring Freud’s mechanistic
triad of id, ego, and super ego. He explains the notion of God by emphasizing
characteristics of God: mercy, justice, knowledge, providence. In his explanatory
account, Frankl does not offer a descriptive account of God which would be based
on imaginative similes and metaphors, where God would be a shepherd or King,
or some Father figure hidden in the “unconscious.” Frankl moves back and forth
between description and explanation, especially when he is discussing ethics and
God. He speaks of religious topics, such as prayer, and he speaks of theological
matters, such as God’s providence. Descriptive accounts are not always superior
to explanatory accounts, nor are explanatory accounts always superior to descrip-
tive accounts. Each account has a specific function. One can read the Book of Job
either to appreciate the mercy of God or to speculate on the relation of between
the good God and evil. Just as description and explanation are not contradictory
but rather complementary, so too are Frankl’s studies of religion and his philoso-
phical reflections on the “good Lord’s” providence for his daughter’s illness or his
wife’s survival in the concentration camp.

As may be seen from Frankl’s presentation of the unconscious God and the
will to meaning, his notion of God and ethical teachings are closely interrelated.
Frankl’s ethics are teleological. They are concerned, not just with individual and
assorted acts and goals, but with the overall goal, or end, of human choosing.
Frankl does not formally elaborate an ethics in the manner of Aristotle or
Kant. His method is, however, empirical in the manner of Aristotle who asks
at the very beginning of Book I of his Nicomachean Ethics whether there is any
ultimate goal for human choosing or whether it just goes on haphazardly, just
one thing after another. Frankl’s notions of the will to meaning, values, and
meaning are all centered upon the questions: “What is my life about, what is any-
one’s life for?” When Frankl entitled his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he had
in mind the interrelationship of the individual acts of meaning in one’s life, in his
own life as well as in that of others. At the same time, he always calls to mind the
inescapable conditions of human choosing, what he calls “fate.” Fate is as much
a part of human living as the will to meaning and freedom. The problems of
fate and evil always appear together with Frankl’s discussions of meaning and
freedom. The notion of fate for Frankl is not that of a totally deterministic
and usually cruel power, indifferent to the plight of humans—as Shakespeare
has it—which “kills them for their sport.” Fate and disastrous events affect
every human life. And so, the question arises whether God is good.
For Frankl, however, fate is the given situation in which all persons find them-
selves. But In his judgment, Frankl clearly insists that in any situation whatsoever
each person has his or her basic freedom still intact. In Man’s Search for Meaning
Frankl insists that although all prisoners by fate were sent to the camps against
their will, nonetheless the inner core of their freedom was beyond the Nazi
power which attempted to suppress this freedom in every way imaginable. Frankl
simply states in Man’s Search for Meaning: “Every day there were choices to
make” (5).
Frankl often mentions incidents where he finds the reality of God’s presence,
even in situations that may seem to be trivial. Frankl recounts an intimate
moment between himself and his daughter before the war:
. . . my daughter at about six years of age asked me the question, “Why do we speak
of the good Lord?” Whereupon I said, “Some weeks ago, you were suffering from
measles, and then the good Lord sent you full recovery.” However, the little girl
was not content; she retorted, “Well, but please, Daddy, do not forget: in the first
place, he sent me the measles.” (Man’s Search for Meaning 188; “Conclusion,”
Will to Meaning 142–57)
The scene appears to be an ordinary intimate moment between a father and his
daughter. His daughter asks Frankl why he always speaks of the good Lord.
Frankl reminds her of a sickness which she just had suffered and adds that the
good Lord cured her. His daughter then asks him why the good Lord had allowed
her to become ill in the first place. Her question abruptly shifts the topic from her
health problem and Frankl’s pious answer to a deep theological problem: how

can the good Lord allow evil—like her sickness—in the first place? Frankl’s
answer to his daughter is a descriptive account of the relationship of his sick
daughter to the Good Lord of whom the Bible speaks. His daughter, however,
has shifted the discussion to a higher and more comprehensive context which re-
quires an elaborate theological and philosophical discussion. What shifts the dis-
cussion to a higher context is her question.
Such questions are like operators in mathematics. Operators transform one
object into another. Such signs as +, 7, dy/dx, and ../ as in ../25 are operators
in mathematics. The sign of this operator “7” means only one thing: divide. Ques-
tions move a discussion or a set of ideas to a new level or different context. So,
one can ask: “how can I divide 25 into 11?” The question opens up the topics of
fractions and decimals. The question “transforms” the topic by requiring a knowl-
edge of something new, in this case, fractions and decimals. A person can also ask
questions like: “Is this world eternal?”, “Is it divine?”, “Is fate a person?”, and “Is
there a God? Does this God have an idea of who I am?” Such questions move peo-
ple out of their round of daily living and surviving. But such questions are just as
human as daily living and surviving. To ask questions is the means by which a per-
son undergoes an intellectual conversion.
The basic texts in the Bible which offer a more comprehensive context of the
relation of God to humans are Genesis and the Book of Job since they explicitly
take up the questions of creation and of good and evil. In Genesis the Lord God
sees that creation is “good,” that Adam and Eve are “good.” But the Book of Job
is the high point of theological speculation in the Hebrew Bible. The Book of Job
addresses the mystery of a good God who permits evil to happen to a good
man without an adequate reason which Job and his friends—as well as the reader
of the story—can understand. The Lord God is good and yet a permanent evil
subsists in this world which is a constant disruption of human living. The French
philosopher Paul Ricœur has called this permanently abiding evil the “fault”
that runs through human undertakings in a manner similar to a geological
fault line. Bernard Lonergan calls such a pervasive disorder in human living
the “mess.” The mess appears in the illness of Frankl’s daughter, the death of
loved ones, a concentration camp, a civil war, and drug addictions. This abiding
evil can often arouse the sweeping and resentful question: “Why doesn’t anything
work?” not the question: “Why don’t things work anymore?” The first question
means that things never did work.
Several answers can be offered. First, there is no certainty that there is a God,
and thus we are here in this life alone. Further, there is an evil principle that ulti-
mately controls everyone and everything in this world, and in any other world
where humans might be. Movies from the time of “Flash Gordon” and “Dra-
cula” up to “Star Wars” with the Evil Side and TV shows like “Star Trek”
along with other such abundant offerings always present some evil personality
or thing that threatens the world. The evil principle exists without any reason
for existing other than it simply does exist. In reflecting on the constant and per-
manent reality of evil, one could adopt a dualist position that has been around for

many centuries. This is gnosticism. Its main tenet is that once upon a time humans
lived as spirits in a place of light and happiness. Then for no reason they were im-
prisoned in bodies and thrown from this place of light into this dark world. The
entrapped soul must struggle to escape from the material world back to the
realm of light. Gnosticism is a dualism according to which the body and the
soul are always in opposition to each other. The body is evil; the soul is good.
Heidegger is certainly not a dualist, but the notion of “thrownness” is central
to his philosophy. He believes that the basic situation of Dasein (existence) in this
life is its “thrownness.” Without any understandable reason, Dasein is thrown
into this world where it is filled with dread as it experiences itself and others
ineluctably “slipping away” into nothingness. Rare instances of friendship and
love offer almost eerie flashes of a peace which appear and then vanish in the ines-
capable flow toward death. To be human for Heidegger, then, is to endure
thrownness with the inescapable dread whose ominous presence always darkens
human consciousness in its depths as Dasein inexorably stumbles along toward
death.
Frankl’s notion of fate is his attempt to realistically confront two essential
facts in human living: the presence of evil and the meaning of human life, the
meaning of existence. Obviously, Frankl is not in any way a dualist, either as a
psychiatrist or as a philosopher, who holds that the soul is imprisoned in the
body. His concept of the three dimensions of existence—the biological, the psy-
chic, and the noological—is a rejection of such a hypothesis. As already men-
tioned, fate according to Frankl is the inescapable situation in which persons
find themselves. Illness, loss of a loved one, aging, a concentration camp are ines-
capable situations. Frankl does not think that an inescapable situation is the same
as a hopeless situation. For him the person’s will to meaning is the source for
finding values and choosing them, even though one’s fate seems overwhelming.
As seen earlier, Frankl speaks of “attitudinal values.” Such changes in a person’s
attitude toward fate are not an escapism or an induced denial of one’s fate. Atti-
tudinal values are choices that people make in spite of their fate.
In the thinking of Frankl, for persons to find attitudinal values which they can
freely choose presupposes that there is a God who somehow actually cares about
them and their choices. So the questions arise: “Who is God?” And then, “Does
God care about me?” Frankl takes care to answer these questions. He never
brushes them aside. His answer to questions about the existence of God and
God’s relation to fate is based on his philosophy, especially his own religious
belief and the manner in which he has lived his life. The God of Frankl is a “living
God” to whom he and others can pray.
In his words:
However, the main thesis propounded in the lecture “The Unconscious God” remains
still valid and tenable. There is, in fact, a religious sense deeply rooted in each and
every man’s unconscious depths. In two of my books, Man’s Search for Meaning
and . . . The Will to Meaning, evidence has been advanced to support my contention

that this sense may break through unexpectedly even in cases of severe mental illness
such as psychoses. (Unconscious God 10)
And also:
When I was fifteen years old or so I came up with a definition of God to which, in
my old age, I come back more and more. I would call it an operational definition. It
reads as follows: God is the partner of your intimate soliloquies. Whenever you are
talking to yourself in utmost sincerity and ultimate solitude—he to whom you are
addressing yourself may justifiably be called God. (Unheard Cry for Meaning 63)
Frankl is describing “a religious sense deeply rooted in each and every person’s
unconscious depths” which is the source of a person’s direct communication
with God. God is not a distant and external power of some sort. God is “a part-
ner” in one’s “soliloquies” and prayers. God is intimate to a person’s inner life.
Frankl’s main interest in these two passages is to show that God is a person—
a “partner”—whom one may address, with whom one may converse, and to
whom one may reveal the deepest fears, loves, and hopes. God is close, so close
that God is more intimate to us than we are to ourselves, according to St. Augus-
tine. God is already present to the person before the person even begins to think
about any type of communication or conversation or plan.
Frankl’s primary conception of the relationship between existence and God
is that of a religious attitude. A religious attitude and knowledge of God, as in
prayer, is essentially one of worship. The less one speculates about what one is
doing and what God might be doing the more successful the prayer will be.
Prayer and worship are essentially acts of affectivity not of speculation. God is
a person whom one addresses, not someone about whose omnipotence one is
mainly preoccupied. The basis of prayer is the conviction that God knows the
person who is praying. Especially in Man’s Search for Meaning Frankl describes
different prayers of different persons, as in the “exhortation” he gives to the pris-
oners when all of them are being punished for the actions of several prisoners who
stole some food. He tells them to think of someone they love, someone who
watches them. The heart of Man’s Search for Meaning is Frankl’s own mystical
communication with his wife which he ends with the quotation “Love is stronger
than death”—words taken directly from the Bible, the word of the Lord God in
the Song of Solomon.
The worship of God with its prayers, personal and liturgical, uses descriptive
words and categories to speak of God. Religious persons address God as a person
who understands their fears and loves and hopes. Such persons speak of God
and God’s relation to them with personal affectivity. Thus God is the “partner”
of their deepest hopes and fear, a “shepherd,” a “shield.” The psalmist tells how
God leads him to green pastures; His right hand upholds him; the Lord sits in
judgment. Isaiah describes the vision of the Lord God with his vast robe
whose hem alone fills the courtyard of the temple. These descriptive words and
affective images of the psalmist and Isaiah are addressed to God or describe

God at particular times and places, specifically in their relation to God. These
writings are filled with the hopes and fears of historical persons, like the psalmist
and Isaiah in Jerusalem. Both of them speak of their trust in and love of God as
they say: “Though I walk in the valley of death . . .” and “I saw the Lord God
standing . . .” According to Frankl, the religious affectivity and the worship of
God lie in the noological, spiritual dimension. Such affectivity cannot be dis-
missed as “nothing but” a biological drive or a psychological state like a crush
on some rock star.

Frankl as a psychiatrist, however, clearly distinguishes Logotherapy and reli-
gion. He is always cognizant of the three dimensions of existence which he has dis-
tinguished: the biological, the psychological, and the noological (spiritual). As
already noted, Frankl does not identify the noological (spiritual) with the religious.
Logotherapy is a psychotherapy which seeks to help the patient who is experi-
encing difficulties on the psychological and noological levels. These difficulties
can be psychological such as neurosis, or neogenic such as the existential vacuum.
It should be noted that Frankl does not simply propose God as the value every
person must choose who suffers from the existential vacuum. Frankl always
seeks to find the minimum value which is the maximum for the person in the spe-
cific situation. Thus, in the concentration camp Frankl proposed the future com-
position of a chemistry book as a value to a prisoner who had despaired of
surviving the camp. There are times, however, when he confronts religious pa-
tients with the reality of God as a value which they should consider. On some oc-
casions through directly questioning his patients and fellow prisoners he can elicit
prayers which express their own fears and desires.
Besides the religious way of worshiping God in prayer and liturgy, there is a
philosophical way of studying God. Such a study is often dependent upon the
religious teachings and ideas about God. As a minimum, religious teachings pre-
suppose that God exists, is knowable, and has some care for humans. Theology
arises when a person begins to ask certain types of questions. Such questions are:
“Does God know me and care about me?” If God is good, why are there death
and suffering? Once having listened to a sermon about God at a Catholic Mass, a
parishioner went up to the priest afterwards and said that he had some questions
about God and the Trinity, and he posed them. The priest briefly repeated what
he had said. The parishioner then asked, “But what does God think of me?” Such
a question is not purely self-centered. It is a manner of expressing a legitimate
question for people who think about God and wonder whether God even
knows anything about them. How can God know an individual among the mul-
titude of people alive and dead? God can be imagined as someone like the gov-
ernor of a state who can be said in a loose sense to know the people in his state.
The man’s question after listening to a sermon expresses the basic concern of a
person who believes in God and wonders just how much God knows or is con-
cerned with individual persons, in this case, the man himself.
Asking questions is natural. There are all kinds of questions. There are the
questions that we ask daily. Will it rain today? Why is it so hot? Should I buy

a new or used car? Such questions with some appropriate answers fill our daily-
thoughts and conversations. Such questions deal with a world to which our con-
cerns, ambitions, fears, loves are related. This is the world in which our common
sense guides and misguides us. Such questioning is intentional in the language
of Husserl and Frankl. Questions intend something. They “aim” at something. If
correct, they settle the issue as when we determine that to buy only a fire-engine-red
Alfa Romeo is more prudent than to buy a house, a house boat, and the Alfa
Romeo at the same time.

Asking questions about God and God’s existence is also natural. People may
not ask such questions daily, but once in a while the questions impose themselves
on their wandering or unwilling attention. The death of a loved one, their own
health, the ongoing wars around the world are realities that raise questions
whether anyone knows anything about them, or even more poignantly, if anyone
cares about them. These questions provoke a person’s religious beliefs and affec-
tions, or even if the person has no religion, the questions will still probably pro-
voke at least some passing interest or even unease . Both the religious person and
the non-religious person are concerned about the possibility of any stable situa-
tions at the present or the future.
Both sets of persons live with basic hopes as well as with the threats upon their
hopes.
In the case of religious persons, such questions engage their feelings and per-
sonal thoughts about their relations to God. These questions do not wait for
other matters to be discussed and undertaken. But one may wish to push them
aside and give one’s thoughts and attention to things that have an individual
and more limited interest. But such questions are like the ghost of Banquo at
the feast. They will not leave just because they are an unwanted presence. They
demand one’s deepest and most personal response.
As already mentioned, some questions about God pertain to the world of com-
mon sense where one related objects to one’s particular situations, especially to
one’s moods and feelings of fear and affectivity. The psalms and one’s own
prayers express a direct relation to God. Besides questions about God and how
God might think about individual people and their lives, there is another manner
of asking questions about God that are theological. This manner prescinds from
formal prayers and one’s personally expressed prayers. Such questions move us
from the world of description to the world of theory. Questions about whether
God knows individual persons and whether God is present to Frankl’s thoughts
and prayers when he communes with his wife in the camp belong to the world of
description, the world as related to one’s hope and fears and loves. Questions
about what God wants and whether God is everywhere—even present to an indi-
vidual parishioner—belong to the world of explanation. The kind of question
posed determines the kind of answer that can be reached.
Logotherapy is a type of psychotherapy, not a theology or a philosophy. As
such, logotherapy studies the psychological and noological dimensions of exis-
tence with the corresponding psychological and noogenic difficulties which

occur in these two dimensions. But in dealing with such difficulties, Frankl finds
that he is asking questions that go beyond the strict objectives of his psychother-
apy. Two of the basic questions which he asks are about “fate” (with his meaning
for this term) and God’s providence, that is, God’s knowledge of the future and
God’s care for us. Chapter 2 distinguishes the knowledge one has in the world of
description and in the world of explanation, as well as of the intellectual conver-
sion which makes the passage from the one world to the other possible. This
chapter has raised the notion of questioning again. Questioning is essential to

Frankl’s work. It is the necessary condition for anyone’s intellectual conversion,
including Frankl’s.
An intellectual conversion requires that one ask fundamental questions about
human knowing itself: Is knowing a type of perception or intuition? Is knowing a
kind of looking at what is “already out there”? Is the real world what is already
out there to look at? However, isn’t such a conception of human knowing a kind
of reductionism that can be expressed as “knowing is nothing but a type of taking
a look at what is out there?” Or briefly, “reality is what is already out there.”
Such an account of knowing may be somewhat adequate to account for knowl-
edge of the sun, clouds, and rain as they appear. Such an account of knowing,
however, runs into difficulty even in simple judgments like, “The sun’s rays
are harmful,” to say nothing of other judgment like, “Love is wonderful” or
“There exists a square root of −1.” Are the harmful sun’s rays, love, and the
square root of a minus one all “out there” in the same way? To adapt the remark
of Edmund Husserl cited earlier: from the point of view of reality the square root
of −1 is as real as the sun’s rays or the city of Paris. One sees the city of Paris
and feels the sun’s rays. One cannot see the square root of −1. Yet all of them
are real. Besides the human perception of sun and burnt skin, there is the fact
that the square of −1 exists and that no amount of perception, looking, or intuit-
ing can verify that fact. Quite bluntly, there is nothing to look at. The symbolism
of −1 represents something understood which requires other conditions than
merely looking at the symbol.
So the question arises: what is the difference between perceiving and acts of
understanding and judging? The question certainly arose for Frankl as his
three dimensional representation of a person, of existence exemplifies. Frankl’s
conception of dimensional ontology with its threefold structure is an example
of his distinction of physical seeing and intelligent judging. The ability to conceive
such a structure shows Frankl’s clear distinction of the two types of human
knowing, namely perception and intellection (understanding and judging). His
response to the young man described in Chapter 2 who declared he had not
seen the human soul is a succinct affirmation of the threefold structure of the per-
son with, in particular, the noological, nonmaterial dimension of the person.
Frankl does not suffer from the delusion that all human knowing is a case of tak-
ing a look at something that is perceptible like any other material body that is
already out there. In a concession to this limited image of human knowing as per-
ception, one could agree that some aspects of human knowing obviously involve

the sense of seeing. However, neither seeing nor any other act of sensation is the
paradigm of human knowing. No less a person than St. Augustine in his Confes-
sions admitted that it took him years to grasp that the soul was not a material
thing like a body which one could somehow look at. In Lonergan’s tart comment,
the human mind “no more glances than sight smells” (Verbum 70).
An intellectual conversion is not a matter of a casual or even an earnest
attempt to peer into one’s intentional acts of understanding and loving, and
then immediately to see acts of knowing or loving as they occur. To grasp

one’s intentional acts one must perform them with a heightened awareness, or
consciousness, of what one is doing when one understands something or judges
about something like Kepler’s Three Laws or ../−1. One grasps that acts of under-
standing are in no way like looking or seeing. One understands that the three laws
and ../−1 can neither be looked at nor seen because they are not material things .
These objects of understanding are not measured by their location in the coordi-
nates of place and time, here and now, the way material, seeable objects are.
Human knowing is not an undifferentiated kind of seeing, looking, or intuiting.
The essential element of an intellectual conversion like that of Viktor Frankl is
the rejection of the reductionist myth that all human knowing is a kind of looking
at what is already “out there.”
With the interrelated insights of his intellectual conversion, Frankl is able to
pose theological questions about the relations of existence to God. Religious
questions are not the same as theological questions. Religious questions take
place in the world of description. This world is essentially determined by its rela-
tion to the feelings, images, and prayers of individual worshipers as well as of
members of different rites, religious communities, and Churches. Religious ques-
tions concern God as Lord, shepherd, Father, husband to his people (Hosea),
King; as loving, merciful, just, all knowing. Theological questions do not modify
or eliminate the world of description. They rather enrich the person who is doing
theology.
The questions of theology arise naturally when one wonders about religious
beliefs and customs, and their relevance to oneself. Some persons can, however,
pass untouched through the ubiquitous pious examples of a religious family and
friends, and their prayers and rituals. Others can absorb the living piety of their
religious family and friends, and make this living piety their own and thus grow in
their understanding and appreciation of their own religious life. And still others
can come upon religion when they encounter religious persons, or when they
experience that too many things in life make little or no sense without some divin-
ity. In any case, the religious person can ask questions about religious topics, such
as the merciful God’s responses or apparent lack of responses. Both religious and
nonreligious persons can pose questions about God. Religious persons, however,
have the advantage of knowing God personally through the affectivity of their
prayers and their good works.
As evident from his writings, Viktor Frankl is a religious person. His descrip-
tion of his conversation with his father who showed him some broken stones from

a synagogue destroyed by Nazis records the power of the words still legible on the
stones: “Honor thy father and mother . . .” For Frankl, these words are those of
the Lord God which he takes as directed to him. Although he had obtained a visa
to escape to the United States, he immediately decided to let the visa lapse rather
than leave his parents. In his vocabulary, this ambiguous and portentous situa-
tion is an example of what he calls “fate” in Man’s Search for Meaning. As
Frankl remarks, this was the first of many situations in which he let God show
him the way. The events following upon the German invasion of Austria in
1938 introduce a violent rupture in his life. The Nazis force his wife to have an
abortion; they send his parents to a camp where they died; he encourages his
wife to do anything to stay alive but she is gassed. He is sent to a concentration
camp. His first day in the camp he promises himself that he would not run into
the wire and be killed. An obvious question arises? What has Frankl to live for?
The concept of fate appears often in Frankl’s writings and is defined in The
Doctor and the Soul as the “limiting factors in life” (44). As a psychiatrist he
often dealt with limiting elements in patients’ lives: their illnesses, the death of
a spouse or a child, loneliness, fear, dread. But it was through living, working,
and suffering with fellow prisoners in concentration camps that Frankl was
able to form a comprehensive understanding of fate that is coherent with his reli-
gion and his philosophy. Fate, values, and meaning are the basic themes in Man’s
Search for Meaning, as well as in many of his other books and writings. In Man’s
Search for Meaning, Frankl rejects the idea of “fate” as some personal or imper-
sonal force that suppresses everything human in the prisoners. Such a fate would
eliminate the possibility of any freedom, values, or meanings that prisoners might
have. Obviously, any belief of theirs in God or any claim to knowledge of God
is baseless. Man’s Search for Meaning is Frankl’s counter argument to this idea
of some sort of impersonal force in the world. Most important of all, he endorses
his counter-argument by the concrete witness of his life in the concentration
camps.
The fundamental question abides. How does Frankl keep his religious beliefs
in spite of what has happened to him, his family, and millions of others? How can
there be a good God who allows such rampant evil? Frankl does not treat religion
and theology as two separate and independent personal parts of his life. Rather,
religion and theology mutually reinforce each other. Frankl can move from the
world of description and prayer to the world of explanation and theology because
of his different but complementary interests. Theology may not automatically
make anyone holier or more charitable, but it can enlighten one’s prayers and af-
fective thoughts to make possible a new and richer type of living. When Frankl
prays or reflects upon his relationship with God, he engages his affectivity
for prayer and his intelligence for theological reflections. This affectivity and
intelligence are the activities of one conscious person. The prayers in the world
of description and the theological speculations in the world of explanation
take place in one person, in Viktor Frankl. Frankl does not have to go outside
of himself by reading or asking others to bring together the elements of prayer

in the world of description and the intellectual questioning in the world of expla-
nation. One person can know both the city of Paris and the parallelogram of
forces.
NASCAR racers if asked about what “acceleration” and “going fast” mean
can give adequate accounts in terms of racing. They talk of speed in the world
of description. But if one asked Newton, he would answer that acceleration in-
cludes both going faster and going slower in relation to time. An engineer can
know and use NASCAR’s description “going faster” as well as Newton’s. The
context dictates which definition one would use. One person can pray to the
good Lord and wonder about the providence of God. However, Frankl’s knowl-
edge of the noological dimension of existence enables him to explain clearly to the
biology student (discussed earlier) why the soul though “invisible” nonetheless ex-
ists as a spiritual condition, not as something empirical. His knowledge of this
dimension helps him to understand better how God is not something bodily
and thus visible. To understand the difference between the world of description
and the world of explanation takes an intellectual conversion. The job of the
intellectual conversion is not to create a dualism of two worlds but rather to
enlighten the person to grasp the conditions for the two worlds and their interre-
lationship which have their source in the one intending person.
Some philosophers and theologians, like Thomas Aquinas, Leibniz, and Lone-
rgan, will undertake to prove the existence of God. Leibniz is the source of the
profound and unsettling question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
(210).
The overall intention of these thinkers is to show that knowledge of God is
possible and that it is not “nothing but” a crude amalgam of pious images.
These three philosophers make use of the theory of the analogia entis, the analogy
of being. The analogy of being has nothing to do with whether beings look like
one another. To use Frankl’s example, an animal in a lab experiment and a sick
human being are related but they do not even look alike. The analogy of being is
the account of the rich diversity of reality, of the different kinds of beings, and
their interrelationships.
Briefly, the analogy of being means that contingent beings are interrelated.
The theory of the analogy of being is based upon the distinction that can be
made among different kinds of beings—to use the example of Frankl—such as
the suffering of animals in a laboratory and the suffering of humans.
The phrase the “analogy of being” is correlative to what Frankl calls “dimen-
sional differences.” These dimensional differences, as already seen in Chapters 1–
3, are the three “dimensions,” or “levels,” which Frankl identifies as constitutive
of existence: the biological, the psychological, and the noological.
Overarching these three, he identifies “the supra-meaning,” God. Frankl’s
dimensional ontology is based upon the analogy of being. Frankl would say
that animals, humans, and God belong to different dimensions, or orders, of real-
ity, and that God is not limited to the three dimensions which Frankl often lists
and illustrates. God does not belong to one of these dimensions. God is another

dimension, another order, quite simply “the supra-meaning” (Man’s Search for
Meaning 187).
Frankl himself uses the analogy of being to illuminate the gradations of real-
ity, the difference yet interrelationship between distinct beings and distinct dimen-
sions of reality. The dimension of animal life with just its biological and
psychological constitution is at a lower dimension than the human life with its
noological element, and human life is at a lower dimension than God. Frankl of-
fers the example of an animal in a lab which is used for the production of some
immunizing drugs and which must suffer whenever its blood is drawn or it re-
ceives certain shots. The animal certainly knows that it is in pain. But the animal
is unable to understand or find any meaning in its own suffering. The persons
running the lab are the ones who can understand the meaning of the pain since
their knowledge is at a higher dimension. The persons running the lab understand
that the animal’s suffering has meaning in a higher level: the possibility that the
researchers will be able to alleviate human suffering (Unheard Cry for Meaning
53, n2; 55–56).
In a similar manner, persons may not be able to understand the meaning of
their own suffering but can find meaning in a higher dimension than their own
human dimension. Further, while human intelligence alone cannot grasp the ulti-
mate meaning of human suffering, it can invoke a dimension higher than the
human, the divine dimension to find meaning. However, Frankl’s main interest,
much less his exclusive interest, is not in proving the existence of God by intellec-
tual means such as the analogy of being and by the gradation between higher and
lower dimensions of beings. Like Pascal, Frankl is more interested in the “reasons
of the heart” which are the source of his own knowledge of God and which he
discovered by himself when he was a young boy. But the reasons of his heart cer-
tainly do not suppress the reasons of Frankl’s intellect. The writings of Frankl
witness rather to the interest which he shows both in his religious life and his phi-
losophical reflections.
The question which Frankl’s daughter asked him about the Good Lord and
her measles is the type of question which startles a person. How can there exist
a Good Lord who allows suffering? Not just immense suffering but any suffering
at all? To offer some answer to this type of question requires not only a person’s
religious knowledge and experience of God, but also some philosophical knowl-
edge of a good God and the existence of evil in the lives of good and innocent as
well as the wicked. The question pertains to the difference between the world
or description and the world of explanation. This type of question reveals the
necessity of an intellectual conversion if one wishes to continue in a certain type
of discussion, for example the relation of God to evil, even in the case of one
child with measles. One can simply ignore the question as pointless. One can say
there is no God. Then people live and die alone with whatever they have achieved,
without their friends and too often with their enemies. Again, one could say there is
some type of higher Being who simply “tosses” human beings into this life to

struggle, suffer, and die as best they can. Or one can raise a further question such
as: do values and meanings exist in a world where everyone suffers, and if so, how?
Frankl answers in two ways. First of all, he uses a religious notion of God with
which he inspires and directs his own life and affectivity; then as a psychiatrist
and a philosopher he uses ideas from his two disciplines to enrich his understand-
ing of God as well as that of other persons. As a psychiatrist, Frankl invokes the
patient’s religion if the patient has any. As a believer himself, he does not brush
aside other persons’ religious belief. The religion of his patients offers a set of va-
lues and possible meanings through which the patient can attain a personal rela-
tion with God. When Frankl and his fellow prisoners are being punished as a
group for refusing to betray several other prisoners who stole some food, he ad-
dresses his fellow prisoners and invokes the thoughts and memories of loved ones
to inspire them in their misery. He tells them that they can find meaning in the
clear knowledge that their loved ones are not merely empty memories, but that
these loved ones are still present to their suffering and see and appreciate their
bravery. He can console patients who have lost loved ones by pointing out
how much more these loved ones would have suffered had they been the survivors
in a concentration camp (Man’s Search for Meaning 102–05).
However, Frankl is hardly a type of dualist with two ideas of God: one idea
would comprise a God of religion, the other a “God of the philosophers.” Rather
to identify God as both the Good Lord and the Supra-meaning is an example of
how Frankl combines elements of the world of description and of the world of
explanation. The two worlds, the one with the God of religion and the other
with the God of speculation, exist in harmony in the one conscious intending sub-
ject, Viktor Frankl.
The questions which Frankl asks himself or someone else asks him about God
allow him to recognize the two worlds and to shift from one to the other without
confusion. Almost any question will do. For example, “Why did the Good Lord
give me measles in the first place?” is a perfect question for a specific situation.
The two “worlds” are neither opposed to, nor isolated from, each other since
Frankl is the person who can shift his conscious intention from one world to the
other.
The “two worlds” are sets of objects accessible to the interests of Frankl’s in-
tending. One world is neither truer nor better than the other. Frankl’s knowledge
of the two worlds and his ability to shift from the world of religion to the world of
theology and philosophy is the ultimate source of the power and richness of his
work as a logotherapist and philosopher. Frankl’s citation of Albert Schweitzer
shows the way in which a person is able to integrate the two worlds in his life:
“The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought
and found how to serve” (Unconscious God 85n).

Victor Frankl - The Notion of God

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Chapter 4

The Notion of God

The notion of God, of “supra-meaning” as Frankl sometimes refers to God, is

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on some rock star.

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Romeo at the same time.

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chapter has raised the notion of questioning again. Questioning is essential to

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then immediately to see acts of knowing or loving as they occur. To grasp

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