Why God Told Moses He Had No Name, According to Erich Fromm

When Moses asks God what he should call him before his people, the answer he gets, according to Erich Fromm, marks one of the most important turning points in how humanity has understood love.

In The Art of Loving (1956), psychoanalyst Erich Fromm devotes several pages to something that might be surprising in a psychology book: the historical evolution of love for God. He doesn’t do it out of religious faith (he’s explicit that, personally, he doesn’t think in theistic terms), but because, in his theory, the way a culture imagines its god reveals the way its members are capable of loving.

From clay idols to gods with human form

Fromm traces an evolution through several stages. At first, he writes, human beings don’t distinguish themselves from the natural world around them: they worship animals, wear animal masks, turn an animal into a totem. Later, once they learn to make objects with their own hands, they start worshiping idols of clay, silver, or gold, projecting their own skills onto them.

Only at a later stage, when human beings perceive themselves as the highest thing in the known world, do they start giving their gods human form. And it’s here that Fromm introduces a distinction he borrows from the Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen: the difference between matriarchal and patriarchal religions.

From the mother goddess to the father who demands obedience

According to Bachofen’s findings, which Fromm acknowledges were disputed in his own time, many cultures first went through a phase in which the supreme figure was female: a mother goddess, as unconditional as the maternal love described in Fromm’s distinction between milk and honey. All children are loved equally, simply for being children.

The patriarchal phase that replaced it, which Fromm places in parallel with the development of private property, changes the rules: the father demands, sets principles, and prefers the child who best meets his expectations. Love stops being guaranteed and starts being earned.

A God who begins, literally, as a tribal chief

Fromm describes the first stage of Western patriarchal religion as that of a despotic and jealous God, owner of what he has created:

• He expels humankind from paradise for eating from the forbidden tree.
• He decides to destroy all of humanity with a flood, saving only Noah.
• He asks Abraham to sacrifice his own son, Isaac, as proof of total obedience.

But, Fromm notes, within the biblical narrative itself a change starts to show: God makes a covenant with Noah and commits himself to honoring it. Later, he agrees to Abraham’s request not to destroy Sodom if ten righteous men can be found there. God starts to be bound by his own principles, not only by his own will.

The burning bush: “my name is without a name”

The moment Fromm identifies as the most revealing of that whole process is the scene in which Moses asks how he should introduce God to the Hebrews, who won’t believe him without a specific name to give. The answer he receives is, on the surface, a dodge: “I am that I am.”

Fromm reads it very literally: it’s as if God were answering that his name is, precisely, having no name. A name, Fromm reasons, always points to something limited, something that can be defined and enclosed in a word. A God who is no longer just an all-powerful, jealous father, but the symbol of a set of principles (justice, truth, love), can’t have a name without ceasing to be, precisely, that symbol.

From that idea comes, according to Fromm, the Jewish custom of avoiding pronouncing God’s name, and the later theological tradition of describing him only by what he is not (not limited, not unjust, not cruel) instead of stating what he is.

Why this is, in fact, a theory about growing up

The parallel Fromm draws is direct. A believer who still sees God as a father who punishes, rewards, and needs to be pleased, he writes, hasn’t fully outgrown the childish wish for a figure who protects and watches over everything. It’s a legitimate and very widespread stage, in his analysis, but not the most mature one.

The person who, in his terminology, reaches a more adult relationship with the idea of God stops expecting rewards or fearing punishments. They don’t pray asking for things. They live by certain principles (justice, truth, the capacity to love) because they hold them from within, not because an external figure demands it or is going to reward them for it.

That same transition, between depending on a protective figure and sustaining yourself on your own internalized principles, is the one Fromm describes elsewhere in the book regarding love between parents and children. For him, love for God and love for other human beings aren’t two separate topics: they’re the same capacity to love, applied to two different objects, maturing at exactly the same pace.