What Does inscrutable Mean
The Latin word inscrutabĭlis came to Spanish as inscrutable . This adjective is used to qualify what cannot be found out or discovered .
For example: "Access to the system is protected by an inscrutable code" , "The soul of a human being is truly inscrutable" , "My grandfather was an inscrutable man: you never knew what he was thinking or what he was feeling" .
The inscrutable is that which is impossible to understand or to know given its complexity, depth or mystery. The term can even be used in reference to a person when it comes to someone closed or quiet, who does not reveal their thoughts or emotions.
Suppose an investigator tries to solve a crime . You already have a suspect, but you don't have conclusive evidence. In this framework, he decides to interview the subject whom he considers guilty, with the intention of detecting some attitude that will help him solve the case. However, the individual is inscrutable: he does not convey any emotion or doubt, either in his words, in his body posture or in his face.
The idea of inscrutable usually appears in the realm of religion . In this context, it is common for it to be expressed that God's designs are inscrutable: for believers, there are divine decisions that cannot be understood and that should not even be tried to understand since they are beyond human reach.
When it is claimed that God's ways are inscrutable, it is generally intended to argue that something negative that happens to someone actually has a positive connotation or at least a motive. Thus, even if the human being does not understand it, he must trust the divine decision.
Misfortunes can happen to all of us that lead us to doubt the meaning of life. When we lose a loved one, for example, the world seems to fade in front of us, as if it is no longer worth moving forward because the goals seem to have gone along with that unique being, whom we will never see again. There are religious people who are capable of facing these difficult situations with integrity and faith, accepting the designs of God.
To sustain themselves in the midst of a loss or a moment of life filled with sadness and bad experiences, it is comforting to think that these inscrutable decisions of God are not arbitrary or capricious, that they were not made to ruin their lives or to harm them, but which form part of a structure much more complex than the world we know, and for that reason we do not have us as protagonists.
Thinking in this way can alleviate pain, since it gives us a broader perspective: bad things do not happen to make us suffer but respond to the need to keep the Universe itself, with its infinite elements and events, in balance, and we should not stop trying to analyze them but accept them and move on. In any case, it is known that many of these tragic experiences lead the faithful to abandon their faith or to turn to another religion.
Having said all this, we have a fairly broad idea of the meanings and uses of the word inscrutable . In order to delve into them even more, we will list below some of their most common synonyms, some of which appear more frequently in everyday speech: mysterious, unfathomable, impenetrable, enigmatic, dark, indecipherable and unknowable . Regarding its antonyms, we can mention decipherable and clear .
The person who does not express his feelings can be enigmatic or impenetrable, just as the will of God can seem indecipherable to us. The term dark , for its part, also refers to something confusing, difficult to understand.