Another View 3

One of the great limitations human’s have placed on God is known as “anthropomorphisms.” What that means is: we conceive of God in a human image, or rather, in the image of the human mind. We utilize human terms attempting to give shape and form to that Other Reality that has not shape or form, so we conceive of words to help us out, and rarely own that these words are a severe limitation to the word God.

In the fifth century Common Era (C.E.), a saint by the name of Dionysius (considered by many to be the father of all Christian metaphysics) wrote this: “We say that God is neither a soul, nor a mind, nor an object of knowledge…neither is God reason, nor thought, nor is God utter able or knowable; neither is God number, order greatness, littleness, equality, inequality, likeness, nor unlikeness; neither does God stand or move, nor is God quiescent; neither has God power, nor is power, nor light; neither does God live, nor is life; neither is God being, nor everlastingness, not time,…nor wisdom, not one, nor oneness, not divinity, nor goodness…nor any other thing known to us.”

Well then -- just what to make of all this that God is not nor neither, to use a triple negative (never said to be impermissible grammatically, least that I have found). So, how does one talk/speak/imagine God? Well, that is the issue, isn’t it?

It’s a terrible thing to have to come to terms with the fact that the human senses are our point of contact with the “real world,” and that as great as this gift is, it escapes all ability to grasp the unutterable God. We don’t like that we behold the world “superficially” -- only ever from the outside, only ever through our five senses. And while these senses are great gifts, they are only and ever expressive of the external world at best.

So, it is in the human mind that we attempt to grasp that which refuses our grasping. It is our avenue to going “inward,” the human mind. It is here that we feel from the inside. Interestingly enough, St. Nikitas Stithatos describes what he calls the five internal senses, these being particular to the spiritual world. They are: intellect, reason, noetic perception, intuitive knowledge, and cognitive insight.

The key of the five is intellect, defined as “the highest faculty in humans, through which we know God or the inner essences of created things by means of direct apprehension or spiritual perception. Unlike “reason,” from which it must be carefully distinguished, the intellect does not function by formulating abstract concepts and then arguing on this basis to a conclusion reached through deductive reasoning, but it understands divine truth by means of immediate experience, intuition or simple cognition. The intellect dwells in the depth of the soul.” So, as you can see, this is a redefining of intellect. Actually, it is a harkening back almost a thousand years, as St. Nikitas lived around 1020 C.E.

So, there is a definite “knowing through unknowing” here -- another reality that baffles our well-trained scientific minds. Strange, isn’t it, that through our external senses, reality appears as a “known.” This is our illusion to “control” that of which we cannot make sense. We play with nouns and labels, giving us the illusion that we know what “Reality” is. In the interior consciousness, in the mind even, we know Reality is not so accessible. And at our very “naming” of Reality, we create objects or things, and hence the problem of “finiting the infinite.”

When I am most fully awake spiritually (which varies it seems even within each day), I say far more about God than I know. This is why it is so troubling to be a speaker (preacher) and know that everything I say is far more than I can know or be certain. In the mind, we are only that which we see -- there is another limitation. And yet, it is the point of most intimate contact with reality. Stubbornly, I refuse most of the time to admit that my pride of knowledge is put to confusion by the fact that at the point where I feel reality most intimately (in my mind), is also the place I understand reality the least.

Well -- there is the conundrum, again. But then, this reality has not finality to it, I must admit -- it is simply, and at best or worst, Another View.