Prelude to the Triumph of Orthodoxy

"Given this state of affairs and stepping out as though on the royal highway, following as we are the God-spoken teaching of our holy fathers and the tradition of the Catholic Church--for we recognise that this tradition comes from the Holy Spirit who dwells in her--we decree with full precision and care that, like the figure of the honoured and life-giving Cross, the revered and holy icons, whether painted or made of mosaic or of other suitable material, are to be exposed in the holy churches of God, on sacred instruments and vestments, on walls and panels, in houses and by public ways; these are the icons of our Lord, God, and Saviour, Jesus Christ, and of our Lady without blemish, the holy Theotokos, and of the revered angels and of any of the saintly holy men.  The more frequently they are seen in representational art, the more they are those who seem them drawn to remember and long for those who serve as models, and to pay these images the tribute of salutation and respectful veneration.  Certainly this is not the full adoration in accordance with our faith, which is properly paid only to the Divine Nature, but it resembles that given to the figure of the honoured and life-giving Cross, and also to the holy books of the gospels and to other sacred cult objects.  Further, people who are drawn to honour these icons with the offering of incense and lights, as was piously established by ancient custom.  Indeed, the honour paid to an image traverses it, reaching to the model; and he who venerates the icon, venerates the person represented in that image.

    "So it is that the teaching of our Holy Fathers is strengthened, namely, the Tradition of the Catholic Church which has received the Gospel from one end of the earth to the other.  So it is that we really follow Paul, who spoke in Christ, and the entire divine apostolic group and the holiness of the Fathers, clinging fast to the Traditions which we have received [2 Thess 2:15].  So it is that we sing out with the prophets the hymns of victory to the Church:  Rejoice exceedingly, O daughter Zion, proclaim O daughter of Jerusalem; enjoy your happiness and gladness with a full heart.  The Lord has removed away from you the injustices of your enemies, you have been redeemed from the hand of your foes.  The Lord the King is in your midst, you will never more see evil [Zeph 3:14f], and peace will be upon you for time eternal."

Second Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, 787

The Only Real Sin

"Such is the [Resurrectional] faith of the Church, affirmed and made evident by her countless Saints.  Is it not our daily experience, however, that this faith is very seldom ours, that all the time we lose and betray the 'new life' which we received as a gift, and that in fact we live as if Christ did not rise from the dead, as if that unique event had no meaning whatsoever for us?  All this because of our weakness, because of the impossibility for us to live constantly by 'faith, hope, and love' on that level to which Christ raised us when he said: 'Seek ye, first of all, the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.'  We simply forget all this so busy are we, so immersed in our daily preoccupations and because we forget, we fail.  And through this forgetfulness, failure, and sin, our life becomes 'old' again petty, dark and ultimately meaningless--a meaningless journey toward a meaningless end. We manage to forget even death and then, all of a sudden, in the midst of our 'enjoying life' it comes to us:  horrible, inescapable, senseless.  We may from time to time acknowledge and confess our various 'sins,' yet we cease to refer our life to that new life which Christ revealed and gave to us.  Indeed, we live as if He never came. This is the only real sin, the sin of all sins, the bottomless sadness and tragedy of our nominal Christianity."

Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann
Great Lent:  Journey to Pascha

The Priest's Priority of Prayer

"Speaking to Pope Blessed Eugene III, St Bernard tells him in very strong terms that even the duties and responsibilities of the papacy come second and his interior life first.  Naturally, here again we must not suppose an opposition between priestly life and interior life.  Even in his priestly activities the priest...is united to God in charity.  But the temporal aspect of our activities must not warp our outlook and rob us of a spiritual perspective.  The grace of God indeed endows active works with special power to unite us with Him and counteract the effects of distraction, etc.  But on the other hand we must not become so immersed in work and attached to it for its own sake that we lose our spiritual perspective and no longer seek God above all in Himself...

"Not only is resting in God, in thought, reading, and contemplation, not a waste of time, but the more we rest, the more we accomplish, if our rest is the true repose of charity and wisdom, the repose which comes from casting away all temporal cares and concern with ourselves in order to dwell in the love of God...."

Fr Thomas Merton, OCSO
Monastic Observances

The Light of Glory

    "For with Thee is the fountain of life,

    in Thy Light shall we see light" (Ps 35:10 LXX)

There's a good reason why Deaf people ordinarily do not frequent bars--they are usually dark places and we need light, lots of it, in order to see each other signing with our hands.  We are endlessly fussing over lighting.

Take, for example, the sign CAT--it is signed in such a way as to resemble cats' whiskers.  The sign LION calls attention to the lion's mane.  There are also signs which very closely resemble each other, such as the numeral '6' and the letter 'W/w.'  In order to perceive what is being signed, two things are then required:  Sufficient lighting in order to see the sign-er's hands and facial expressions, and (usually) knowing the sign's resemblance to the thing being referred.

You and I know what a "cat" is because we've experienced them, whether by seeing them and their whiskers, by petting them when they insist, or sneezing if we're allergic to them.  In all these cases, our knowledge of "cat" is based upon sensory experience.  This is why the Scholastics used to say that "There is nothing in the intellect that was not first perceived by the senses."  With the five senses we collect information; with sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste, we are accumulating "intelligible species" of various things we've experienced.

The form of "cat," after experiencing them, or at least being told about another's experience of them, has its resemblance impressed in the mind.  Thus, we have in our minds what Scholastics called an "intelligible form" of a cat, that is, an impression left in our intellect that is not the same thing as the cat(s) experienced.  If "cat" in our experience is the same thing as the "cat" in our minds, then the object and the intelligible species would be identical and we would somehow share in that cat's nature.

Now, suppose there is some thing that completely evades our senses.  It is touchless, tasteless, soundless, without smell, and invisible.  How can that thing be knowable?  What, then, would be its likeness?  Without a likeness, it has no "intellectual species" whereby its likeness is impressed upon the mind.

One such thing, as Lewis Carroll might suggest, is the Jabberwock.  What is a Jabberwock?  Well, "it did gyre and gimble in the wabe"; its "borogoves" were "all mimsy."  The only thing we seem to know that it has claws.  "But," as Alice said, "it's rather hard to understand!"  And why?--simply because it has no likeness to anything we know and thus we have no basis of comparison in order to form an impression in our minds of what a Jabberwock is.  In other words, we cannot conceive of an intelligible species of a Jabberwock.

If the Jabberwock completely eludes our experience of all knowable things, and if there is absolutely nothing we can compare it to, the next best thing towards figuring out just what a Jabberwock is would be to be a Jabberwock.

Let's kick things up a notch, as Emeril Lagasse would say.

What is God?  Or rather, what is the divine essence?  On the basis of the Theophany at Sinai, "I AM who I AM," the most anyone can say about the essence of God is that he is very existence itself.  You and I are 'existence plus human nature plus accumulation of experience.'  God, on the other hand, is pure existence or, as St Thomas Aquinas was oft to say, ipsum Esse subsistens, "self-subsistent Essence."  But by the fact that God is "pure" existence means there are no attributes whereby we can describe him.  (Theologians call this the "simplicity" of God.)

Without attributes, we have nothing to compare God with, and therefore no likenesses.  Nothing in all of Creation can be used as a basis of comparison of the divine essence.  We may use analogies to describe processions and persons in the Trinity, and the Lord Jesus Christ has revealed the Father, but, as St John the Evangelist said, "No one has ever seen God..." (Jn 1:18).  This is the basis of the precept against making images of God:  Since God's essence is pure existence, there is nothing with which we are able to depict him.  It is as the holy prophet Jeremiah said, "O most mighty, great, and powerful, the Lord of hosts is Thy Name.  Great in counsel, and incomprehensible in thought" (Jer 32:18, 19).

Now we have a real challenge.  St Thomas agrees with Aristotle that we, as rational creatures, "by nature desire to know."  The only things we can know are true things (or at least things which seem to be true, which is why some people believe lies).  More than that, human minds desire to know the causes of things.  Since (1) God is very Being, and 'being' and 'truth' are interchangeable terms, it follows that God is very Truth, so human minds naturally desire to know God, and since (2) God is the uncaused Caused all things that were, are, and evermore shall be, the human mind naturally desires to know this Cause.

But how are we to know this First Truth and Cause of All Things if we are unable to have an intelligible species impressed in our minds?  The total lack of any likenesses whatsoever to the divine essence means that we desire to know the essence of this Truth and uncaused Cause, but we have a dead end, a desire with no apparent way of satisfying that desire.

St Thomas has an answer to our question.  In the first place, the only way something is knowable is to have an intelligible species in the mind, but without any likeness as a basis of comparison, God must, as it were, 'turn on the lightswitch':

Previous discussion has brought out the fact that no creature is associated with God in genus.  Hence the essence of God cannot be known through any created species whatever, whether sensible or intelligible.  Accordingly, if God is to be known as He is, in His essence, God Himself must become the form of the intellect knowing Him and must be joined to that intellect, not indeed so as to constitute a single nature with it, but in the way an intelligible species is joined to the intelligence. For God, who is His own being, is also His own truth, and truth is the form of the intellect.

Whatever receives a form, must first acquire the disposition requisite to the reception of that form.  Our intellect is not equipped by its nature with the ultimate disposition looking to that form which is truth; otherwise it would be in possession of truth from the beginning. Consequently, when it does finally attain to truth, it must be elevated by some disposition newly conferred on it. And this we call the light of glory, whereby our intellect is perfected by God, who alone by His very nature has this form properly as His own.  In somewhat the same way the disposition which heat has for the form of fire can come from fire alone. This is the light that is spoken of in Psalm 35: 10: “In Your light we shall see light” (Compendium theologiae, §105, emphases added).

St Thomas tells us that this is the true meaning of the Psalm:  "In Your light," that is, the brightness whereby we can see You, "we shall see light," that is, see You Yourself.  It is precisely this joining of the graced soul to God such that it becomes "connatural" to him that so illumines the soul to behold the Lord's glory:  "The faculty of seeing God, however, does not belong to the created intellect naturally, but is given to it by the light of glory, which establishes the intellect in a kind of 'deiformity'" (S.th. 1a, q. 12, art. 6, resp.).

After the Last Day, this will be our experience (if we persevere in the following of Christ!), as that is the meaning of the Seer of Patmos' vision describing the Heavenly Jerusalem with all of those glittering stones--they each refract the light of glory that we will experience from God:

And I saw no temple in the City, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.  And the city has no nee of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.  By its light all nations shall walk... (Apoc 21:22-24).

This is why St Thomas was able to say:

Now this increase of the intellectual powers is called the illumination of the intellect, as we also call the intelligible object itself by the name of light of illumination. And this is the light spoken of in the Apocalypse (Apoc. 21:23): "The glory of God hath enlightened it"--viz. the society of the blessed who see God. By this light the blessed are made "deiform"--i.e. like to God, according to the saying: "When He shall appear we shall be like to Him, and [Vulg.: 'because'] we shall see Him as He is" (1 Jn. 2:2) (S.th., 1a, q. 12, art. 5, resp.).

I'm reminded of one of my favourite praise-and-worship songs, and perhaps this is where it would be best to close this post, though there are many more things to be said about the lumen gloriae, especially Christ's experience of it during His life.  And so:

    As we gaze on your kingly brightness

    So our faces display Your likeness

    Ever changing from glory to glory

    Mirrored here may our lives tell your story

    Shine on me!  Shine on me!

The Illumination that Blinds

     

     No one has ever seen God.
     The only-begotten Son,
     who is in the bosom of the Father,
     has revealed him (Jn 1:18).

     ...the blessed and only Sovereign,
     the King of kings and Lord of lords,
     who alone has immortality
     and dwells in unapproachable light,
     whom no man has ever seen or can see (1 Tim 65-15).

    ...in Thy Light shall we see Light (Ps 35:9 LXX)

Knowing the Unknowable

In his commentary on the Gospel According to John (properly titled Super Evangelium S. Ioannis Lectura), St Thomas Aquinas explains why it was necessary for the Eternal Word to assume our human nature (1:14):  Among others, to reveal the God who is otherwise unknown to us.  God-in-himself, given the immense splendour of his Being, is unknowable.  The doctrinal term describing God's unknowability is "innascibility."

In this post, I intend to explain those three ways, according to St Thomas Aquinas, that human minds can 'see' God and why this 'seeing God' is decidedly not the same as 'knowing the divine essence.'  After that, I will explain three conditions which St Thomas stipulates whereby such a 'seeing God' is somewhat possible.

As St Thomas writes in his commentary on the Fourth Gospel,

...God is said to be seen in three ways.  First, through a created substitute presented to the bodily sight; as Abraham is believed to have seen God when he saw three and adored one (Gen 18:2).  ...In a second way, through a representation in the imagination; and in this way Isaiah saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne (Isa 6:1).  Many visions of this sort are recorded in the Scriptures.  In a third way, he is seen through an intelligible species abstracted from material things; and in this way he is seen by those who, considering the greatness of creatures, see with their intellect the greatness of the Creator, as it is said:  from the greatness and beauty of creatures, their Creator can be seen accordingly  (Wis 13:5); the invisible things of God are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made (Rom 1:30) (§211, ¶2).

Immediately following that last line, St Thomas adds:

In another way, God is seen through a certain spiritual light infused by God into spiritual minds during contemplation; and this is the way Jacob saw God face to face (Gen 32:30).  According to Gregory, this vision came about through his lofty contemplation (ibid.).

It is unclear whether the Angelic Doctor meant this means of seeing God by "contemplation" is taken to be a fourth way of seeing God, or whether the earlier comment that "God is said to be seen in three ways" is an error on the part of the secretary (since St Thomas' commentaries are transcripts of classroom lectures).

Whether three or four, St Thomas' next point is the same:  "But the vision of the divine essence is not attained by any of the above visions."  Abraham's theophany of the Trinity revealed nothing about the essence of God--as even today sacred theology reaches its uttermost limits in trying to wrap our minds around the inner life of God as Father begetting the Son and spirating the Holy Spirit.  Isaiah's theophany of haShem enthroned in heaven in no way means that God has the figure of a human being who is able to move his body like us in order to sit; rather, the vision highlighted God's majesty.  And abstracting a Creator from creation simply tells us that Someone created something without telling us what this Someone is.  And Jacob seeing God "face to face" is about an encounter, a meeting, and not about coming to know that 'stuff' of the divine nature.  None of the three (or four) ways of "seeing" God revealed anything about the divine essence.  As St Thomas goes on to say--

...for no created species, whether it be that by which an external sense is informed ["created substitute"], or by which the imagination is informed ["representation in the imagination"], or by which the intellect is informed ["intelligible species"], is representative of the divine essence as it is (§211, ¶3).

Why is this?  It is because of how the human intellect knows things:  "Now man knows as to its essence only what the species he has in his intellect represents as it is.  Therefore the vision of the divine essence is not attained through any species."

But there is another reason why the human intellect cannot know the divine essence, besides that mode of knowing that is peculiar to human nature.  The other reason has to do with the disparity between God and humanity.    

The reason why no created species can represent the divine essence is plain:  for nothing finite can represent the infinite as it is; but every created species is finite; therefore it cannot represent the infinite as it is.  Further, God is his own existence and therefore his wisdom and greatness and anything else are the same.  But all those cannot be represented through one created thing (§211, ¶4).

There is thus an absolute disparity between God and creatures such that there is nothing that exists which can adequately 'represent the divine essence.'  Notice that 'seeing God' and 'vision of the divine essence" decidedly do not mean the same thing.  To 'see God' to to have an image that represents something about God, whereas a 'vision of the divine essence' is to know exactly what God is.

And this is at the heart of the precept against making images of God in the Decalogue:  Any attempted representation of God is necessarily a misrepresentation.  This is why the furthest that Christian iconography can go is to depict "the Ancient of Days" (cf Dan 7:9).

The "innascibility" of God was first clearly articulated by the Cappadocian Fathers and systematised by Denys the Areopagite, a doctrine which features strongly in the writings of St Thomas:

Therefore the knowledge by which God is seen through creatures is not a knowledge of his essence, but a knowledge that is dark  and mirrored, and from afar.  Everyone sees him, in one of the above ways, from afar (Job 36:25), because we do not know what God is by all these acts of knowing, but by what he is not, or that he is.  Hence Denys says, in his Mystical Theology, that the perfect way in which God is known in this present life is by taking away all creatures and everything understood by us (ibid.).

In other words, the uttermost limits of knowing what God is reduced to two points:  We know what God is  not by the use of negative terms:  'nameless,' 'incomprehensible,' 'unknowable,' and the like.  On the other hand, we can know that God exists, as that was the meaning of Moses' theophany at the Burning Bush:  "I AM that I AM" and why St Thomas made the startling conclusion that

God's Essence = God's Existence 

Still, the "stuff" of pure existence eternally eludes knowability.

Can the Divine Essence be Seen?

Now St Thomas moves into a third category of divine knowledge.  We've explored the notion of 'seeing God' through representations, and we've explored the notion of 'vision of the divine essence' in terms of knowing just what that essence is, which is patently impossible.  But a vision is nonetheless possible.  It is important to grasp that St Thomas distinguishes, in this 'vision of the divine essence' between knowing the divine essence and seeing the same divine essence (beyond the use of the three or four representations explored above).

How we can 'see' the divine essence will not concern us here, because we've got a bigger fish to fry:  Preparing ourselves for the vision of the divine essence is far, far more important than prying into how it is possible.  There is no place for curiosity in theology.

St Thomas identifies three ways in which the divine essence is seen:  without images, with dispassion, and incomprehensibly.

'Vision of the divine essence' is far beyond 'seeing God' through "a created substitute," "a representation in the imagination," and "an intelligible species."  It is without the use of images.  "Three things should be noted about the vision of the divine essence..."

First, because it will never be seen with a bodily eye either by sense or by imagination, since only sensible bodily things are perceived by the senses, and God is not bodily:  God is spirit (John 4:24) (§213, ¶2).

Next, holiness of life is required.  Today's understanding of a "theologian" is a distortion of the original sense of the word--not an academic scholar who researches the things of God (that is not theology but religious studies) but one who encounters God in a personal relationship:

Second, that as long as the human intellect is in the body it cannot see God, because it is weighed down by the body so that it cannot attain the summit of contemplation.  So it is that the more a soul is free of passions and is purged from affections for earthly things, the higher it rises in the contemplation of truth and tastes how sweet the Lord is (§213, ¶3).

Finally, the vision of the divine essence cannot be a comprehensive vision; in other words, it is impossible to close the proverbial book on God and say, "Well, that's everything."  The immensity of God's being makes such comprehension inescapably impossible:

Third, no created intellect, however abstracted, either by death, or separated from the body, which does see the divine essence, can comprehend it in any way.  And so it is commonly said that although the whole divine essence is seen by the blessed, since it is most simple [= without composition] and has no parts, yet it is not wholly seen, because this would be to comprehend it (§213, ¶4).

The goal of the Christian life, therefore, is divinisation or deification or theosis: 

His divine power has granted to ua all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge [ἐπιγνώσεως, epignōseōs] of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature [θείας φύσεως, theias physeōs] (2 Pt 1:3-4).

We do this by our personal relationship with God in contemplation:

Beloved, we are God's children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is (1 Jn 3:2).

Wherefore Christ?

By way of an introduction to a subsequent post, the foregoing highlights the necessity of Christ or, more precisely, of the Word-made-flesh.  Since the Word or Son is the Father's own self-contemplation, it follows that the Word knows everything there is to know about the Father.  And that omniscient Word assumed a human nature--with a human soul--in order to, as the Fourth Evangelist said, reveal God.  As the Incarnate Word said elsewhere, "I have manifested your name to the men whom you gave Me out of the world..." (Jn 17:6).  Hence Christ alone is the only means to certainty about God.

When St Thomas explained the above cognizance about God, he bracketed it off with a brief description of wisdom, which "consists properly in the knowledge of God and of divine things," a description he borrows from St Augustine.  As the Angelic Doctor said, "The need for this teaching," namely the vision of God, 

...arose from lack of wisdom among men, which the Evangelist implies by alluding to the ignorance concerning God which prevailed among men, saying:   no man has ever seen God.  And he does this fittingly... (§209).

 St Thomas then closes off the bracketed section by an explanation of why only Christ was able to reveal God:

The Evangelist mentions the competent teacher of wisdom when he adds, the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father.  He shows the competence  of this teacher in three ways:  by a natural likeness, by a singular excellence, and by a most perfect consubstantiality (§215).

We will explore this in depth later, but the $64,000 reason why Christ is the only "competent" teacher of wisdom has to do with the fact that He alone--out of the entire human race--is equipped to lead us towards attaining the vision of God:

...Christ was also full of truth because his precious and blessed soul knew every truth, human and divine, from the instant of his conception.  And so Peter said to him, you know all things (John 21:17).  And it is also said:  my truth, i.e., the knowledge of every truth, and my mercy, i.e., the fullness of all graces, shall be with him (Ps 88:25 [LXX]) (§189, ¶2).

It was on account of that cognizance of God and of divine things imprinted in Christ' soul by the Holy Spirit's gift of Wisdom that enabled Him to guide us towards the vision of God.  We'll talk about that soon.