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.