I'm interested in becoming Catholic, but

[Duke_of_St_Paul]

I’m interested in becoming Catholic, but I’m unsure whether certain notions of mine would be compatible with Church doctrine. I’ve posted this in another forum but having viewed some of the threads here I feel this forum would be more appropriate.

And please let me know if there is any issues with two threads on the same topic, i.e. if one has to be removed etc.

1. God as the Apophatic Void

I perceive God in terms of negation. Whatever can be said of God is not God but rather what he’s like. God is not even a god but beyond such a notion; beyond loving, merciful, gracious, glorious, etc. Therefore, I perceive God as neither conscious nor unconscious, neither intelligent nor unintelligent, but simply the Truth; he is what he is, ineffable, illimitable, unknowable, and unmeasurable. He is relative to void.

2. God the Emanator, not the Creator

I perceive God as having emanated from himself the physical universe by process of implication. If God is the negative aspect of existence then the physical universe is the positive aspect. Whereby God cannot be described he brought forth, by means of existing, description. Just as all things go together, i.e. light with darkness, good with evil, etc. the physical universe goes together with God because each implies the other.

3. God is Verb-Like and not a Noun

I perceive God being the process and not the processor. However, God is not a verb but merely like it; he transcends the notion of being a verb, but he is absolutely not a noun. He does no acting although he emanates action. Likewise, God does not have a will but emanates one.

4. The Holy Spirit is the Emanation of Will

I perceive the Holy Spirit as an emanation of God, being his will.

5. The Son is the Manifested Reality of God the Father

I perceive the Son as a manifestation of God, being his physical reality. Since God is relative to void, although not void, he emanated Jesus Christ as a result of implication. From God’s emanation of the universe, Jesus Christ was conceived as positive expression in relation to the negative expression of God the Father. Whereas God in unknowable Jesus Christ is knowable, and therefore God becomes knowable, but only through Christ.

 

[Bob_Crowley]

I’ve started reading a Dummies Book (about the right category for me) on the “Kabbalah” which is basically Jewish theology according to the writer. I’m also reading another book “Wrestling with the Divine - A Jewish Response to Suffering” by Shmuel Boteach (the library for both of them was the local op shop incidentally, but I digress).

I sometimes think we can learn a bit from the Jews with their Rabbinic tradition.

Both authors seem to share common thought on God’s continuously sustaining the universe, which was made from nothing, and as such has no intrinsic existence of its own. As Boteach put it “Can we say that the creation that was called from nothingness has become an independent existence and now is a something? Obviously not. Our creation, which began as nothingness, is being retained as something not through its own intrinsic nature but through God’s constant creative force, which acts upon it and sustains it…”

They also made the point that since God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, it was necessary for God to “withdraw” so to speak in order to make room for creation to exist. If God were present in HIs normal mode of full power, there would be no room for anything else. So they believe He withdraws Himself, if partially, as sort of partial vacuum into which something else can take the place of the void.

That’s why evil is able to exist for example, but in the full radiant power of the beatific vision, it must be expelled, which is why only the perfect get into heaven.

I well remember one time when I was driving down to the church in my early Christian years, when I got a bit “pally” with God, a sort of smug mental back slapping episode. The next thing I knew this sense of anger just descended on me, and I thought I was literally going to disintegrate. I had to pull over into a side street until this very uncomfortable sensation passed. Then I gingerly went home again. God might have “withdrawn” to some extent so the material world can exist, but don’t make the mistake He’s vacated the field altogether. He could “un-make” you or me anytime He wanted to eg. Ananias and Sapphira.

So in one sense, your first four points might have some truth in them, but not as you describe them. The way I see it you’re struggling to formulate your ideas about God and creation.

When it comes to your fifth point, which really skirts around the issue of the Trinity, I leave it to God. I have no intention of trying to understand it, but simply accept it as revealed truth. If I can’t even understand my own brain and mind, I am not going to get very far trying to psychoanalyse God. And neither will you.

 

[Duke_of_St_Paul]

When it comes to your fifth point, which really skirts around the issue of the Trinity, I leave it to God. I have no intention of trying to understand it, but simply accept it as revealed truth. If I can’t even understand my own brain and mind, I am not going to get very far trying to psychoanalyse God. And neither will you.

Thank you for your post. However I have one question. If you can’t trust yourself how can you trust your mistrust?

 

[JamesATyler]

What does it mean if he mistrusts his mistrust in himself? Does that mean that he accepts the possibility that he might know and trust himself? So the final result would be that he might know himself and he might not. If he trusts his mistrust in himself then that means that he might know himself and he might not.

What the difference?

 

[andyklein]

I’m interested in becoming Catholic, but I’m unsure whether certain notions of mine would be compatible with Church doctrine. I’ve posted this in another forum but having viewed some of the threads here I feel this forum would be more appropriate.

And please let me know if there is any issues with two threads on the same topic, i.e. if one has to be removed etc.

1. God as the Apophatic Void

I perceive God in terms of negation. Whatever can be said of God is not God but rather what he’s like. God is not even a god but beyond such a notion; beyond loving, merciful, gracious, glorious, etc. Therefore, I perceive God as neither conscious nor unconscious, neither intelligent nor unintelligent, but simply the Truth; he is what he is, ineffable, illimitable, unknowable, and unmeasurable. He is relative to void.

2. God the Emanator, not the Creator

I perceive God as having emanated from himself the physical universe by process of implication. If God is the negative aspect of existence then the physical universe is the positive aspect. Whereby God cannot be described he brought forth, by means of existing, description. Just as all things go together, i.e. light with darkness, good with evil, etc. the physical universe goes together with God because each implies the other.

3. God is Verb-Like and not a Noun

I perceive God being the process and not the processor. However, God is not a verb but merely like it; he transcends the notion of being a verb, but he is absolutely not a noun. He does no acting although he emanates action. Likewise, God does not have a will but emanates one.

4. The Holy Spirit is the Emanation of Will

I perceive the Holy Spirit as an emanation of God, being his will.

5. The Son is the Manifested Reality of God the Father

I perceive the Son as a manifestation of God, being his physical reality. Since God is relative to void, although not void, he emanated Jesus Christ as a result of implication. From God’s emanation of the universe, Jesus Christ was conceived as positive expression in relation to the negative expression of God the Father. Whereas God in unknowable Jesus Christ is knowable, and therefore God becomes knowable, but only through Christ.

Have you been reading Johns Scotus Eriugena? If I could summarize all of this, the central idea is that God is so great that he is not great. We can never begin to describe God. So God is beyond good, etc, and beyond being; He must then be non-being.

I will quickly try to respond to your points, but its 8 am on Friday and class starts in 10 minutes.

1. Was there nothingness before God? Was there a “there” before God? A void implies non-existence. We can view a void only in terms of time. God is beyond time. So how could there be a void when there was a God before time?
2. How is that not pantheism? Are you saying that it must be the case that if there is a God, then the universe had yo have been created and that God is everything? It seems to be that your argument says that God is non-existence but that he made existence.
3. So God has non-being but He “is” since “is” is also a verb? So we have a verb without a subject. Can something without being do an action and how can “is” be when there is no “is?”
4. And 5. The trinity.

 

[Vouthon]

Dear Duke

Thank you for the questions!

Here’s hoping I can be of some assistance too you…

1. God as the Apophatic Void

I perceive God in terms of negation. Whatever can be said of God is not God but rather what he’s like. God is not even a god but beyond such a notion

Apophatic theology has traditionally been considered superior to cataphatic in the Catholic tradition, despite both having a treasured place in our spiritual patrimony. As Meister Eckhart put it in the 13th century, “I pray God to make me free of God, for unconditioned Being is above God and all distinctions”.

The Western Christian world developed a rich mystical tradition centred around the idea of the “Hidden God”. Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Blessed Henry Suso and Blessed Jan van Ruysbroeck, for example, spoke of “The God beyond God”, “God above God” or “Wayless Being in which all lovers lose themselves” (Ruysbroeck). The ultimate goal of Christian mysticism is not “knowledge” (gnosis) but a direct experience of the Presence of God, beyond concepts and images, through being uplifted by love. Knowledge can only take you so far. Eventually one has to resign one’s intellect under a cloud of forgetting before the incomprehensible, unconditioned majesty of God and cleave to him through a wordless, thoughtless ascent of unknowing love.

As St. Thomas Aquinas, the great scholastic, explained:

“…The ultimate reach of our knowledge of God consists in realizing that we do not know him. For then we grasp that what God is surpasses all we understand of Him…God eludes every conception of our intelligence, so that it cannot grasp him…We cannot give God a name that defines or includes or equals his essence since we do not know to that extent what God is…God eludes the conception of our intellect because he transcends all that our mind conceives of him…It is because human intelligence is not equal to the divine essence that this same divine essence surpasses our intelligence and is unknown to us: wherefore man reaches the highest point of his knowledge about God when he knows that he knows him not, inasmuch as he knows that that which is God transcends whatsoever he conceives of him…”

***- Saint Thomas Aquinas (De Potentia VII, 5, ad 14) ***

Therefore Saint John of the Cross tells us in his, “Verses on the ecstasy of deep contemplation” (16th century):

I entered where there is no knowing,

and unknowing I remained,

all knowledge there transcending

Where no knowing is I entered,

yet when I my own self saw there

without knowing where I rested

great things I understood there,

yet cannot say what I felt there,

since I rested in unknowing,

all knowledge there transcending.

A particularly evocative mystical tome from this tradition is called The Cloud of Unknowing written by a deliberately anonymous Carthusian monk in 14th century England as an advanced manual for contemplation. The mystic in this book told his young student to strip away anthropomorphic interpretations of God and leave them behind a “cloud of forgetting” - after, one presumes, he had first made full use of them during meditation until he could find no “more” through his own cognitive faculties and knowledge. The via positiva (through representations, images and anthropormphisms) is the first “door” one passes through in meditative prayer, before being naturally led to the higher contemplative prayer proper. He was taught by the Carthusian teacher via this book to now ascend rather through a single-focus to the Cloud of Unknowing, the divine dark where the eyes of reason are blinded, utterly inaccessible to any earthly categories, beyond thought or human conception.

(continued…)

 

[Vouthon]

One of the earliest mystics in the Christian tradition to clearly and systematically delineate in theological fashion the “non-anthropomorphic” way of contemplation, was an anonymous sixth-century Syrian monk who called himself “Dionysius” in his corpus of writings that were to become foundational for Catholic Christians.

One of his works was called “The Mystical Theology”. The word “mystical” was used prior to him to describe contemplative prayer however he elevated it to even greater heights through his use of philosophy.

In the introduction to this work he writes this:

"…Supernal Triad, Deity above all essence, knowledge and goodness; Guide of Christians to Divine Wisdom; direct our path to the ultimate summit of your mystical knowledge, most incomprehensible, most luminous and most exalted, where the pure, absolute and immutable mysteries of theology are veiled in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their Darkness, and surcharging our blinded intellects with the utterly impalpable and invisible fairness of glories surpassing all beauty.

Let this be my prayer; but do, dear Timothy, in the diligent exercise of mystical contemplation, leave behind the senses and the operations of the intellect, and all things sensible and intellectual, and all things in the world of being and nonbeing, that you may arise by unknowing towards the union, as far as is attainable, with it that transcends all being and all knowledge. For by the unceasing and absolute renunciation of yourself and of all things you may be borne on high, through pure and entire self-abnegation, into the superessential Radiance of the Divine Darkness…

Its incomprehensible Presence is manifested upon those heights of Its Holy Places; that then It breaks forth, even from that which is seen and that which sees, and plunges the mystic into the Darkness of Unknowing, whence all perfection of understanding is excluded, and he is enwrapped in that which is altogether intangible, wholly absorbed in it that is beyond all, and in none else (whether himself or another); and through the inactivity of all his reasoning powers is united by his highest faculty to it that is wholly unknowable; thus by knowing nothing he knows That which is beyond his knowledge…

Nor is it a body, nor has it form or shape, quality, quantity or weight; nor has it any localized, visible or tangible existence; it is not sensible or perceptible; nor is it subject to any disorder or inordination nor influenced by any earthly passion; neither is it rendered impotent through the effects of material causes and events; it needs no light; it suffers no change, corruption, division, privation or flux; none of these things can either be identified with or attributed unto it.

Again, ascending yet higher, we maintain that it is neither soul nor intellect; nor has it imagination, opinion reason or understanding; nor can it be expressed or conceived, since it is neither number nor order; nor greatness nor smallness; nor equality nor inequality; nor similarity nor dissimilarity; neither is it standing, nor moving, nor at rest; neither has it power nor is power, nor is light; neither does it live nor is it life; neither is it essence, nor eternity nor time; nor is it subject to intelligible contact; nor is it science nor truth, nor kingship nor wisdom; neither one nor oneness, nor godhead nor goodness; nor is it spirit according to our understanding, nor filiation, nor paternity; nor anything else known to us or to any other beings of the things that are or the things that are not; neither does anything that is know it as it is; nor does it know existing things according to existing knowledge; neither can the reason attain to it, nor name it, nor know it; neither is it darkness nor light, nor the false nor the true; nor can any affirmation or negation be applied to it, for although we may affirm or deny the things below it, we can neither affirm nor deny it, inasmuch as the all-perfect and unique Cause of all things transcends all affirmation, and the simple pre-eminence of Its absolute nature is outside of every negation- free from every limitation and beyond them all…"

Here is a translation of The Mystical Theology:

esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeII…lTheology.html

 

[Vouthon]

3. God is Verb-Like and not a Noun

I perceive God being the process and not the processor. However, God is not a verb but merely like it; he transcends the notion of being a verb, but he is absolutely not a noun. He does no acting although he emanates action. Likewise, God does not have a will but emanates one.

God for us is one eternal, unceasing, divine act:

“…When God says that He is being…it can only mean this: that he is the pure act of existing…Pure act: therefore excluding all imperfection in the order of existing. Therefore excluding all change, all becoming, all beginning or end…”