I second brother Constantine
We can increase in our knowledge of
revealed truths regarding the Trinity and the nature of the Godhead, via a prayerful reading and absorption of the combined wisdom of 2,000 years of the Church’s greatest minds. theologians, saints and mystics, who have pondered deeply on this mystery at the very epicentre of our faith - some having even withdrawn, through a mystical rapture, into the very life of the Triune Persons. The Church’s understanding of revealed truth is continuously developing as the ages wear on.
However we will reach, eventually after we have pushed the finitude of our intellectual faculties to the uttermost brink, a kind of breaking point, a dead end, where we ultimately come to realize that we are creatures, whereas God is uncreated and infinite, such that a “cloud of unknowing” arises between ourselves and God that can only be broken, pierced, not through discursive thought or knowledge but through love in a state of simplicity, with which the barrier of our finite knowledge is surpassed and we attain supreme union with our God in a restful state of “learned ignorance”, to use the words of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa.
It is noble and praiesworthy to stretch our intelligence to the very break in this way, since it is only when we personally reach the point at which we can
know no more concering God with our rational mind that we can then accept, humbly, our ignorance of the Infinite and rest in unknowing.
According to Paul in the First Letter to Timothy, God “
dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see”.
The Spanish mystic Blessed Ramon Llull once put forth this truly sweet idea that our grasping after God through the knowledge of our human intelligence is comparable to little children chasing after and trying to catch butterflies in a field. They find themselves unable to catch the insects and instead merely trample on the flowers beneath their feet.
I will quote it for you to read here, try and picture it:
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“…The Lover entered a delightful meadow, and saw in the meadow many children who were pursuing butterflies, and trampling down the flowers ; and, the more the children laboured to catch the butterflies, the higher did these fly. And the Lover, as he watched them, said: ‘Such are they who with subtle reasoning attempt to comprehend the Beloved, Who opens the doors to the simple and closes them to the subtle. And Faith reveals the secrets of the Beloved through the casement of love.’…”
***- Blessed Ramon Llull (1232 – ca. 1315), Spanish Catholic mystic & Franciscan tertiary ***
