This reminds me of taking philosophy in college. This is where St. Dionysios provides us with a classic and, for those who have been reared and educated in a Western philosophical context, revolutionary understanding of God. If God could be an object of intellection, that is if one says “God exists” or “God is,” one reduces God to the level of a mere being. This reduction makes God a simple, knowable essence, the heresy of Eunomius (refuted by St. Basil in the 4th century). In this sense, theism is an impossibility, ontologically speaking. To assert that God exists, in that existence means to be an object of intellection, and hence, a being, produces a paradox: if God exists then God is a being, and thus not God at all. One sees in this conceptual paradox the echo of the infamous atheistic challenge to theism: “Can God create a rock too heavy for Him to lift?” But, the atheistic solution is as inadequate as it is infantile. The atheist forgets that to say “God is not” or “God does not exist” is still to call to mind God as an object of intellection, and then to negate Him; there is no difference in saying “God is not” or “unicorns are not” because in the mental act of negation, whether of God or of unicorns, one’s intellect is apprehending something that is intelligible: either a horse with a single horn, or a kind of supreme or first-being. As these imaginative beings are objects of intellection, they are still beings. So, atheism conceives of a being called “God” and rejects it, but still fails to resolve the paradox. Indeed, so radical is the patristic rejection of both theism and atheism that the contemporary Orthodox scholar, Dr. David Bradshaw, confidently asserts “The East has no concept of God. It views God not as an essence to be grasped intellectually, but as a personal reality known though His acts, and above all by oneself sharing in those acts” (Aristotle East and West, 275). The only possible solution to the theistic paradox is the one provided by the Neoplatonic metaphysics of St. Dionysios (Perl, Theophany, 17). areopagite.org/?p=576
Posted on: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 20:48:00 +0000
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