Stalking the Wild & Watery Godhead

Problem:

[T]he word God is obfuscated and overlaid with so many unhelpful accretions in the West that it is not surprising that people recoil from this idol (McGilchrist).

Solution? He doesn't give one vis-a-vis the need for a new & unsaturated un-language for Celestial Central (see yesterpost), but he does advocate an apophatic theology.  

Now, apophatic theology has always been with us, and not just in the East (e.g., Tao, Moksha, Nirguna Brahman, et al, each of these being translinguistic experiences that shatter or repel speech). 

For example, real Jews don't say the G-d name for fear of idolatry, and for Thomas,

This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know.

I read somewhere that Thomas never deploys irony -- hey, nobody's perfect -- but that right there is a pretty ironic statement. He also speaks of "the necessity of calling God by many names," 

since we cannot know God naturally except from his effects, so it is necessary to designate his perfection by different names.... If, however, we were able to comprehend his essence in itself and give him a name proper to his essence, then we would express him in a single name.

Now, we can certainly know of God's essence even if we can never comprehend our knowledge of this bare fact, i.e., truly know what we're talking about. 

On the one hand, we all know that God's essence is to exist. But what this essential existence means from the inside out, God -- or whatever -- only knows. 

Incomprehensible! 

Damn right:

That which is incomprehensible increases with the growth of the intelligence.

There are hints, however, and these hints are situated in such a manner that we can -- or rather, must -- spend our lives endlessly deepening them, if only because compared to this vertical adventure, anything less is a little borr-rring. 

Religious thought does not go forward like scientific thought does, but rather goes deeper.

This is just another way of saying that the depth -- the very depth that makes life worth living, or even a truly human life -- is real, and at a right angle to things (this is indeed what's The Matter With Things, insofar as they become mundane things only).   

Let us trot out a few more aphorisms, which, if nothing else, disprove the arboreal principle that no-one else I think is in my tree, because someone else is out on a limb with me after all:

The moment arrives in which one is only interested in stalking God.

I do not speak of God in order to convert anyone but because it is the only subject worth speaking of. 

If is not of God that we are speaking, it is not sensible to speak of anything seriously. 

Put conversely, show me what you take seriously and I'll show you your religion. 

See?!

Each one sees in the world what he deserves to see.

Oh. Well, look again, waaay up there. No, not at my finger. That:

He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary.

I get it: a nonlocal map. Just don't confuse the cataphatic LH map with the apophatic RH territory. But you need both words and grammar, which is to say, semantics and syntax:

The universe is a useless dictionary for someone who does not provide its proper syntax.

Now, what is the proper cosmic syntax? 

He doesn't say, because an aphorism is not a dissertation or even a blog post. Therefore, I'll say it: the grammar of the universe is hierarchical in the same way language is, e.g., letters tacitly point to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to story, story to theme, all conditioned from the top down, even though we can't communicate anything in the absence of those downright letters.

It's almost like everything alludes to something vertically adjacent, or something. Thus, 

What I say here will seem trivial to whoever ignores everything to which I allude.

Speaking of trolls, this reminds me of something I read yesterday, that Thomas's philosophical output includes no less than 10,000 objections. Best auto-troll ever!

I too anticipate objections, except in my case I lived them. In other words, I used to be all the things I now hope to ridicure. But I must not have been rotten to the core, or I wouldn't be here laughing at myself. Oh well. The Mystery works in mysterious ways.

Speaking of boredom, you're starting to get a bit repetitive.

There is no spiritual victory that is not necessary to win anew each day. 

Meanwhile, stay thirsty my friends:

The thirst for the great, the noble and the beautiful is an appetite for God that is ignored.  

And 

Thirst runs out before the water does.