The Last Word

I suppose there are two kinds of people: those who know nothing and those who pretend not to.

That may be a stark way of expressing it, but it certainly puts our secular brethren on the back foot: it is not we who hold unsupportable beliefs and live in a fantasy world, but you atheists.

Now, what do I mean by this? I won't speak for biblical literalists, but the restavus know that when all is said and done, God is beyond all human conception or description. After all, no one has provided us with a more detailed map of the vertical than Thomas Aquinas, and yet, 

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

To be perfectly accurate, we do and we don't, accent on the latter. In fact, I would say that do and don't constitute a kind lopsided dynamic complementarity, in that while the finite can never exhaust the infinite, it never stops trying. For example, how many circles are in a sphere? Correct: ∞. Likewise, how many points in a line?

Yes, but what's the point?

Good question: it is simultaneously somewhere and nowhere, since it has no dimensions, i.e., no length, width, or height. This being the case, how could these little nothings be the building blocks of anything? We can posit them, but can never actually imagine them, because supposing we do, we lend them the dimensionality they lack. But if the point is seen a declension from a higher dimensional object, then it becomes intelligible. Just like us.

Some additional comments by Thomas:

Although uncreated truth exceeds all created truth, yet there is nothing to prevent created truth from being better known to us.

Just don't pretend the created can ever exhaustively map the uncreated. 

God is one in reality but multiple according to our minds; we know him in as many ways as created things represent him. 

In fact, literally speaking, I don't even know that we can say God is one. After all, one is a quantity, and God is certainly not that. Rather, he is beyond all quantification. He escapes number entirely. Perhaps a better way of putting it would be "not two," i.e., radically simple, with no parts or division. 

On the one hand,

Created things are not sufficient to represent the creator. Hence we cannot possibly arrive at perfect knowledge of the creator from creatures....

That way lies idolatry. But on the other hand, although "God can in no way be said to be like creatures," creatures can nevertheless "truly be called like to God in a certain sense."

Oh? What sense would that be? In an analogous sense, so long as we remember that the differences dwarf any similarity -- that "Whatever is comprehended by a finite being is itself finite," so "To know God in a created likeness is not to know the essence of God." In the end,

God is honored by silence, not because we may say or know nothing about him, but because we know that we are unable to comprehend him.

Again, we at least know we don't know, and that's better than nothing something.

Very Zen.

Agreed: "at the end of our knowledge of God," he "is ultimately known as unknown." And  

We only know God truly when we believe that he is above all that men can think about God.

Well, what are we supposed to do in the meantime, in this life of vertical wayfaring? Are we getting anywhere, and is there anywhere to get? Well, here's a thought:

If humanity alone is described as made to God's image and likeness..., there must be a sense in which the deepest meaning of being human is that homo, that is, human nature, is also "no-thing"..., not just in a privative but also in an eminent sense (McGinn). 

Ah ha. We're not empty, rather, full of nothing. This would explain why we ourselves are as unknowable as God. As alluded to in yesterday's post, if we are the freakiest things in all of existence, this is why. In the words of John Scottus Eriugena,

The human mind both knows itself and does not know itself; it knows that it is; it does not know what it is. And through this... the image of God is especially thought to be in humanity.... What is more wonderful and more beautiful to those thinking upon themselves and their God is that the human mind is more to be praised in its ignorance than in its knowledge.

In other words, supposing we are the image and likeness of God, then we are the little nothings that reflect the big nothing that is God. Here's a bold suggestion:

even God does not know human nature in the sense that the unmanifest aspect of human nature is one with the divine and therefore indefinable. The reciprocity between a strong version of negative theology and an equally strong negative anthropology [in Eriugena] was something new in Western thought and mysticism. 

Something new in eternity?

You might say that. As alluded to above, there is a dialectic between affirmative (cataphatic) and negative (apophatic) theology that gives rise to "a movement beyond both saying and unsaying":

it involves thinking of determinations by themselves, simultaneously thinking of contradictory determinations, and exploring, insofar as possible, the meaning of the higher unity of contradictory determinations. 

Like vertical metabolism or something: affirmation --> negation --> beyond all affirmation and negation.

Man and God are one in that they are dialectically united in the concealing/revealing dynamic of the Word. 

The bottom line is that it's both easy and not easy to download the unspeakable into language. On the one hand, everything speaks of God, and yet, God can best be spoken of as no-thing. This no-thing is

a way of speaking about the First Principle that is both negatively "not-a-thing" and eminently beyond the world of "all that is and all that is not." 

Creation proceeds from no-thing to something -- that is, everything -- while the mystical ascent proceeds back to the nothing beyond all conception.

Gemini, give us a summary and and image:

In essence, the passage argues that the mystery of God is mirrored in the mystery of humanity. Both are ultimately unknowable, yet this very unknowability is the source of their profound significance. It emphasizes the limitations of human language and reason when grappling with the divine, suggesting that true understanding lies beyond the realm of concepts and definitions.